Mr. Chair, I think the committee will understand that we are charged with the administration of the program under the terms of the legislation, and the legislation sets the standard of “grave and prolonged” as the test.
That is a very high standard, and there are in fact situations in which that test is not met by the applicant on the basis of the medical information that is provided. The adjudicators are charged under the terms of the legislation with making a decision on the basis of the medical evidence according to that test.
I need to be clear that those are parameters. It is indeed a very strict test, and has been since the beginning of the CPP legislation.
To answer your question about the experience of the client and the engagement, this in fact is one of the areas in which we are, I think more demonstrably, going to be adjusting the system. We have already begun a process—which I indicated, and it will become continuous and much more interactive—of engagement with clients and the stakeholders who work with these clients, to learn from them the implications of their lived experience for the administration of the program in terms of such things as real-time exchange of changing medical information and so on. That will become part of the process, and out of it will come, on a continuous basis, new tools for improved adjudication of these cases.
Whether through call centres or in person, as Mr. Godin indicated, we will be improving our training of staff so that they are in a better position to interact with clients and be as helpful to those clients as we possibly can be.
The application process itself is a substantial move in that direction. Benoît has indicated that of necessity it is no simple, ordinary.... It's not like an application for a driver's licence; it is dealing with a completely different order of complexity. However, we have reduced it to roughly a quarter of the earlier complexity of the application process. That is progress, and we're committed to being as engaged with the clients as we possibly can be.