Yes. In our audit on disability benefits applications, we looked at all of the department's data on the processing of those applications. As we said, we noted that the processing of an application took about 39 weeks. That is how long a veteran has to wait to receive a response to their application. When we separated the data, we realized that some groups waited for a response even longer than that, and they were francophones, women and Royal Canadian Mounted Police veterans. The reasons for that discrepancy vary from one group to another.
Your question was about francophones' applications, so I will talk about that.
A 2018 report from the Office of the Veterans Ombudsman notes that francophones wait longer than anglophones for a response to their application. Changes were made in the wake of that report. In 2018, Veterans Canada opened an office in Montreal to process francophones' applications. In 2020, the department also created a bilingual group to process the applications. The number of francophone applications has increased so much that the group cannot process them quickly. That is why francophones wait 46 weeks on average for a response to their benefits application, compared to 39 weeks for anglophone veterans.