The board member who has a cold bureaucratic front is in difficulty with me. I want board members who have the skills and the working habits that make them amicable and where vets feel open and at ease with them. That's the objective.
To have the same board members in the same areas constantly is not a good idea. You need to shuffle the deck once in a while. Otherwise, you have certain types of decisions rendered in one area and another type in another, depending on the advocacy, depending on the nature of claims. So it is important to mix the board members coast to coast, have a systematic mixing of the people.
I agree that the complement is low out west. Our foremost priority is to fill the complement out west. I am hopeful that shortly we will have people out there.
Manitoba is not very busy, nor is Saskatchewan from a review hearing request accountability point of view. Alberta is busy and so is B.C.
What you must remember about the Atlantic regions is that board members in the Atlantic regions handle both review and appeals, so you will always have a higher number of people based in Charlottetown to handle both reviews and appeals.
There is a concern about bilingual capacity also. I must maintain always a regular complement of fully bilingual board members to handle Quebec, eastern Ontario, and the Atlantic provinces. So it is a juggling act sometimes, to get those members out and hearing cases. Our low number does not help, but I am very confident that it will be corrected shortly.