I'll respond in two ways.
First of all, you have to bear in mind that we do about 56,000 transactions a day. If the ombudsman has gotten 5,000 complaints--actually one complaint is too many, and we would like to be perfect--the reality is that when you're doing 56,000 transactions a day, there are going to be some cases where the people may disagree with the position we've taken, because unfortunately sometimes we can't give a veteran everything they may feel they should have. We have to understand that.
The other part is I can tell you that I personally look at the types of referrals we get from the ombudsman. I can tell you that I think veterans are being well served. Obviously I come out from a particular bent. But the types of complaints he's getting in some cases have to do with timeliness. Sometimes they're about people needing a little bit more information, if for instance you had said to somebody that they really needed to send in a receipt for health-related travel. I'm sure some of the complaints he's getting have to do with pension applications. I'm sure some of the files he has to deal with have to do with pension issues, but he can't intervene in a pension application until it's gone through all the stages of the pension process, including the Veterans Review and Appeal Board, unless there's some tremendous urgency, such as if, sadly, the veteran is close to death, and it would be wise to make an intervention as opposed to following the process through the system.
The reality is that everything is relative. Five thousand is too many, but if you're doing 56,000 transactions a day, and over a period of a year and a half you've accumulated 5,000 complaints.... And that's not to say that every complaint is valid. In fact, some of the complaints, I would suggest, are probably made by people who just want more information. That's why we've set up a process within the ombudsman's office, so that when the ombudsman gets a call on something routine, like not getting their cheque last month or not being sure if their change of address was received, we have a facility for what we call hot transfer. Instead of the ombudsman's office opening up a complaint or setting up a file, we have a hot transfer capability to someone in the department who can actually look into the situation and hopefully resolve it for the client.