Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I will be sharing my time with my colleagues in order to give everybody an opportunity to get their questions in today.
Minister Thompson, I am pleased to see that you're back before the committee. This is the second time already that you have been here in the very short period of time that we have been meeting. So I appreciate your coming with your officials to answer the many questions we continue to have.
I noticed that the funding for your department was cut by $33.6 million, and I suspect it's largely due to the decrease in compensation payments for exposure to Agent Orange. Given the large amount of money that was put aside and the expectations of people who were going to be applying for the Agent Orange program, is the reason that only slightly more than half of that money was disbursed because the criteria of the program were very narrow for people to qualify?