When I came into the job in April 2009, one of the first things I did to educate myself was to pull all of the Federal Court decisions with the VRAB. Because of the lack of information it was my best source in order to educate myself about how the VRAB worked.
When those decisions started coming through and I looked at them, I started seeing that there was a pattern of return and coming back and forth, so I raised the issue with the DG and with the ombudsman and told them that it might be worthwhile to do this study.
With two students, we pulled all of the Federal Court decisions. We married up the Federal Court decisions with the decisions from the VRAB when they came back so that we could study the rate of success. All of that information was given to Borden Ladner in September 2011. They spent maybe six to eight weeks with a team of four lawyers working on them. They came back to us within that period with a draft report. It was reviewed in the office. We tweaked things a bit in areas we were concerned about or where we felt there was further explanation required. It went through the full review process within the office, and it was published this year.