They're not following from the charter on down with this new Veterans Charter. Access is so simple. When I first joined the board, hearings were 10 minutes. We would give an introductory comment, and we'd say what's missing. What's missing is your link to service, or we don't have a diagnosis. It's that simple. We're all supposed to be working together. The legislation is written in a way that you should have access, except for contradictory evidence. But the way the adjudicators are trained now is the complete opposite. As I say, you don't need all these medical files.
The veterans legislation was written to be non-adversarial. The process was written to be non-adversarial. It's the only one in Canada, and it has to stay that way. I can't imagine having government lawyers on the other side, and people battling to give these guys their due. The Bureau of Pensions Advocates was developed in the 1930s because the government and the people of Canada thought it was horrible that World War I veterans and Boer War veterans would have to pay out of their own pocket to hire lawyers to get their disability benefits. Now here we are in 2014, and we have veterans paying out of their own pockets to take the system to Federal Court because the system is broken. We should be having Bureau of Pensions Advocates' lawyers represent veterans at Federal Court.