First off, thanks to all of our witnesses. I have many constituents who work with Veterans Affairs and I want to say to you and also to your colleagues through you, thank you for your service to Canada. We know how hard you work and we know what a challenge it is to speed up processes when you're dealing with challenges of shifting organizational culture.
I want to reference testimony from two years ago by you, Mr. Natynczyk, in which you said there was an organizational culture that needed to shift.
I want to invite you to connect the dots for me a bit. You testified previously that during the Harper mandate, the staff at Veterans Affairs was cut back to 2,300 overall. It is now back to 2,900. It takes time to build that cohort back, but there was also an organizational culture, as I understand it from testimony from the Senate subcommittee two years ago, that didn't necessarily give claimants the benefit of the doubt, and there needed to be a shift towards a presumption of benefits required.
I wonder if there's a connection between that organizational cultural shift that was required and the fact that the complement of Veterans Affairs officials was diminished so much that there wasn't the ability to treat all of the files that were being requested.