Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you all for being here.
I, too, want to express my concern and my colleague's concerns about the conversations you were involved in there, Ms. Vaillancourt. That's not why we're here, and we're certainly concerned about our veterans, so thank you for your part in being here today.
I also want to bring up the fact that we have an issue here, as my colleague John Brassard said, with processes. Unless we make wholesale changes, we are going to be in this circumstance, as Ms. Weatherbie said yesterday, on an ongoing basis. We need an efficiency business model here, I think, as you were saying, Mr. Maxwell. We can't function in this way and expect to improve or change anything.
I do want to quote Mr. Gary Walbourne, and I'm sure you've all heard this. He said:
The Canadian Armed Forces knows when, where, and how you have become ill or injured. The Canadian Armed Forces should tell Veterans Affairs Canada that the illness or injury is attributable to their service, and this determination be accepted.
Mr. Wagner, you talked a bit about the dynamics around empowering the front line. First of all, if we made this change—which we recommended as a committee—and the government did not agree with that recommendation, neither does VAC, neither does the Canadian Armed Forces. Here we are trying to improve things, but really, if that were taken care of right off the front end, what change would that make to the number of first applications and the time involved in veterans getting their care?
Mr. Wagner, do you want to comment on that?