Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being with us, Mr. MacAulay. It is always a pleasure to see you.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to watch you a bit and give you a certain amount of time to answer me, because I have several questions to ask you, Minister.
First, I'd like to thank you very much for replying to the letter written so magnificently by our chair and answering within the very respectable time allowed.
From what I understand, it is never, or only rarely, the same kind of data being compared. There are different analyses. The main reason why we have all gone a bit astray is that sometimes the numbers are for veterans' first applications and sometimes they're for completed applications. So we can see that there are backlogs and we don't really know what they include.
In the upcoming meetings, I'm going to put a lot of emphasis on the first application. The ombudsman told us clearly that the first application was the most important one and was the key element in the process. The figures show that there has been no significant improvement when it comes to the first application.
Minister, can you tell us briefly about the importance of the first application?
The figures we have show that there has been no improvement when it comes to processing applications from francophones as compared to applications from anglophones.