Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, and Ray McInnis talked about it. At VAC, early in 2018, our legislation essentially allowed us to award entitlement on a full basis or on a partial basis. VAC reviewed those partial entitlements and realized that there was a huge subjectivity in it: there was no fairness in the system, and two veterans similarly situated could end up with two different amounts of disability.

Veterans Affairs committee  I guess it's important to remember that we hear 5% of the overall cases, so a good news story is that the claims of 95% of the people who apply to VAC accept its decision at some level. Whether they are satisfied, I can't speak to, but they accept it. Then we get that 5%. Yes, our favourability rates are going up as well, and they are going up partly because we are applying the same favourable rules that VAC is applying, but they come to us for a couple of reasons.

Veterans Affairs committee  I guess the challenge is that VAC builds its adjudication policies in this wide net to capture that sort of 90 percentile. I'm not sure you could accommodate that kind of direct testimony. We're reducing that down to say 10%. It would be a challenge, I guess, is all I can tell you.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair and honourable committee members, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. With me, as you know, is Jacques Bouchard, and I'm going to share my comments with Jacques today. I should note that Jacques is also a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces.