National Defence committee  Thank you very much for the question. That's actually a difficult question to answer. It would depend on the complexity of the circumstances. To give you an appreciation, immediately, if we're talking about an incident of sexual assault, the first order of business is to colle

National Defence committee  I would suggest to you, ma'am, that it's likely a lot less than that in a simple circumstance. But we have had cases that span 30 or 40 years, historical sexual assaults that are brought forward. The legwork that's required to look back into addresses and to individuals from 40 y

National Defence committee  Thanks, Mr. Chair. Mr. Harris, thank you for that question. The proactive approach of trying to, obviously, prevent any of these occurrences has a police role to it. That's the community policing aspect of what we do. From my perspective and from the perspective of the Canadian

National Defence committee  They could do either. They could come to the military police directly. They can either come to—

National Defence committee  I would suggest to you that the majority would come through either the victim themselves or colleagues of the victim, etc.

National Defence committee  About one quarter of cases would come through the commanding officer or the chain of command. A lot of them are coming indirectly via the victims themselves or the victim's friends or those who they've come forward to. Once that information comes to light, of course, we immediate

National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, thanks for that question. Certainly, that's data we could drill down and extrapolate based on who the subject is, but we haven't done that analysis per se with that focus in mind. Certainly my experience has been, over the 26 years I've been in this business, that it'

National Defence committee  Correct.

National Defence committee  I certainly can't speculate as to the mindset of the other victims, but what we've experienced in cases in which we've had multiple victims with the same offender is that once information comes to light that this individual has been charged and will be tried for sexual offences,

National Defence committee  I would suggest to you that our processes within the military police system are fundamentally the same as they are in any other jurisdiction across Canada. So from a policing perspective, we handle those complaints in the same manner that any other police agency would. Now, we h

National Defence committee  The decision in terms of which route this goes, whether it goes through the civilian court system or through the military courts martial system, takes into account several factors. One of these factors is the subject, the accused; if they are not military, there's no courts mar

National Defence committee  It's not necessarily automatically. You could also have military, military, and a civilian jurisdiction, if the offence occurs downtown involving two military people. So you can see how complicated it can become. There are a number of factors that need to be taken into account.

National Defence committee  Certainly, sir. Good morning, ma'am. With respect to any complaint of sexual misconduct, whether that be sexual assault or otherwise, and certainly in your scenario of a sexual assault that has occurred, regardless of rank, the military police will investigate that offence to t

National Defence committee  The initial thing is we need to consider the victim's concerns in our determination of which route we're going to take in terms of separating the individuals. It may be that the victim himself or herself wants to be removed from that workplace and relocated to another workplace w