Veterans Affairs committee  I would say that gender-based analysis plus is a mandate across government departments and, to be quite honest, it is relatively poorly done. In most cases, it is done in a superficial way and not in a very transparent way. At the same time, it is a very important tool that government has, and anything we can do to get departments to transparently share those analyses would allow for external voices and expertise to evaluate and help improve them.

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't see a huge difference. Both of those departments have been part of the same gender-blind institutional culture, so a lot of the culture we see at CAF, at DND, translated into that at Veterans Affairs. If we look back historically a bit further, for so much of Canadian history DND, CAF and VAC have thought of women as “lesser soldiers”.

Veterans Affairs committee  I will say briefly that I have a long list of recommendations that are part of two recent reports I did related to this topic. I will share them with the committee, and I hope that a lot of those recommendations can flow into your study.

Veterans Affairs committee  Okay. Thanks. One of the ways your committee can change the culture is to become an agent of change yourselves and to become the voice that makes women veterans more visible. You're beginning to do this in this study, but I would really encourage you to also self-reflect on the ways in which this committee itself has in the past maybe also reproduced the male veteran norm and contributed to this culture problem and what that can mean moving forward.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can get us started. We're definitely not starting from zero. It is absolutely crucial to draw on the existing international research, but it is also important to develop some Canadian-specific research. The institutional conditions are not exactly the same. The deployment cycles are not exactly the same.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. I'm happy to speak to that. I completed a scoping review on research on military women and women veterans last year. That was focused on Canada, but I put that into the context of international research so that I got to see some of the real differences that exist. The country that has the most developed research on military women and women veterans is for sure the United States.

Veterans Affairs committee  If there is time, I will. It is certainly something I hear a lot about in my research with women veterans, that they don't readily self-identify as veterans. I also hear that they encounter situations in their day-to-day life where they are not recognized as veterans: having a veteran's licence plate and someone commenting on how many years their husband served, or going to Remembrance Day with their medals and being asked whether those are their father's medals.

Veterans Affairs committee  A large part of it is the lack of political will. Historically there haven't been a lot of researchers who have been asking for this data, so now we are watching and we are certainly demanding more transparency around it. I also think there's a lack of coordination. Even, for example, when I speak with researchers within the Department of National Defence, the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada, they're not even necessarily coordinating among themselves, let alone coordinating with us externally.

Veterans Affairs committee  I think Karen could speak to that.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm sorry, but I misunderstood the question, because my audio is not very good and there is a lot of feedback. I just wanted to say that I can respond to your question. The way I understood what the director of research at VAC shared, he was talking about the members of his team, the research directorate.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I am in contact with members of the veterans affairs research directorate. I have done some research for them, some contracted research. I did one follow-up study for them, looking specifically at the transition experiences of women veterans. There is some collaboration and contact.

Veterans Affairs committee  That is a very difficult question for me to answer, because there is the law on transparency around the data. I would say the lack of transparency has been a major obstacle to research developing more richly in this field of military women and women veterans. These are departments, especially the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence, that are not very open and transparent externally.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'd be happy to elaborate on that. In Canada the approach we have taken to filling the existing gaps in knowledge on women veterans and military women more broadly has been mostly reactive—responding to problems that arise or media reports that arise—but there hasn't really been that paradigm shift that I think needs to happen whereby we see a whole-of-government approach that is proactive and that looks at coordinating between research happening at DND/CAF and research happening at VAC and really creating a pan-Canadian research strategy.

Veterans Affairs committee  The country that really stands out as having the most coordinated and proactive approach is the United States. They've been at this the longest. They have actively addressed women veterans' issues in policy and research since about 1983, when they set up an advisory committee of women veterans working with Veterans Affairs.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I have three sentences left.