Thank you. It is a very on-point question.
My challenge, and what I personally struggle with is.... With regard to the credentials that I explained to the committee earlier, as well as some general familiarity with government processes, I feel relatively comfortable in understanding the ATIP process and the system—how to make a request. However, this is where I go back to highlighting what I was referring to in my remarks.
The system must be designed with the most vulnerable type of person in mind. That could be the 16-year-old who is still in high school. It could be the person who is severely traumatized and wants nothing to do with people in uniform and doesn't understand that there is even a website at all.
The concerns I have are that the understanding.... If you asked the chief of the defence staff or the minister to conduct a poll of members of the forces on their comfort and familiarity with the ATIP system and whether they feel comfortable making these requests, it would not shock me if you had one or two hands in a room full of people and no real genuine understanding of the implications.
I think the problem as well is that there are opportunities for people who make such requests to suffer reprisals. People in the forces, when they note the subject matter of the request or the timing of the request, make guesses as to who has filed that request. It would not surprise me if all of a sudden you would be expecting other administrative actions or changes in things, such that in very subtle and hard-to-detect ways, people are victimized for just trying to use the system.