Mrs. Gallant, go ahead.
Evidence of meeting #106 for National Defence in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #106 for National Defence in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We don't really have any experience in recent so-called peacekeeping. We have Afghanistan. You mentioned that we were viewed differently. What in our military was unlike other militaries? The soldiers who went over there, both male and female, received cultural awareness training, and that lent greatly to that difference that was perceived, but you mentioned systemic problems in the military with respect to behaviour.
Do you think that creating a new position or department in government is more important than actually fixing the problems where, for example, on a military base—the odd one, not all—the sexual assault of women is the norm rather than the exception?
11:55 a.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
Again, I don't think we need to pick one or the other. If there is a special vehicle that is needed to address that specific problem, by all means we should have it, but I don't think that this should delude us into believing that this special vehicle is going to solve the problem when you need the solutions to be spread across all the different parts of the institution.
If there is a perceived need for that—and I don't know about it—then, yes, I do think that we should design a special vehicle, or you can think about somebody who is willing to champion those issues. In general, in studying institutions, I find that when these issues.... Lasting change often comes when at the most senior levels people believe that they're really going to make a difference and they really want to change things.
I think we need to see the commitment to change, the commitment to changing institutional structures that support...or perhaps not “support”, but that don't challenge things like harassment and bullying. I think those efforts need to come from as high up in the institution as possible for them to make a difference.
It's not even enough if it's.... You definitely need a critical mass of people who want to change things, but I think it needs to come from above. I think special vehicles are good, but often they have the effect of convincing people that things are being taken care of—for example, we formed this committee to take care of this issue, so it must be solved.
September 20th, 2018 / noon
Julie Dzerowicz Davenport, Lib.
Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your excellent presentation. It has actually brought out a lot of my own emotions, because I've only ever worked in male-dominated professions, and I've always been the minority. For a lot of your comments, it's been either “I totally disagree” or “I totally agree”, so there has been a lot of emotion for me.
First, I really appreciated your clarifying that Canada deciding to go into Mali is not just a PR exercise. It really is part of a much broader approach about us re-engaging in the world, wanting to contribute to peace operations and to the UN, and helping to change that institution and actually drive some changes forward. That's in addition to trying to introduce our feminist international policy assistance and the money that you so rightly pointed out, around $150 million, where we're trying to build capacity in a number of countries to empower women and girls at the local level. I appreciated your making that statement. I think it's an important one. It's a much broader agenda that we're trying to do.
I hear what you're saying, that when you add women, you do not automatically change peacekeeping right away. There are things around addressing local culture, changing organizations, dealing with power structures, training and building local capacities.
One of the things I always struggle with is that part of me thinks, “Why wouldn't we move right away to a quota?” I completely agree with you that for someone who is a woman and maybe an executive for a large organization, if there are only two women out of 15 people, they're not going to change anything, but if I have eight out of 15, I might actually have a big influence. Why wouldn't we move to something like a quota?
Noon
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
I've been asked this as well several times.
It was considered a huge move that Canada recently.... We have comply or explain now, which is the lowest bar. There's comply or explain, then there are targets, and then there are quotas. Unfortunately, quotas are burdened with all of these things. There's a historical legacy of quotas, and again, it's not me who has any issues with it.
I think countries that have adopted quotas in politics have done really well. I'm talking about Norway, Germany, or France, for example. They have fulfilled the number of women on boards. They've actually done far better than countries that just have targets, and they've definitely done far better than countries that have comply or explain requirements, like Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
My fear with quotas is that, again, we end up hurting the people we are trying to help. We're trying to diversify these institutions, and quotas actually do that very effectively because these are legal quotas. If you don't fulfill legal quotas, you are in violation of the law, which makes a big difference. The problem is that quotas have to be maintained for a significant period to be effective, because groups of people who have not previously been given a seat at the table often need time to learn once they do get that seat at the table. There is that assumption, for example.
The example that people keep using is Rwanda, because today it has the biggest number of women in parliament. I think 64% are women. Remember that Rwanda actually adopted legal quotas, but the quotas were only for 30%, if I remember correctly. If the accusations that people make were true—that if you put women into these positions, they're not that effective and they're often just little shoo-ins for men and will do what the majority group does—we would never have gotten to 64%. They would have stayed at just 30%.
I think that in Rwanda, even if they remove the quotas, we're never going to see the number of women go back to 9% or 10% because there's been enough time to have a demonstration effect, so that women can say, “Yes, we can do this. This is the norm; this is nothing unusual.” I think that's the big difference.
Noon
Davenport, Lib.
That's helpful in terms of my own thinking.
We're looking at peacekeeping missions. Sitting here for two seconds and listening to you, I understand there's a colossal number of factors that make them successful or not. There are the complexity factors. There's the culture of the peacekeeping teams. There's the culture of the local community. There's the training of the peacekeeping teams. There's the diversity of the teams.
If we were making recommendations for Canada—because Canada would like to be a larger part of the UN—what is it that...? We must have learned something from our peacekeeping missions in the past. Based on that learning, based on all the complexities of these factors, what is it that Canada...? If we go into the UN and we want to have, for example, better quality or more successful peacekeeping teams, what recommendations should we be working on with the UN to ensure we have more successful and equitable missions moving forward?
12:05 p.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
You know GBA+, gender-based analysis plus, the one that doesn't just consider gender but all the other factors that I mentioned, the identity markers. I think that's something peacekeeping missions should take far more seriously, that the identities of peacekeepers are more complicated and go beyond just gender. When I say that, I absolutely don't mean that women are not important. There's nothing to say that women can't represent other identities, which may be stronger for them.
There's a lot that shows that. I've done research with indigenous women. For example, I recently did some work for Natural Resources Canada. The indigenous women I interviewed said that they considered race a far bigger identifier for them than gender. Basically, racism was a bigger problem for them than sexism.
GBA+ is now policy in Canada. I think Canada could very actively promote GBA+ as being important for peacekeeping missions to consider.
12:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Thank you very much, Chair.
I want to return to the question of the reaction of local populations to peacekeepers, and to the question of better interaction. I think you emphasized that there isn't a lot of evidence.
I know from my personal experience as a police board member that when we added members to the police force, we added women and we added members of minority communities. The police force reported back with anecdotal evidence of an automatic improvement in relations due to better contacts and better communication.
When we're saying that there isn't a lot of evidence, it still might be true—if we actually did that research—that having more diversity could promote better relations with local populations. We're just saying there hasn't been a lot of study of that. Is that what we're after?
12:05 p.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
It could be, but the other thing that needs to be addressed is that the interactions between peacekeepers and local populations are so formal. There's very little opportunity.
It's always funny to read things that talk about these kinds of utopian visions of peacekeepers and friendships with local populations. The structures of peacekeeping missions don't even allow that to happen, because often you're not even allowed to leave the base.
Diversity is important, and it's very good, beyond just gender, but it's also important to create mechanisms by which peacekeepers can actually interact more meaningfully, and perhaps in less formalized circumstances, with local populations. That's where a lot of grassroots organizations that work in those contexts should be brought in more effectively.
One more point I'd like to make is that, in Afghanistan, one of the things we looked at was how Canadians interacted with local civil society organizations. We found that we're not actually very good at recognizing what civil society organizations look like in global contexts. When we talk about NGOs, we expect a certain type of representation, whereas in Afghanistan the organizations that made the most difference were often associated with religion, for example. There were local women's groups, which were organizing in mosques, and they don't call themselves NGOs. They're just these grassroots groups that have tremendous power in those settings. Learning to broaden our notions of what exactly civil society organizations look like on the ground and not being very tied to our secular ideas of what they look like is very important as well.
12:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Yes. My own experience in peacekeeping abroad has been with NGOs, so I really want to second that. Quite often, significant groups, and in particular women's groups, were overlooked in those processes—
12:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
—because they weren't formally structured in ways that we expected.
12:05 p.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
They meet in basements, that sort of thing, and often don't have resources. In that regard, I also really like the fact that this $150 million is not tied. They want to give it to organizations that are already doing the right thing on the ground, and not micromanaging them to say, “Do this” or “Do that.” I think that's the right approach.
12:05 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
I hope I'm going to get away with one last question.
As a research chair, would you say there is sufficient funding available for the type of research you would like to see?
12:10 p.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
Are you going to give me money?
12:10 p.m.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Is there sufficient money already available to you to fund this type of research?
12:10 p.m.
Professor, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual
I feel very fortunate. I do feel very well funded because just the title of being a Canada research chair is a good one. I do well. I get really good funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I actually get a fair bit of research money from everywhere.
To be completely honest, what I feel we do have a need for is to be able to do more exploratory work. If we have a good hunch about something and need to do a pilot project, the results may be very different from what we anticipated. Being able to do exploratory work to understand these issues is really important.
We need more people involved. I have students who are studying these topics, but policy really needs to be informed by evidence and not by ideology or intuition, which is what I find. A lot of the assumptions and ideas about what women can do in these missions tend to be more intuitive or ideological than anything else—that women are good so they'd be able to do this. The more evidence we can present, the more research we can do. It's important, especially now, because there are peacekeeping missions in which there are significant numbers of women.
In some places, there are all-female peacekeeping units, such as the India example or the Bangladesh example. Again, I have mixed feelings about them. Sometimes I think it's a grand gesture in style to show how well women in this country are doing, whereas India, for example, still has huge problems with sexual violence. It's the lowest-rated country for gender equality in the G20. I do think it ends up being a bit of a public relations exercise, but we have opportunities for grounded research that would enable us to understand the contributions that these groups make, that women make, as peacekeepers. Are they different? Are they really different such that we can actually say women make different contributions?
I would welcome funding to do that work. I do think we have enough, but some funding for smaller exploratory projects would also be very helpful.
12:10 p.m.
NDP
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr
Professor, thank you for coming today. The committee enjoyed your testimony. It adds value to what we're trying to achieve here. We appreciate your taking the time to be here. Thank you.
The meeting is adjourned.