Evidence of meeting #125 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 men.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
Yes, it took me 25 years to find the courage to tell my story.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
Recently the Department of Defence began providing a workshop entitled “Respect in the Canadian Armed Forces” for all of its members. These new workshops are led by experts and include discussions with the participants.
How can such workshops contribute to changing the culture in the Canadian Armed Forces?
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
These workshops are important. However, it's like learning to ride a bike. You can't gather a group of people in a room and tell them how to ride a bike. You have to learn on a bicycle. You have to make mistakes sometimes, fall and hurt yourself to realize that biking isn't that easy. You can provide workshops, courses and training, but that isn't how you learn respect. You have to be in situations where you learn to treat your colleagues with respect — men or women.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
My next questions are for Ms. St-Pierre.
In an article you wrote about the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, you highlighted the importance of the initiatives the government has taken.
How could the Canadian Armed Forces improve their assessment of Operation Honour's impact?
Director, The WPS Group
First they need to determine whether women feel more comfortable reporting misconduct. They need to see, using questionnaires and discussions, whether there has been an improvement in the possibility of reporting misconduct. Has the environment women work in improved? Do they feel safe in that environment? Is misconduct continuing? Is there respect? Is their work valued?
I think those would be ways of measuring the impact of that operation.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
During your career, you provided training to counter sexual violence to military personnel in Nigeria. Could you talk to us about your training experience and the lessons this committee might draw from it?
Director, The WPS Group
Yes. In Nigeria, I dealt with a group of female police officers. We discussed gender-based sexual violence and the way the police could accept the victims and reach them in interviews. With regard to training, I agree completely with what Ms. Perron said. Classroom training is not enough. Using scenarios and case studies, you have to put people in situations where they face various difficulties and must work together to overcome them.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr
We'll go to five-minute questions now, and for the first five-minute question, we'll go to MP Fisher.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for your testimony. Thank you for being here, and thank you for your service.
I'm going to go to Major Perron. You said—and I think it was a quote from one of the letters you've received—that it's not perfect yet. You said that we're “veering” toward a better place, but too slowly, and that we “need a hard right”. So, if you were in a position where you're designing Operation Honour, what would Operation Honour look like? What are you designing? What's a hard right for you?
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
There are several categories of answers in there that I would pursue. The first one is that we need to go upstream to prevent those things from happening. The way we do it is that, first of all, every single woman or DGM should have a mentor of her choice, whether a man or a woman. We have mentoring programs in the military, and they're not being used.
The second example would be exit interviews. When women leave the organization, they should have three interviews to find out what their experiences are, and we should learn from them.
Another example is all the training we do, and I've mentioned this. We need to redesign it, including the obstacle courses, to highlight what different people can do. That's one of the areas that I would change with Operation Honour.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
You said, “that's one of”. Would you consider it a tweak of the program, or would you consider it a drastic overhaul?
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
I would be prone to something in between, instead of a drastic overhaul or a tweak. I think it needs a lot more than a tweak.
The second area of that is data. We need better data. Operation Honour is keeping very minimal data on the number of transgressions or complaints. We need to know by unit. For every single unit, at every level, we should be monitoring not only the complaints, but the career progression, the failure rates, the success rates, the recruiting, the pass and fail on courses, and why. Sometimes it's just equipment. Sometimes it's just the way the courses have been designed.
I'm one of these people who believe that physical standards should never be compromised or lowered for any group of people. If the enemy builds six-foot walls, every single soldier should be able to scale six-foot walls, but if we say that all our soldiers need to be five foot seven because we got the lowest bidder on our aircraft and that's the height minimum that we need to have, there's something wrong with that. Legitimate standards have their place, but we need to challenge those.
Liberal
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
What gets measured gets done.
The caveat there is that units that don't have any complaints should be red-flagged, in my mind, and units that are getting a lot of complaints should be getting pats on the back and additional training and mentoring.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Kristine, I'd ask you the same question. You talked about your objective as making the military culture more inclusive, a culture of diversity and gender equality. If you were in the seat designing, redesigning or tweaking Operation Honour, what do you do?
Director, The WPS Group
I'm going to reiterate the need for disaggregated data. It's not difficult, but it's in every situation. Whether it's peacekeeping or policing in the military, we're always talking about needing more data. Even in terms of setting targets for more women or more diverse groups, we need to understand who's coming, why they're dropping out and who's going up. Having a mechanism for ensuring that we have that hard data and being able, then, to analyze and understand it would be number one.
Number two, I think one of the big problems is in terms of communication. You can set targets, and you can have big programs, but if they are not well communicated across the organization and you have people who perceive Operation Honour as something that perhaps it's not or who don't understand why we're doing this, then it's not going to advance. I think we need a strong and rigid communication plan for that so that everyone from the top to the bottom really understands why we're doing this and why this is so key and important to changing the culture of the organization, of the military.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr
That ran a bit long, but I wanted to hear what you had to say.
I'm going to yield the floor to MP Martel.
Richard Martel Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for being here today.
Ms. Perron, I'm very impressed with your journey. That is why I will start with you.
In 1992, you became the first woman in the Canadian Armed Forces to join a combat unit. I find your journey impressive. I'd like to know how many women after you managed to join a combat unit.
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
There aren't many. Twenty-five years after I obtained my diploma, 0.7% of the members of the infantry, of which I was a part, are women. Progress is slow. Women are moving forward slowly, but there is progress.
Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC
When women want to join the army, is their first objective to integrate a combat unit?
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
It depends on the women. Women are probably less familiar with combat arms. The army is used to seeing women in traditional occupations, for instance as nurses, clerks, dieticians or logistics experts. Occasionally, women are encouraged to join a combat unit. People in recruitment centres may have been told that they have to recruit women into combat units, but their beliefs mean that they are not very much inclined to encourage women to join combat units.
I have not done any research and I may be mistaken, but according to these statistics, 2.9% of the members of combat units are women. It's not even 3%.
Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC
In the beginning, your objective was to join the Canadian Airborne Regiment. Why did you not manage to get there? Was it because you were not allowed to join it? I don't know why you were stopped.
Senior Partner, A New Dynamic Enterprise Inc.
I don't either. I received a categorical no. It was my dream and I asked to join for several years. I came first in a parachute jumping course, but I was told that women had no place in the Canadian Airborne Regiment.
Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC
I see nothing in your history that shows that you did not have everything it took to join that regiment.
What do you think about Operation Honour, which includes an obligation to report all misconduct? In his last report, the Auditor General mentioned that some victims are not ready to report an incident or do not want to do so. What do you think of that?