Thank you for the question, and thanks for championing this and keeping it on all of our radars.
There's something that I think is a really positive thing. I mentioned the Elsie initiative for women in peace operations. Through that, we're trying to work with countries around the world. We developed what's called a “barrier assessment methodology”. We talked to peacekeepers, people in policing and military forces around the world, and got a whole range of ideas of what types of barriers they face. These are things from their family not wanting them to join the forces, the stigma of joining the forces—often people are called “loose”, or that they can't do something else—to equipment challenges once they're in the forces. Are there helmets? Is there gear that fits them? Are they missing out on deployment opportunities because they often happen at a point in their career where women in particular who have young children at home don't want to go on deployment. They end up getting an added cycle of not experiencing opportunities that set them up for deployment.
There are 14 barriers that are identified. They're basically universal—they're broad enough to be universal—and, of course, one of the barriers is sexual assault or sexual harassment within the forces.
We have made that barrier methodology public. Various countries are undergoing it. The Canadian Armed Forces is going to undergo it as well, and perhaps Brigadier-General Bourgon can speak to that. I think it's an important thing. We're saying we have a systematized way of addressing everything from external cultural issues to internal ways that job descriptions are written or that selection processes are done to figure out what those barriers are, and then we'll have some ways of comparing and contrasting and figuring out some solutions.
I'm sorry to go on for so long.