This is the heart of everything that we should be focused on: How can we make the lives of our women and men in the Canadian Armed Forces, especially women who have dealt with such horrible situations....?
Even though we have made great progress, for example, in having great representation and creating a pipeline of more women to go into those positions. I sign off on general officer promotions. We started with six general officers and now we have fourteen, and we are going to have a vice-chief of the defence staff who will be a female.
My goal was to make sure that the pipeline goes throughout the Canadian Armed Forces so that you have greater representation, but we also need to deal with what is in front of us. We need to have a place where people don't get bounced around and we have empowering stories like this where they know exactly where to go to get to a place where they can have their stories heard and be empowered to know that they can go forward, and if they don't want to, that they can get the right support when they need it, and more importantly, get the legal advice and get the police connection too if it's needed. One place, that's what we are working towards.
We also need to look at the independence. We're seeing more often now, and through the most recent examples, that people felt that there were going to be reprisals. Even though we have very aggressively dealt with this, we clearly have much more work to do on this. We have an independent military justice review that is currently ongoing, but ultimately, I feel that total culture change is going to happen when we have more women who are well-supported inside the Canadian Armed Forces, so that this cannot continue. If it does, they will know that every single one of them has the ability—so they cannot ever be told they can't say anything—to come forward and know that actions will be taken. If somebody doesn't listen to them seriously, there will be consequences for anybody who interferes with that.
That's where we need to get to. It is actually happening now, but obviously, it is not happening to the extent that we want.