Thank you, Madam Chair.
I agree with Ms. Larouche that it would be great to hear from Commander Patterson. I certainly had a number of questions for her.
As you know, there are several senior members under investigation. Those are independent investigations, and they will be taken care of. As the Library of Parliament said, though, there was a survey in 2018 of 55,300 active members, and more than 30,000 had experienced or witnessed inappropriate behaviour. Those are the ones we have to deal with, not the few.
Trust is important—that has been brought up—and I think that if we have a trust to get these changes made, it will be under a minister who has already made a number of changes to try to deal with this. Obviously, more needs to be done. We've heard it. I look forward to hearing from Ms. Vandenbeld later concerning more of those recommendations.
I don't think, however, that any of the serving members would be against the fact that we have to.... The main things we've heard of in these recommendations that we should be discussing are related to the independence of the processes; the role of the chain of command in the process; the culture change, which the witnesses have said will not be done all at once—there's a lot that needs to be done that we could be working on now—and the fear of reporting.
One thing I wanted to ask Commander Patterson is whether there's a reprisal in the code of service discipline related to providing a negative reaction to someone who's reporting, or whether there's an offence in the code of service discipline or the code of values and ethics.
There should certainly be disciplinary measures, when there are more than 30,000 people who are affected or aware. The reporting was only done the next year. Out of 30,000, there were only 84 reports of sexual assault, 34 of harassment and 80 of inappropriate behaviour. Obviously, then, there are things that are inhibiting the reporting. We've heard that from witnesses.
That's the recommendation. It's what we should be talking about at this time. That's what we should be getting on with quickly, so that we can get these changes made while there's time.
Thank you, Madam Chair.