Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to thank my colleagues for their thoughtful interventions today.
I am still disappointed that we are continuing to debate motion after motion. The opposition continues to rebuff any efforts to withdraw this motion, adjourn the debate or even allow us to adjourn this meeting, knowing we would then be able to get directly to the reports. I am disappointed that all three opposition parties have rebuffed good-faith efforts to see if we can get past this impasse.
I was particularly disturbed earlier when Mr. Bagnell was giving a proposal, which I believe to be very sincere, to see how we can get past this impasse, at least in part. He was being laughed and scoffed at by members of the opposition here in the room. It's one thing for us to disagree, but it's another to laugh at each other. I really think we're above that, and I believe that Mr. Bagnell was sincere in what he was proposing, just as I have been in the various proposals that I have brought to all three opposition parties and that other members of the committee have discussed.
At this point, one of the best things we can do is make sure, regardless of what happens with the reports, particularly when we have motions that ask for no government response.... I am very grateful to Mr. Bagnell for bringing forward an amendment that says we do need a government response, because what is the reason we are here and putting a report to Parliament if it's not to have the government respond to that report and take action on it? I'm hopeful, but I'm also very disappointed that there does not seem to be any good-faith willingness to try to get beyond this impasse.
Having said that, I'd like to continue where I left off last time and talk about some of the very important recommendations that some of our witnesses, survivors, academics and experts have brought to our committee, to the FEWO committee and to us as members of Parliament. I believe that these are vitally important recommendations. I am very glad to hear my colleagues talk about the importance of making sure that we are amplifying the voices of survivors and experts. We heard from academics who have spent their entire academic careers looking at these kinds of issues, and they have solutions. We've heard a lot of recommendations and a lot of solutions, so I'd like to continue to put on the record and amplify some of those voices and recommendations.
As those who were watching this meeting previously will recall, I've been going through a list of various recommendations that we compiled based on testimony, particularly what we have heard from survivors. We have compiled them into a section on culture change in the Canadian Armed Forces. I will begin where I left off.
The next recommendation is about addressing the generalized lack of expertise on sexual misconduct, culture change or gender issues in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I think it's interesting that the survivors put that forward in particular, because I think “lack of expertise” can mean many things. First of all, I believe there is increasingly more expertise on this issue. Of course, within the SMRC, which is on the departmental side, there is developing expertise not just in terms of people, but also in the data they're collecting and through combined knowledge and the knowledge creation that comes from lived experience. I believe there is more and more expertise, certainly on both sides and within the Canadian Armed Forces, because of the training we have put in place. However, I think when the survivors put this particular recommendation forward, it was more to talk about the gaps.
We know that somebody who is trained to be a soldier, a sailor or an aviator is somebody whose main job every day is to protect Canadians.
They are very specialized and well trained. It does not mean that they would necessarily have the in-depth level of expertise that one needs in order to provide advice, particularly when it comes to institutional culture change. Culture change is not easy, especially when it is dependent on self-reflection.
I've worked in institutions around the world, with UN Women and other global institutions, on culture change. It requires a set of eyes coming from outside, simply because culture is something you're unaware of. When you're in a particular institutional culture, it can be very difficult to recognize the things that make up that culture. They become self-evident; there are certain paradigms that everybody shares. Unless somebody is directly confronted with something that they consider self-evident and are asked why they have that belief, why they hold that particular notion and then have to reflect on it, then that particular culture and that paradigm are not going to change. That is what requires the outside expertise.
I do believe that this is expertise on a number of levels. This would, of course, be people who are subject matter experts in issues of sexual misconduct, trauma-informed experts who understand how to investigate. We need experts on essentially how to respond to these issues, but we also need experts on culture change, institutional culture, processes and procedures. I think it is really telling that the survivors themselves are asking for that to come from outside the Canadian Armed Forces, in some ways to put up a mirror to show what it looks like to somebody who is not already embedded in it, and honestly, to somebody who isn't invested in things staying the same.
Many of us know that once you're in an institution, and of course you believe in that institution fundamentally, it's such a betrayal when that institution fails you. Those who are in the Canadian Armed Forces, by their nature, believe in what they're doing, believe in the institution. It's very hard to be self-reflective and to look at the flaws within. I think this recommendation is particularly important and certainly would be worthy of putting in a report.
The next recommendation is to acknowledge that the CAF's current approach of self-monitoring is “too reactive, inconsistent, linear and simplistic to be effective and successful against the complex problem of sexual violence.”
I think that these words that were chosen by survivors and witnesses are very telling and very important. First is the idea of self-monitoring being “too reactive”. I think that is, sadly, something that we have seen, instead of looking proactively, preventing or taking actions before there is a significant crisis or problem. I do believe that it's been recognized. It's certainly been recognized by the acting chief, the minister, myself and many others. The approach to self-monitoring should not be reactive, but should be something you do before it reaches a crisis. That's very important.
The next one is even more important. It is that the CAF's current approach is “inconsistent”. This is something that we've seen in the testimony. We certainly saw the differences in the way that men and women who commit almost the same or exactly the same offence are treated differently. Sometimes in your chain of command, the resources available to you would allow for things to be resolved in an equitable and just way, and there are just outcomes. But, for others... I think this is why Justice Fish made the recommendation that the chain of command be taken out of military investigations involving military police or CFNIS. Investigations should not rely on the chain of command, particularly if the chain of command is where the problem is.
If that's where the harassment is occurring, it's very important that it be done independently. It has to be independent because of this inconsistency.
The one thing that is required and necessary is for people to feel that they have trust in an institution, for people to feel that it will be fair to them, whether they're a victim or a perpetrator, whether it is a serious misconduct issue or something like a joke, which is also very serious. However, no matter what it is, it is the consistency in the response, if people know that regardless of who brings it up, regardless of the rank or position of the person who's perpetrating, regardless of where they are in the chain of command, regardless of what their role is, they will have consistent application of the policies, the procedures, the values and the processes in order to get a just outcome.
In fact, I would say that a just outcome is defined by the fact that it is consistent and not dependent on who happens to be in your unit, or who your chain of command is or who you are.
The next one—and I will be honest, I'm not entirely certain what it means, and I think we would need to do a little more reflection and thinking on it—is the choice of the word “linear”. The survivors have put this forward, saying that CAF's current approach of self-monitoring is too linear. This is just my own interpretation, but I think what they're saying, when they say it's too linear, is that it is an action and then a consequence, and it just goes in a straight line as opposed to looking at the full context, looking 360 degrees, making sure that we're not just looking at a equals b equals c, but actually looking at everything around so that we can actually change the culture. However, I'm actually not certain. That's an area that certainly we could delve into a little more.
The next one is a bit more obvious: the choice of the word “simplistic”, that the CAF's current approach of self-monitoring is simplistic. That's an easy trap to fall into.
We have seen that this is a complex issue. In the beginning, when we started our study, which I'll remind members was supposed to be three days and has gone on for about four months, I think most of us thought we understood. Most of us thought we had a bit of a handle on it. We knew that bad things had happened and we thought we knew how they should be fixed. However, the more we delved into it, the more we heard from witnesses, the more we heard from the academics and from members of CAF, from people who are actually part of the process, I think we learned how complex it is. That's exactly why the motion before us, which says we can only spend two minutes each discussing these recommendations, doesn't work. It isn't simplistic. It is very nuanced, very complicated. Even the solutions are complicated.
We've heard so many proposals from very credible witnesses. In some cases, these proposals have been complementary to one another, but in other cases, they have been contradictory.
There are those who propose solutions, who say that we need to put everything into one. We need to take the SMRC, the ombudsperson and an inspector general type of office and put it all in one place. There are others who say that if you have the investigative arm, which is investigating perpetrators, in the same place as the support for the survivors, the advocates, the counselling, the policy and the data, there needs to be some kind of division there, otherwise you have the very same people counselling survivors and doing the investigation at the same time and providing whatever supports or processes for the people who are conducting this bad behaviour.
We've heard that. We've heard a number of different solutions in what ways it should report to Parliament. What does “independent” mean? We know that when the Deschamps report, in 2015, went to the highest levels of CAF, the definition of independence, to CAF, was that it be outside the Canadian Armed Forces, outside the chain of command.
By putting it under the Department of National Defence, the civilian side of National Defence, who are not in the actual chain of command because they're not actually military members—often many of them are ex-military—that was seen by many to be considered independent.
We know now that it didn't work. We know now that's not independent enough. We've heard from so many of the witnesses that it wasn't working for them, that putting it under DND was not necessarily what Madam Deschamps would have intended. However, for many people, that was the interpretation.
Now that we know this, it also shows, by the way, why it is so important that we have Madam Arbour. Madam Deschamps did a very effective job of identifying the problem and identifying what needed to be done. There needs to be an independent body, but actually getting from the what to the how, actually putting together a road map, specifics of exactly how to do this, if you asked 25 of the people who came before us, you could probably get as many as 25 solutions about how you actually put that in place. That piece is the hardest. We all know that. In our own lives, we know that. We often know what we need to do, but how do we do it? What is the first step? What does it look like at the end? What are the unintended consequences? This particular file is full of unintended consequences.
Operation Honour had unintended consequences. I believe those who initially established Operation Honour did so in good faith and believed the impact of it would have brought the results.
We now see that many of the things in Operation Honour did not have the intended impact or results, and what we've seen, actually, is that certain things were harmful. We know that things like the duty to report have taken away agency of individual victims, individual survivors, people who go through certain kinds of behaviour and then perhaps either are not ready to go forward with a full-out investigation or choose to try to do it in a different way.
We know that sometimes, on certain things, it's better to make sure that the people who have experienced it have the agency and are able to control how and when these things come forward. In many cases, informing the perpetrator that somebody has complained is perhaps the thing that the person fears most, but because of duty to report, that has happened and it might happen before someone feels ready. It could be that with the right supports, with the right options placed before them, with the right understanding of process, with the right advocates beside them, people would want to come forward, go through a full investigation and be able to confront that person and see that the person comes to justice. However, the duty to report took that away. It forced people into that before they were ready or when they specifically didn't want to.
It's very hard, because one thing we see is that bystanders are very important, that people who see wrong need to call it out. It is a really hard thing to know, when somebody is calling out somebody else. We call it, in certain other areas of feminism, the “white knight syndrome”.
I think most of us as women have had those circumstances where a very well-intentioned ally, a male who wants to do the right thing and stand up for women, jumps in, in defence, at a point where a) you might have been perfectly capable of defending yourself, or b) you didn't want that because it makes you feel like you're somehow incapable of defending yourself or less.
That white knight syndrome is really hard, because for a lot of men—I've spoken with a number of men, even in my own life, who genuinely want to do the right thing—it's not easy to know at what point you have to call it out, at what point you have to report and at what point you are actually taking away that agency and sense of power from that person, the victim.
That's why there is this reflection on duty to report and making it duty to respond, because responding doesn't necessarily entail reporting, but it means you have to do something.
You can't ignore it. You can't brush it under the carpet. You can't just let it be. You have to respond, but respond appropriately. That's where a lot of the training comes in. Going back to the previous recommendation, that's where a lot of the expertise is too. We need external expertise from people who know about these things and who can give training and guidance to ensure that whatever we do does not have the unintended consequences that many of the things we've tried so far have had.
The rest of this says, “to be effective and successful against the complex problem of sexual violence.” There we have it. Right there in the recommendations brought to us by survivors, they talk about this as a very complex problem. If it was an easy problem, it would have been resolved. It is a very difficult problem because it isn't about individual behaviour. It is, as we've said, about the entire context, the entire culture: the assumptions, the preconceived notions and the ways in which people interact with each other.
Again, I will go back to Dr. Okros, who was extremely good at explaining to us the power dynamics that happen and that in any given space, we determine... I think Mr. Bagnell was very self-reflective when he talked about the idea of who is most important in the room. How do we navigate that?
Madam Chair, in this particular room, you're sitting at the front, and that would indicate to many people that you are the most important person in the room. I tend to agree. Wassim, the clerk, is also sitting there, on your right, and we know that sitting at the right or left of the chair puts a person in a very elevated position. If we didn't know anybody in this room and walked into the room, we would immediately know certain things about your importance. Then we would look to body language and the way people interact.
I would like to go back, though. I've talked about who is important, how we determine that and how we try to elevate ourselves or diminish others to change social structures and what is important, so I'll go back to what happened earlier in this meeting.
Mr. Bagnell was putting a sincere idea forward about how to get past this impasse and how to find consensus, and he was snickered at and laughed at. One of the key ways that people determine power is through ridiculing, diminishing, snickering and laughing, and we saw it right here in this room earlier today. Frankly, I am extremely disappointed, because we are all members of Parliament and are held to a much higher standard of behaviour, particularly towards one another. We know that this is the kind of behaviour that is intended to diminish. It is intended to show who is important and who is not.
We've seen it in other ways as well. We've seen it in the use of language. Men are referred to by their title or by their last name—Mr. whoever—and women are almost always referred to by their first name. This is in public settings. Obviously when you're in a personal environment it's a different thing, but in an official formal public setting, there is a diminishing that happens when you refer to people by their first name as opposed to “Mr.” or whatever the title is.
These are all subtle things that we don't really know we're doing, although I would suggest that earlier today members probably did know what they were doing. Sometimes it's deliberate and sometimes it's not.
I'll end here because I've got quite a few other recommendations. I just want to say that the committee worked very well together for the first year and a half that I was on it, and I know we're at an impasse. However, I really hope that in some way we'll be able to find a way past this impasse. Maybe we could find some way to put our own interests aside and put the survivors ahead, and make sure these recommendations get out. That's why I'm reading them into the record.