Thank you, Madam Chair. I do believe that at the last meeting I left off by going through some of the very important recommendations that survivors have presented to us, either through testimony at FEWO or directly. I just want to start by saying that I do wish that we actually had agreement from the opposition to adjourn debate so that we could immediately get to the reports. There are three very important reports that I think it would be very important for us to go to directly to consider drafting.
What we're debating right now is an amendment that asks that we have a government response, and again, I reiterate that I don't see the purpose of having reports and then not asking the government to respond to those reports. As a result, we're still here, and I will continue discussing these important recommendations so that at least we can get these recommendations on the record because I think that it is very important, and then we will do our best to ensure that there is action taken on these.
There's a tremendous amount of effort and work that survivors and experts went through when they came to speak at our committee.
We forget because we're here as members of Parliament. We're used to being in a committee room. We're used to speaking, but for somebody to come to Parliament and be asked to speak before a parliamentary committee, especially somebody who has survived a sexual trauma, or for people who have spent their lives as academics studying an issue, to give their testimony and to answer questions is a big deal. It matters, and a lot of preparation goes into that.
I would point to people like Professor Maya Eichler, who, when she came here, had her 10 minutes to be able to present. This is a professor who has literally devoted her academic study to the Canadian Armed Forces, military culture and gender issues. She had a tremendous amount to provide to this committee, but instead of allowing us to ask questions and have the interaction back and forth with her, again, there were games played, motions coming forward, and all she had was her 10 minutes.
I would very much like to make sure that some of the testimony and also things that witnesses, survivors and experts, have provided are at least on the record, right here, which will be in Hansard and is official. I will do this by reading them out. I do believe that I ended on the recommendation that self-monitoring is too reactive and inconsistent for the complex problem of sexual violence. I'll go to the next recommendation, which recommends addressing the use of sexually and racially coded language that supports and accentuates social hierarchies in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I think this one is very important. It does go to quite a bit of the testimony that we heard, and I spoke the other day about how these social hierarchies are established. It's rarely blunt. It does happen, but it's rare that somebody turns to somebody else, points at them and says, “You do not belong,” or makes an overt kind of comment that would indicate that a person does not belong, that a person is “othered”, that they are different. They do it through coded language.
I do think that it's interesting here that when putting these recommendations forward, survivors mention sexually and racially coded language because we cannot distinguish.... There are many people for whom intersectionality only duplicates and amplifies what they face.
Women have always faced discrimination within institutions, including in the military. If you are a transgender woman, you will face even more discrimination. If you are racialized, Black or indigenous, and a woman.... We add these layers of identity, and I think we can't necessarily distinguish because when people are choosing who belongs and who does not.... We heard from some of the witnesses the idea that there is a masculine normative toxic culture. It's the warrior concept. It's this idea that to be—and I mentioned this previously—a good soldier, a good aviator, a good sailor, there is a particular typecast that is assumed.
A lot of this is based on a not very modern way of looking at military. We know that in the military there are occupations across the board. I had the wonderful opportunity—I think it was three years ago—to be able to sail on the HMCS Winnipeg. We went from San Francisco to Esquimalt through the leadership program. This is something all members of Parliament are allowed to participate in. It's a wonderful way to get to know the day-to-day life of our sailors, who are doing tremendous work, and to really understand what that's like.
It was three nights on a ship. Very few people get to experience what life might have been had they chosen a different path. For three nights, I got to see first-hand, had I made a different choice in my life, had I chosen to go into the military, to join the navy, what it would have been like. It gave me a level of understanding, just sleeping in the bunk on the ship and eating with the sailors, and sitting down talking and listening to them.
I talked to women who were on that ship who were just returning home. They had been on the ship for six months. Being away from their families, being away from their children, the sacrifices that they make, but also the incredible sense of unity and camaraderie....
There's a recommendation coming up that talks about group loyalty. I think this is one of the things that makes it so hard when that's betrayed. I could see the close quarters. I could see that if somebody were in a situation where they were being sexually harassed—you can't avoid people on a ship. It really made a difference when we were sitting and talking. Different people and different ways of minimizing, diminishing or building up, building team and leadership can affect the entire group.
I'll talk a little bit later about some of the other experiences I had while on the HMCS Winnipeg, the people that I met there and how profoundly impressed I was. We were able to participate in fire drills. We were able to participate in rescues of somebody overboard. We were able to participate in many of the day-to-day activities. We saw the engine room. We saw the operations room. We did a simulated attack where we actually experienced what it would be like if the ship were hit by a torpedo. The table in the dining room turns into a surgical table. There are multiple uses for the space because space is very limited.
It was really an incredibly eye-opening experience that showed me that there are so many trades. There are so many ways to serve that aren't what you see on TV, that aren't what we see in pop culture.
Again, I reiterate this World War I notion of the soldier in the trench. There is so much more in today's military, and yet the way in which the stereotype, the normative of who will succeed.... It is still very much a masculine, heterosexual normative way of looking at it. Frankly, that is doing a disservice because it actually takes away the number of skill sets—men and women. I do think that it is very important to know that if there's a toxic masculinity that only favours a certain kind of masculinity over others, this is just as limiting and damaging to men who don't fit the stereotype as it is to women.
I go back to the recommendation that talks about sexually and racially coded language because I can only imagine, in an environment like that, when there are microaggressions, when there are comments made—and they can be very subtle comments, but they are ways in which people within the group navigate. I think we've all experienced it. I imagine anybody who is racialized, or a woman, or indigenous or LGBT, or anybody who has an identity that isn't part of the normative of the group that they're in has experienced this kind of thing.
I've certainly seen it in politics, where there are things that are...and I like the fact that it says “coded” because it is coded. It is a signal that somebody sends to someone else to say, that person is different; that person is other; that person does not belong here. It's a way in which to create the social hierarchies that Dr. Okros and others spoke to us about and provided testimony about.
Sometimes I think people don't even realize they're doing it. We hear things said, and we repeat them. I think that sometimes—especially for those who are in the dominant group—they may not even realize when they're using certain language, when they're using certain terms that have become so frequent, the harm and the impact that actually might have on other people in the group, who then are being told—not outright but day by day through little things, through microaggressions, through the words that are used, through the choice of terms—“You don't belong here. You're not part of the group.”
I've heard from some of the survivors that it can be even more damaging, that constant piling-on over time of these microaggressions, the language and the things that make you feel like you don't belong in a place that you've committed your life to, for something you believe in thoroughly. That's where the sense of betrayal, I think, comes in. You have people who believe profoundly in the group they are a part of, where the objective is the protection of Canadians, the bringing of peace and security in the world.
Going back to what I learned when I was on the HMCS Winnipeg, the work that they're doing—I mean, they've intercepted drugs in the Carribean. They've intercepted pirates off the coast of Somalia. They've participated in multiple multi-country efforts to make sure that we are safe and secure on so many levels, things that we wouldn't even know about. Honestly, I think we should probably talk more about some of the successes, the things our military members do that make our day to day lives safer. I don't think that people who have a family member who is struggling with drug addiction realize how many drugs are intercepted and stopped from getting here, to North America or Canada, because of the military. That's something that, when we look at young people thinking about their career....
I was talking to a young woman whose brother is an addict. She has had real difficulties with that. She said, “I want to be a social worker because I want to make a difference, and I want to make sure that other people don't become addicts, that they have services.” That is wonderful, I think, that giving back and the fact that this young woman wants to be a social worker, but would she ever even have thought that perhaps if she joined the navy that might actually be another way to stop the drugs from getting here and stop things like what was happening with her brother? I don't know if she would have thought of that as a way of giving back, because we don't know the stories. We don't know all of the different things that the military does, and part of that is because of this stereotype.
You know, when you watch TV, you look at a lot of the shows that portray the military. I'll confess, I watch a lot of them myself. This is a genre that I quite like, but just like I asked a friend of mine who is a doctor, “You know, I've watched 11 seasons of Grey's Anatomy. Does that make me qualified?”
She said, “It certainly doesn't make you qualified to be a doctor, but...”. Anyway, she made a joke that I'm not going to repeat, but it's the same thing with political shows.
We all know that when we watch these political shows, they don't reflect the reality of what it is to be an elected member of Parliament. In the same way, I think a lot of the shows and pop culture that portray a life in the military are not a full picture of what life in the military is. You do see in pop culture this racially and sexually coded language. You do see a lot of the stereotypes.
I think Hollywood is getting better at trying to show a little bit more.
I watch SEAL Team and I noted that recently they dealt with an issue about sexual harassment on a ship. They had one of the characters step in and speak out for somebody. She herself had experienced it and then she saw it happening to someone else on the ship. She stepped because she was an officer and had more power than she had at the time that this had happened to her.
They showed the backlash, the retaliation and some of the challenges that they had. When more women spoke out, when somebody who had some power at that point, an officer, defended somebody who didn't have power, who was more junior, they faced a backlash, and other women spoke out. Because of that, in that show anyway, it started to make a difference. They've dealt I think with other issues as well.
I think you're only now seeing that and you're seeing it because it's reflecting what is really happening. However, for a lot of the pop culture, for a lot of what we see when children look at, what do I want to be when I grow up, and they look at soldiers and they look at TV and Hollywood, I don't think it is inclusive.
It's getting better. I gave the example in the show SEAL Team where they've also tried to deal with issues about PTSD and veterans, and I think that's a good thing, but it's only very recently that Hollywood is starting to portray some of these issues that really happen.
I think it is really still the norm in our mindset, which is why there's the sexually and racially coded language, the social hierarchies, the portrayal of military in only a very aggressive masculine warrior kind of way, whereas leadership as we know is much broader than that. That's not to say that you don't need those skill sets, but we need to see it a lot more broadly.
That's why I think that particular recommendation is so important, but I do see that there are many other hands up, so I will allow my colleagues to have a say before I come back and go through some of the other recommendations.
Thank you, Madam Chair.