Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to start with a few general remarks on where we are. An unfortunate tendency that I've seen in the committee is for some members of the committee to claim to speak for survivors and victims and to have exclusive concern for survivors and victims, and if you don't share their opinion on how this committee should act, somehow you're not standing up for survivors.
I'd urge all of us not to fall into that trap of questioning who is, in fact, concerned about making change here. That's in front of all of us, and we have all expressed our opinions quite clearly on that.
What's important here is that women, in particular, be able to serve equally in the Canadian military, and we've known for the past six years that is not possible because of the highly sexualized, hypermasculine culture in the Canadian military.
Nothing has really happened about that of significance, and we continue to have one complaint of sexual assault or sexual misconduct filed about, on average, once every three days. Clearly, whatever measures have been taken have been inadequate to address this.
When we talk about this question, sometimes I think we confuse the study we're doing in this committee with the study that's going on in the status of women committee. This committee's study, if you look carefully at its terms of reference, was to determine why nothing happened with the accusations against General Vance as the person in charge of Operation Honour when he was in fact accused of sexual misconduct himself. Why is there that vacuum at the top? Why was there that failure for three years, of leaving General Vance in office and in charge of Operation Honour?
I know sometimes people have said we're focusing too much on one case. This isn't one case. This is the chief of the defence staff, who was in charge of Operation Honour. It is critical to the credibility of any future reforms that this committee determine what happened, why no action was taken and why General Vance was left in charge. If that question is not answered, and if there aren't changes as a result of that answer, then it puts in question all the reforms that we want to talk about going forward and all those reforms that are necessary to change the culture of the Canadian Armed Forces.
In terms of the committee's work, I note Mr. Bezan's figures he's provided on the amount of time that is spent diverting this committee from its work, and as I said in the last one, I'm quite disappointed that the efforts to deal with the effects of COVID on the military and mental health in the military have been shoved aside in order to focus on a report on which it's very difficult for us to reach a consensus. We could have very clearly dealt with those other two reports in an expeditious manner.
In that sense, Mr. Barsalou-Duval's amendment may be helpful in that we could do an interim report and it would allow us perhaps to get back to the work on which we have a large degree of consensus here and there was a large degree of consensus among the witnesses we heard.
One last thing that disturbs me about the discussion is the tendency for certain members to say that Mr. Bezan and I are engaged in finger pointing. I think this trivializes the accountability function of Parliament. We are finger pointing. We are looking for the people responsible, and in a parliamentary system there must be a minister responsible for this failure to act in ways that have been effective over the past six years on the issue of sexual misconduct.
It's not finger pointing to seek to assign responsibility in a parliamentary system. It's a fundamental part of a parliamentary government, and that's certainly what I'm interested in doing, because if we can figure out either who ordered there to be no investigation into General Vance, or if we discover that no one ordered this and the ball was simply dropped at the most senior level, then what change are we going to see that will provide confidence for members in the Canadian Forces that this issue will be taken seriously?
We've heard all the promises. We've heard all the fine words over the last six years. What is going to change here to make sure this doesn't continue going forward?
While I have some concerns about wording, I'm not going to quibble with the amendment. I am prepared to support the amendment if it allows us to get at that question of who is ultimately responsible here for failing the men and women who serve in the Canadian Forces, and if this allows us to get back to some of the other important work of the committee.
Thank you, Madam Chair.