Thank you for letting me know, Mr. Barsalou‑Duval. I'll slow down for the interpretation process.
I was on a point leading to a recommendation in the U.K. report on training. The report just prior to that recommendation states that training needs to take a preventative view and needs to “help leaders at every level better understand the early signs and symptoms of systemic degradation of behaviours.” It's not only delivering training in a top-down fashion, but actually making the training agile enough to pick up the behaviour that it is supposed to address.
The recommendation that the British report makes is that:
All recruits should receive immersive culture and behaviour training at the start of service and continued at regular intervals through their career.
The British Army “has made use of the Garnett Foundation to facilitate 'Respect for Others' training informed by the chain of command. This is scenario based, interactive and highly regarded [training], but has been subjected to funding pressures and remains at risk.”
The run-on recommendation by the U.K. is that:
Use of third-party training expertise is considered leading practice and should be resourced and exploited across [the U.K. defence forces].
Madam Chair, there's another section that I wanted to get to, but I'll leave it here for the moment.
The next issue I wanted to deal with, again with highly relevant recommendations, analyses and insights, is on bystanders. To achieve culture change, we have to address the issue of bystander empowerment. Again, this committee will find segments of this report relevant and may potentially adopt them, in whole or in part.
With respect to training, I think we've seen that the reflex of any government is to say it will train its way out of the problem. Training is an important baseline approach. We've made recommendations on training in the previous report on diversity and inclusion, but it's to make sure that the training has the granularity and the sensitivity to behaviour on the ground. It needs to have the feedback mechanisms to see if it's actually working and then it must insert organizational change agents in key positions.
The U.K. has identified these as “Referent Others”. Regardless of rank, a referent other can be a civilian instructor, an academic who works closely with the armed forces, or a serving member. They are not necessarily of a certain rank, but potentially could be somebody of middle or junior rank who commands respect through a role within the Canadian Forces. It's to empower those women and men to play their roles with respect to training and to empower others in turn to speak out against misconduct.
I think these are really valuable insights and recommendations with respect to the question of eliminating sexual misconduct in the first place. The complement to that, of course, is adequate reporting mechanisms to report instances that are still going on. I'll have more to say on that in future interventions, Madam Chair.
I'll leave it there for now and turn it back to you and to colleagues.
Thank you so much.