Thank you for your important question.
I think the Canadian Armed Forces has come a long way with the help of gender-based analysis, with doing the right thing moving forward for new procurements. Of course, a lot of the equipment in the military is old, though, so it has all of the older issues. We're looking at submarine accommodations, different kinds of accommodations on different ships. These things are already taken into account on newer ships, but we still have a lot of older equipment. That's one problem.
I do think we've done amazing work at places like DRDC, Toronto, for looking at different equipment pieces. That's still in evolution. We're still learning how to do it, but a lot of that is moving forward.
For me, the area that is still the most interesting is deployment. For me, there are three totally different types of medicine. There's the primary care where I'm your family doctor—normal medicine. Then there's the occupational medicine where you are employed, and I am the company doctor and ask how I can maximize so that you can work for me for 30 years. Then there's the deployment medicine, where I know you might be hurting yourself and I'm actually sending you out still, knowing you might hurt yourself. It's a very different type of medicine.
When we're deployed, there are many different ways that can be. It isn't just army. I came mostly by way of air force, so every time the wheels are up, we're deployed. There are many different ways deployment can happen, but we're often isolated by ourselves and we have to figure out how to do things.
If we look at something like a UN mission and start thinking with that women, peace and security lens, we are not necessarily with other Canadian resources or assets, but we're hoping for that equivalency. It's often quite hard to have that kind of equivalency for some of our UN missions. We, to my knowledge, don't have minimum medical standards of women's health training for the UN-level health. Often we'll say, “There's a U.S. base nearby, so we're good”, but especially on women's health issues, and especially even more so lately, there are still lots of different treatments and resources that might not be available in a U.S. location that would be in Canada.
We often still don't have basic basics in some of the UN kit, so things like birth control pills or the kinds of medications that would be needed after a sexual assault, vaginal infection information or even just a speculum, instruments to be able to properly examine a woman's vagina. That may not be available at that first stage, so suddenly something that really should be pretty simple to take care of becomes a big to-do. You have to leave the mission. Especially if you're in a conflict zone, even leaving the mission is actually quite dangerous. You're actually taking yourself out, and it could be a two- or three-day thing.
At one stage I was in Germany, and we would have women still having to come up from Afghanistan to Germany to get primary medical care that could have been ideally dealt with already on site if we all had a higher level of awareness of the right products, the right treatments and how to deal with common women's issues.