The grievance system is presently almost the bane of my existence. It is a source of aggravation and frustration.
I'll say two things. First of all, you need to put yourself in the perspective of the most vulnerable kind of person. Respectfully, that's actually not me. I'm an attorney. I have some legal knowledge. I'm not the most vulnerable kind of person. The most vulnerable kind of person may be the 16-year-old who gets parental consent to join. They may be the person who is so affected by aggravated sexual trauma that they can't even put their hand on the doorknob to get into work, or may vomit when putting on their uniform. That's just an example. If you design a system so that individuals like that can navigate it rather than requiring us to be Rory Fowler or Michel Drapeau, you will succeed in having a system that works for everyone.
The grievance system, as it stands, requires individuals like me and others to spend our limited part-time, our free time, to fight a system that is paid and employed full-time to fight back. That's the challenge I have. I am not an expert on military regulation, military law, etc., but they have access to all of those resources. They also have access to legal advice on those issues. Members don't. What annoys me more than anything is when senior members who have never been affected in the way some of us have flippantly say, “If you don't like it, grieve it,” knowing full well that they've never had to go through those processes, or maybe they did in a minor way and had success.
If I could leave the committee with one final point to think about, it's that if you really want to get to culture change and solve these issues, you need to look at every single aspect of the system and understand how it feeds back in. That includes the honours and recognition system, the promotion system, the grievance system and the military police system—all of it—but with a central view of what the effect would be on these sorts of things that we get to.