Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm not so much looking for answers as just for a bit of assurance.
I'd like to give a bit of an example. I was a professional firefighter for almost 30 years in Ontario. For 20 years a number of us on a committee advocated to bring women on to the fire department. It was a struggle. It went through the advocative stage. It finally passed, and our city council recognized that it had to be done. So it went through that recognition stage.
Then it went to the bureaucratic stage, and they brought in trainers and a number of other people. At that point the whole thing fell on its face. It was because they had developed kind of a checklist program. They came to the officers like me and others and said, “Here's your manual. Here's the stuff you check off if it's being done.” At the assessment after the end of two years, we began to realize that what began as a really good idea got lost in these good intentions, because people were so busy checking little boxes off that they weren't actually implementing it.
I guess what I'm saying here--and I'm sure you'll disagree--is that it feels to me today a bit more like a checklist thing. I'm trying to find out from you--I guess I need some assurance--that it's not. But also I'd really like to find a way in which this whole GBA thing would become a natural approach within all departments rather than the kind of thing for which we say we did this and this and this. I'm just throwing it open for your comments to that.