Thank you for having me.
My name is Martine Roy. Right now, I work for TD Bank in LGBTQI business development. I want to say this because it is important; it is a new role. However, I am not here to talk about this role.
Today I'm here to represent the LGBT Purge as the president. Michelle Douglas presented it well. I won't go back to what happened, because the same thing happened to me. I was in the regular forces and I was arrested, interrogated and let go for homosexuality.
When I was in the army, in training at Borden, everything was highly sexualized. The access to the outside, the really inexpensive alcohol and the group effect made the place perfect for this sort of aggression.
There are those who have just arrived, the recruits. People who have been in the army for a long time and away from their families come for their training and find themselves in the same place as the recruits. Something needs to be done about that. I hear that it is still happening in the same places.
The next point I want to make is important to me. The first letter in “LGBT” is “L”. It represents women. In any organization, we women must take our place, because things are unfair right from the get-go. Since there are far fewer women than men, things are unfair. This creates an imbalance and undermines respect for women.
For me, this is important because we just heard from somebody who went through a transition. I think she witnessed being a white man and then becoming a woman. She is not transsexual for me anymore. She's a woman. I think that to understand what it meant to be a white cisgender male at the top of his line and then to become a woman, she must have felt the discrimination.
I am here in front of you, yes, to talk about LGBT, but mostly to talk about women. I think this is the subject. Why is it that in a lot of industry—I'm not just talking about the military—we still have this issue in 2019? When a woman can go into combat and when we know that woman can do as much as man, why don't we achieve that respect, so that we don't get aggression anymore?
I've brought to my paper a lot of research about how aggression is still happening today in the Canadian Armed Forces. I may be less positive than my colleague, Michelle Douglas, over what's happening because I have a feeling, when I look at numbers—and it's the same for Danielle, the first person who spoke—that we are still having major issues.
It's like in 1969 when we decriminalized homosexuality, it didn't stop there. It's not because there's a law or a policy in place, and all the officers are embracing that policy, that in the rank or in the platoon this is understood.
My colleague brought to us the fact of The Fruit Machine. We're going around with that movie where people testify what happened to them and we realize it has a great impact. I think we need to go into the ranks. We need to go inside. I believe that, after all the investigation—and I pulled the numbers but I'm not going to bring them all to you because I think you do understand and this is why we're sitting in front of you today—there is still an issue and we need to find some resolution to it.
I worked for about 30 years in different corporations after I was fired, and I can tell you that it's not, as I said, just in the Canadian Armed Forces. But I think if we can really find the right way to go inside and give training and education to people like this, ignorance won't keep happening. When everybody knows, they can't tell you that they didn't know. Everybody takes ownership.
When we talk about allies, they're not just heterosexual. Allies are lesbian. They're homosexual. They're transsexual. We need to be allies for each other and we need to have allies outside as well. If everybody would embrace diversity and inclusion and understand that in the workplace, the most important thing is your skill, how much you will achieve in your job, how good you are at your work and how much you will want to stay there, we would have good retention and we would attract the best talent. As the workplace takes up 75% of our time, I think it's a place where we have to show our skill, be able to be in collaboration, and respect each other.
I was really saddened by the number I saw. I was really saddened to see that we're still doing that. As a woman and a lesbian, I can tell you that there are still a lot of issues of respect toward the gender of women and toward the gender of women transsexuals and bisexuals. There are still some issues of respect, and we need some help.
Thank you.