Thank you. This is a very good question and for me, like Michelle, that was horrible to go through. My whole life changed and one day.... It took me 10 years to find work that I felt good in, and it took me 10 years to take a risk, and that was to go work for a very big corporation. I did, and when I found out they were inclusive and all that, I said, “Here we go, I have to tell everybody”, and that's how I started Pride at Work Canada in 2008.
It was my way to say that what happened to me, I don't want to happen to anybody else at any work, because I don't think it should. In creating Pride at Work Canada, I started with eight companies. There are now 120 companies, and my goal was to get the Canadian Armed Forces to join, which they did in 2016. That's why I'm so engaged, but at the same time, I was feeling at one point that what I was saying did not fit with what I was doing, because I accepted that I was thrown out of the Canadian Armed Forces, and I didn't do anything.
That's why I had to do the class action. I had to settle this, and not for only me. When I discovered there were others like me, like Michelle, and there were many of us, it gave me more reason to fight and to say that we cannot go on and say that we're a country of peace, that we're innovators with diversity and all that if we don't clean up our space, and we needed to clear that. We needed to first admit we did it, because no one ever did, and then apologize for it, which we just did. Now we repair, and all those are great things. This is why I'm still in front of you today and I'm still debating that, because I believe we can make it. I believe we can be that inclusive country and that we can teach others. I believe that.