Thank you, everyone, for having me here today and hearing me speak. It's quite an honour to be with everyone here.
My background is that I'm an ex-professional athlete. I was on Team Canada numerous times. I graduated from the University of Victoria. I was a champion wrestler in high school. I won two awards in basic military training, and I was near the top of my class in navy environmental sea training.
I do very much believe that I had a very bright future ahead of me, but in the middle of my navy training, my abusive husband left me and my one-year-old son. I had no assistance. I couldn't afford a nanny. I had no family to help me within thousands of miles. The base out there in Victoria offers only 20 day care spots for a base of about 3,000 people. There are not enough spots. My son was placed on a two-year waiting list, but only for regular hours of day care. That really doesn't help at all for sailing.
In the meantime, I was flying my child across the country for child care with my parents so that I could sail, so I was deployable, but after I let the naval school know what had happened to me, I began to be treated very differently by the senior officers at my school.
Three days before my graduation, after training for a whole year, and when I was already posted to HMCS Winnipeg, I was scheduled to get my promotion and a pay raise that would help me with the cost of child care and the flights, but James Brun, my course training officer—