Good afternoon and thank you to the chair and committee for inviting me to attend today. I apologize up front to everyone in the room and those listening; I'm still finishing up a cold.
First, I want to thank the witnesses who gave testimony last week. Listening to their stories gave me the courage to agree to be here today. As a retired military physician, I was deeply touched by the fact that two of your four witnesses last week were medics. I've always had an interest in medical support needs specific to female soldiers. I spent most of the 20 years of my regular force career supporting the air force. I had the good fortune to be selected for advanced medical education, completing both a master's of health sciences in occupational medicine, and a certificate in women's studies.
My subsequent medical residency was in aerospace medicine, which is a preventive medicine sub-speciality. I also had the honour of being a past president of the Federation of Medical Women of Canada and I have continued, since my release in 2009, to advocate for equitable health outcomes for all Canadian military women.
Last week's testimony provided the committee with a number of first-hand experiences that have occurred after the implementation of Operation Honour. I think we can all agree that despite the sincere efforts and hard work of many, Operation Honour has not achieved the levels of effectiveness we all had hoped for.
There is no question that the military has come a long way and deserves acknowledgement and credit for that hard work. However, as a physician, I want to highlight that a lot of that hard work has been on the backs of those most impacted. All of your witnesses last week were first impacted by their workplace incident and then made to feel responsible to name the problem with their subsequent treatments, determine how to best solve that problem and advocate for the needed systemic changes.
The chronic stresses related to these and other workplace aftermaths consistently, in my experience, end up having negative impacts on people's health and well-being, with these health issues, therefore, for the most part, to me being preventable service-related injuries and illnesses. If I had closed my eyes and listened to last week's testimony, it easily could have been confused for listening to conversations that I regularly would have had in my same doctor's office 30 years ago. Although much has changed, much has not.
CAF has ordered its people to stop harassment. It hasn't worked. CAF has ordered its people to follow the harassment policies. It hasn't worked. However, my question is, why is this a surprise and is this anything unique to the Canadian Armed Forces?
In the medical sphere, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the United States released a comprehensive report in June 2018 on sexual harassment and its effects on women in male-dominated fields of study. They found no evidence that policies, procedures or legal focuses alone would result in any reduction in sexual harassment rates. These are all necessary but not sufficient drivers of the changes needed to address sexual harassment. Their summary advice was that we need to be focusing on system-wide holistic change, inclusive of culture and climate.
There has been much ado about the Canadian Forces military culture and whether it's sexualized or just simply male normative. Either way, it's a culture that is proud to boast that it eats policy for breakfast.
It was Einstein who warned us that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Perhaps what is needed most here is a moment of pause: a reboot, a paradigm shift. Maybe what is needed is a transformational solution instead of yet one more committee with committee recommendations resulting in the same levels of downstream impact as moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. Maybe it's time that we moved from traditional political and military linear thinking and acknowledged that culture and gender are both context-specific topics that are best addressed as complex systems. They're also known as wicked problems.
As physicians, we use these approaches within health care. We know that if we want to make improvements in a health care system, we have to be looking at it in a holistic, dynamic approach. As military physicians, we have a basic framework on how we try to maximize healthy workplaces and fulfill our mandate of conserving manpower, and it's never one thing. It's always a multitude of things that all have to happen at the same time.
First, we always, always have to focus on prevention. Also, it's not either-or. It's prevention and screening, and it's early diagnosis, immediate care and rehabilitation. As well, how do we get you back to work, and if we can't get you back to work, how can we make you the best you can be? Last, this is with feedback loops with constant quality assurances between all of these levels. It is that last bit—the feedback loops—that is often the most important key to success.
How can we apply this approach and address these necessary culture changes so that we can truly, finally and fully integrate women into CAF? I do have specific recommendations under each of those four categories, but for reasons of time, I will move to my conclusion.
This committee was set up with terms of reference specifically to explore if the Government of Canada has given CAF all the resources it needs. I leave you with a clear and simple answer to that question: no.
It was only one career length ago, 30 years, that CAF was very legitimately a workplace and culture designed by men, for men and about men. In the 1980s, when the military was ordered to open to women the 75% of its jobs previously held by men only, a crucial Government of Canada decision was made. It was decided that the legal ruling was to be implemented into CAF with no concurrent, systemic top-down review or designated financial support to ensure gender integration was set up for success.
Gender integration was instead left largely to the women on the front lines, such as the ones testifying in front of you last week and who, for the last 30 years, have said, “We need help.” For 30 years Canadian women have stepped up, signed the dotted line and tried to make the military a better place to work in for those behind them, often at the cost of their own health and well-being. For 30 years they've been waiting to be met at least halfway by the Government of Canada, their employer, to be enabled their proper top-down systemic reviews.
CAF needs more money, more people, more training and more data. The Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Veterans Affairs need strategic funding for the full integration of not just GBA+, but SGBA, sex gender-based analysis, throughout DND, CAF and VAC. Furthermore, these departments need money to develop a health and policy partnership with CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, to accelerate the quality of sex and gender science for military women. Service injuries and illnesses from chronic sexual harassment and assault perpetuated within our own workplace is not the war any women I knew signed up for.
There are many other issues that impact military women other than just sexual trauma and sexual harassment, and we look forward to working together with the Government of Canada, as our employer, to address them all.