Unfortunately, I have more than four recommendations. I have four categories of recommendations. Maybe I'll just pick the ones at the top end.
Having listened to last week's testimony, I know training came up quite often. If I were to focus first on prevention, number one, it isn't just after they come to us. It is how the Government of Canada is communicating to Canadians about what the military is and who we are, and who is already being attracted to come to us. What do Canadians know and understand about the military and how do we attract them to us? How are we then screening them? Once they're in the door, how are we training them about the culture of CAF and what we want it to embody. Again, with that reboot idea, do we need to do a conscious re-look at the profession of arms doctrine and a re-look at what a good Canadian soldier is? Instead of all the documentation and visualizations, and stories of yesterdays, what are the attributes and skills sets? What does a good Canadian soldier of tomorrow look like?
Do a full SGBA on a military person's experience to make sure that from the get-go we have equipment, policies and medical support for everyone who comes in, and that women aren't clearly always “the other” and having to have adjustments made for us. We are then clearly a valued, equal team member. In my opinion, this would also help prevent some of the injuries we see in a higher proportion for women.
Continue all of this training throughout all the ranks and all of the career cycle, because as we move up, we start becoming more of a leader and influencing others. It isn't a one-time education. It has to continue and it has to continue all the way up.
One academic I've heard speak several times is a big proponent of all of our flag officers needing specific training. Because of who they are, it has to be one-on-one counselling that's specifically exploring their own personal implicit-explicit biases so that they're aware of what message they are potentially sending to their subordinates. Again, our culture is often very twofold as to what is said versus what people hear, the formal and the informal. Without that type of training, how do we capture that, when our leadership still sometimes says all the right words but that isn't what's heard?
We also need to actually look at our desired military behaviours and consciously do carrots and sticks. We're getting pretty good with the sticks. We're getting better with sticks, because we are charging. However, as you'll have heard many times, are we charging or doing the appropriate things in a transparent, timely and consistent manner? Are the punishments fitting the crimes? There's still a lot of mismatch there.
We haven't done a lot yet, that I'm aware of, for carrots. How do we reward the correct behaviour? How do we incorporate it into our reporting, our PER system? How do we incorporate it into our promotions and our incentive pays? If we move to screening, how do we potentially come up with early diagnosis?
We all have our phones now. We all have apps. Can we use our apps as an early warning monitoring tool that could actually be climate surveys and climate comments where I can just say, “Hey, I saw this and this happen at work today”, and we immediately get, at an organizational level, who is having problems, who needs extra help in their leadership, 360-degree reviews?
Also, we're the only military that I'm aware of that does not have uniformed clinical psychologists. We have a lot who are contracted. We don't have any in uniform. Again, it would be persons for prevention. As a person who did fight surgery, half my job was to be out with the people doing their normal jobs. You'd pick out who was already stressed. You were always trying to fix people before they got sick. Again, the idea of clinical psychologists is very aggressively used in the U.S. It's in all of the workplaces. Your chaplain is there. Your psychologist is there in the workplace to go have a coffee with you, versus waiting until things are already so bad that you're coming into the medical system. There's a lot more we can do on that early-stage prevention.
Restorative justice is a topic that still needs to come up in a multitude of different areas. There are a lot of people who just really love their jobs and their careers, but they want a bit of justice and restorative justice could make that better.
I have another page. I'll hold off on the rest of it in case anyone else has any other questions.