Evidence of meeting #144 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was caf.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Can we briefly talk about diversity and the number of women from minorities in the Canadian Forces?
Associate Professor, Canadian Defence Academy and Royal Military College of Canada, Department of National Defence, As an Individual
Of course. There are employment equity objectives. However, those objectives have not been achieved for visible minorities or for indigenous minorities, any more than they have been achieved for women.
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Based on your experience as a dean in a military college, what needs to be done to improve the inclusion and retention of women?
Associate Professor, Canadian Defence Academy and Royal Military College of Canada, Department of National Defence, As an Individual
As Dr. Breeck said, having policies to encourage employment equity is a good start. However, they are part of an overall process that has to cover the entire career path, from how to make positions attractive, to recruiting people and keeping them in those positions. We have to have a holistic approach, especially with organizations with very closed and male-oriented mentalities that are not particularly open to other points of view or cultures.
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Thank you very much.
Dr. Breeck, you have told us about your 20 or 30 years of experience in the Canadian Forces and you mentioned Operation Honour. You said specifically that none of the current policies are working and we have to go further, to identify the problems and find solutions. Could you be specific about your thinking?
Retired Military Physician, As an Individual
If I'm understanding correctly, the question was to talk more about how to further improve Operation Honour.
Retired Military Physician, As an Individual
Again, with the translation for clarification, certainly I think a lot of positive things have come as a result of Op Honour. I'm not suggesting everything is not going well with it. It's just probably not as quick and as diverse as what most people would have hoped for.
I'm not an expert on Op Honour specifically. I've been released for quite a few years. I keep finding recently released women who have had issues as part of their time in the military as well, for whom clearly things have happened since Op Honour has been in place. Marie-Claude Gagnon would certainly be much more able to speak to that first-hand.
What problem are we trying to solve? When we look at other locations and other road maps, all the stats suggest that climate and culture have to be part of the package. Areas have to be further developed in Op Honour that include those aspects.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Thank you very much.
We're now going to move on to the next seven minutes, and we'll hear from Rachael Harder.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Thank you so much, each of you, for taking the time to be here and to share some of your personal reflections as well, based on your interactions with others.
Ms. Gagnon, I received an email from an individual who experienced sexual assault over a number of years during her tenure in the CAF. She served as a medical technician for 22 years. During her time she experienced horrific things. One of her statements caught me. I would like your reflections on it.
She said that, based on her reflections and going through court proceedings—she took it all the way through—at the end of the day the individual who had assaulted her multiple times over the course of years, pleaded guilty and was given a $1,000 fine, essentially a slap on the wrist.
She said, “it breaks down any trust in men and your trust that the CAF will protect you as a soldier in combat or a women while in garrison. There is no safe place for victims. Victims are treated horribly once they come forward!”
Would her story align with the other stories you're hearing from the women you engage with on social media platforms and throughout the last number of years that you've been engaged in being an advocate?
Founder, It's Just 700
Unfortunately, this is a fairly common situation. A lot of people see the action of what happened as the trauma, but there's a neglect of looking at what we call the sanctuary trauma, which is the way you get treated after it happened. This is not necessarily unique to the military, but it's really strong in the military.
The duty to report makes it very difficult because you don't have safe disclosure anywhere. Your partner or your spouse may have a duty to report. Your neighbour may have a duty to report. Your co-workers, the people you live and eat with, all your support after you move over and over again, and even maybe your family members in service all have a duty to report. Your health care provider and your priest have a duty to report. That means it's extremely isolating because if you talk, things will take place without you wanting it—you lose control—and that service....
When you look at the bill at this point, there's less support provided to victims in service. The military justice system has less services and support for them than in the civilian system, where they have victim support with people who are qualified to do this. Even with the new bill right now, those kinds of services will be diluted for a person where it's one more hat added to their position. It could be an artillery officer who is doing this once in a while. They're not equipped and they're not trauma informed.
The accommodation and all of these things are not something that is given to a professional. It is left to the chain of command. It's inconsistent. There's no support if you're lost and you're re-traumatized through the whole process.
I made an informal query with my group asking how many people disclosed what happened to them and how many were able to stay within the services. Only 7% said they were able to stay after they disclosed their sexual trauma in the military.
What makes a person who speaks leave? Most of them didn't have the intention to leave, but the way they were treated created that place where they had to leave.
The universality of service is also another thing that people don't consider. If you're not recovering fast enough, you can be considered mentally unfit to stay in service and then you don't just lose your job; you lose your career. You need to retrain in something new. This isn't going from one place to another, you have to redo your whole career path sometimes, depending on the types of trades you have.
Yes, there's been a pause in some ways for this release, but it's still happening. What makes so many people leave the military after disclosing an incident is usually the lack of support and the sanctuary trauma that happens within their workplace and their living environment. If you're on a ship, obviously it's where you live and eat, so this is usually the same people.
In my opinion, that's what creates sanctuary trauma. That is what the person is talking about.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Thank you very much.
What do you think can be done to prevent these types of scenarios from happening in the first place within the Canadian Armed Forces?
Founder, It's Just 700
Are you asking about preventing incidents or preventing additional sanctuary trauma?
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
I would say to prevent the actual incident from taking place to begin with.
Founder, It's Just 700
I would say that there's a lot of push maybe to put women in places without necessarily thinking about their safety. For example, the gender advisers are looking at the civil society and how safe they will be when the military people come in, but are they looking at the people in uniform and their safety when they're deployed? I was not allowed to lock my shower when I was at sea. I was told to not lock my shower. When I said to them that people were walking in when I didn't lock it, I was told to take my shower at night. You're not allowed to lock your shower because if you hit your head, somebody needs to be able to help you.
Those kinds of things haven't considered the gender factor. I would rather take the chance of hitting my head on the wall and lock my shower. Same with your bedroom. When you're asleep, you can't lock your door because the next person has to wake you for your shift. For me, there's an intercom system that could have been used. I was the only one in my dorm.
Those are the kinds of things where, if you are in a setting of deployment of submarines or anywhere, you can look at the environment and ask what we can do to prevent things. What things are unnecessary but we're just doing them because we're so used to being with men only and we haven't really had to think about these things?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Excellent. Thank you very much.
We're now going to move over to Rachel Blaney.
Rachel, you have the floor for seven minutes.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Thank you.
I want to thank you all so much for being here today.
I'm going to start with you again, Marie-Claude. I'm sorry, you're just trying to drink.
Really, one of the things that had an impact on me was when you talked about the self-policing, and then your question to the last member as well. It's that same sort of idea of not having that safety and security. I'm wondering if you could tell the committee what makes military sexual trauma different from other workplace sexual traumas.
Founder, It's Just 700
I would say it's the combination of so many factors. We talk about a male-dominated working environment, yes, but people who join the military are extremely young. I was 18. Some people are even 16. You're really young, uneducated and very naive at this age. You're going to an isolated place without your family and without your support system. You're going into an unknown work environment where people tell you what to do and you just listen and absorb it. You really believe everything you hear. It's a high hierarchy, with lots of power—it's decentralized—given to people who are not necessarily qualified to handle these things. There are no policies or set definitions of safety concerns. What is a safety concern? We don't know. It's given to the chain of command to make a decision.
There's little expertise on workplace harassment among the people who have to make decisions on accommodations and granting things when people come and ask for help. Other workplaces have those needed experts. Of course, it's a male-dominated workplace in an environment with old policies that haven't necessarily been redone and practices that don't always align with GBA+, which means there are additional things you have to fight for in the system.
There's uniformization and assimilation, like the brotherhood. It's really strong. When you go and rat out someone, it is considered a ratting out. It's not considered otherwise. There are reprisals for that. That's what usually generates the sanctuary trauma within your little community of workers.
Of course, we have separate health care and separate justice systems. These are not reviewed as often nor are they necessarily gender-centric. That is also an issue when you're looking for care and support, because the update is not done at the equivalent.... Maybe Dr. Breeck could tell you about that.
Slow recovery can cause you to not meet universality of service. That means career loss. This is another thing that you don't get in many other workplaces.
The duty to accommodate isn't there. There is a caveat in the military from the duty to accommodate, because you don't have to accommodate if you don't meet that universality of service.
Of course your social life and your work conditions are all mixed together, even who you marry usually. It's all intertwined, so there's no separation. When you come forward, it's your neighbours, it's who you live with, it's who you're married to.... Everybody is within that same bubble.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
One of the things you made very clear in your testimony, and we've definitely heard it repeatedly, is the lack of services and support out there for women who have this experience. If you had one thing that you would like to recommend to improve the way things are for women, what would that be?
Founder, It's Just 700
Considering there's already an idea of having more women, because obviously that would eventually make some change, I think it would be to have a standard, a little like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, to push the agenda on certain things.
Right now, just like Dr. Breeck said, it's a bottom-up approach where women are in it and we have to fight the systemic things ourselves. A lot of us are in the lower ranks at the beginning, so we don't have that power to impose these things. Somebody should be coming out and imposing standards so that it's not up to the people within the ranks—the few women—to be the ones challenging everything. That results in unnecessary dismissal, which leads to having fewer women, so it's kind of a vicious cycle.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Yes, it's the cycle that continues.
Another thing that stood out in what you said earlier was with respect to suicide, suicide prevention and the fact that the reports are only looking at male suicide. I'm just wondering if you could speak a little more about that.
Founder, It's Just 700
Again, the way the survey was conducted, it was done for a homogenous group. It was a qualitative data survey. They were going for numbers. If there weren't enough women who committed suicide, they wouldn't be able to see the needs.
I would be shocked if you ever get enough women, with 15% representation, to be able to do a decent survey on these things and a decent study. You need to find other ways to do these kinds of studies when there are minorities. If you use the same format that applies to the male-dominated groups, you'll never get that. You need qualitative data or you need to lump it together with other first responders or compare it with the U.S. There are other ways to do it.
That requires additional resources, additional expertise. If people want to know, they can find out, but they need to put the money out for it.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Thank you.
Dr. Breeck, you spoke in your presentation about the need for feedback groups. Can you just tell me a bit about what that would look like?
Retired Military Physician, As an Individual
I think feedback groups especially in a military context are part of what is really missing. How do silos talk to each other? How does data get shared properly, and how can you get immediate feedback? When we start thinking about people, we have this political designation that the day that I retire I suddenly belong to a different department than what I did the day before, but my medical issues and requirements are exactly the same. All of a sudden I'm split within these two departments.
I may be now retired, in which case only Veterans Affairs knows what injury I have now been diagnosed with. Maybe it's an injury that very clearly other people are going to have while still in uniform. We don't have the resources and the mandates to be able to pick up those trends when they happen in VAC.
The feedback upstream is, “Hey, we're noticing you're hurting people in a way that is preventable because it's through different departments and we haven't put the extra money in to gather the data in that format and to make those bridges happen.”
We don't have to keep re-inventing wheels, which only happens in the federal government. In the provincial government, all of those feedback groups are mandated. We're missing them.