It was a letter-writing campaign where we went out to women who had released within a five-year time frame. The five-year time frame was so that we don't need to repeat any of the foundational training because they would have had skill fade.
The response was actually very low. We should not have been surprised because the primary reasons that women will release.... Certainly there are those who will release because they have had a terrible experience, but a lot of women will release because they have family pressures for which they are making a life decision that they cannot continue in the military. We would have been naive to expect that within five years some of those family situations would change, particularly if it had to do with raising children.
Similarly, a lot of women will release at certain points because of medical injuries. Again, if they are released for a medical injury, the likelihood is that they may not have recovered or healed from that particular injury within five years.
The reasons—and I have just given you three—why they got out hadn't changed, ergo they weren't interested in coming back into the Canadian Armed Forces.