Yes, 23 years over a period of 27, and part of the reason for that is.... She was an exemplary soldier, had extremely good reviews and was listed as promotable. In 1994 while in Germany, she brought forth a case of sexual harassment against her supervisor, and that was the end of her career. She appealed to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and won, and DND was forced to allow her to come back into service.
When she came back into service, she redressed in earnest to get back her position, rank, and pay: denied, denied, and denied. That was part of what led to her ultimate frustration with the service. She had given her entire life and everything to the service. She loved her job. Everything was going very well. It went sideways, and she could never get over that.
Since this happened, I've gone through her personal papers. She had 22 boxes of military documents: her entire career, all the redresses, all the cases, and all the Veterans Affairs studies. There were two large boxes for Veterans Affairs in the last few years. Going over that case of the sexual harassment, I look at it today and I go, “There's no way that this would be allowed to happen today.” But it did then. Essentially, they said, “You know what? We're tired of hearing this. Why don't you just go away?” But once that case was presented, Human Rights turned it around in something like three weeks and said, “Yes, you definitely have a case of sexism here.”
That was the beginning of her difficulties psychologically, and she sought help in DND for stress and anxiety in Germany at the time. It's documented. It's on record. Her release form lists all the things that she had been treated for by the medical people on base during that period of time in five years—she had a five-year posting there—and under “treated for anxiety and depression” was “resolved with counselling”. There was no further follow-up. Then, on her second tour, there was another similar incident while in Kingston. She was based in Kingston at the training school there and had a relapse of depression, essentially. The resolution of that one was to see the padre. There was no further action taken on that later.
Again, those are touchpoints in DND, and this is sort of a separate issue, but those are the points at which, again, early on, there was opportunity, I think, to probably address what was really going on at the back of her mind, although it was pretty obvious to her. She was deeply, deeply hurt by that, and the second phase of her career was all about getting back in and getting restored so that she could get back to where she was. It just...well, it never happened.