There are a couple of things to say.
Does it happen often? I can tell you right now that female veterans across this country reached out as recently as 15 minutes before this began. They reached out to me and said please.
I'm reaching out right now to every one of you members of Parliament, regardless of party, to stand up and say it is not tolerable that we've rejected the women in the military and their request to be heard. It needs to be “me too”, not the “not you”.
Why did Mr. Bruyea have to reach out to me? I can tell you why. It's because in spite of all of our efforts of going through policy and saying the decisions made by the department were not supported in policy, were not supported by any of the evidence before them.... They'll deny this, but the day after Mr. Bruyea filed his lawsuit, the funding was cut for a six-year-old boy. You alluded to Mr. Garnier, who was a criminal, in his thirties, and who was given funding from the very same fund. How can you have a system that says no to a six-year-old boy and yes to a cop killer?
If we can't fix those things, this is all for naught. It's a disgrace that we would put a little boy who fears for his dad's life, let alone his own safety, in that position, and we say yes to a cop killer. It's absolutely absurd that we would do that.