Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. My name is Paul Hook. I'm a veteran. I spent 25 years in the Canadian Armed Forces as an officer in the Armoured Corps.
Since my retirement last year, I have been the managing director at CIMVHR responsible for human resources, finance, outreach and strategic planning. I use my lived experience as a military dependent—I'm the fourth generation serving in the military—as a military officer and now as a veteran to work with my colleagues, such as Nicholas Held, to make sure that the research that is being put out has all the merits that are required.
Over the past year, CIMVHR, as part of its work to complete our strategic plan that takes us to 2030, has had some hard discussions. As my colleague discussed, there is a research gap. We've looked at hiring an indigenous adviser as well as a diversity adviser, both of whom we should have in January 2025. That will allow us, as we move forward with our research areas of focus, to ensure that we're meeting the needs of all of our military veterans and their families when we do research.
As a point for discussion at our annual conference, we were very happy to have Randi as well as other people from Manitoba attend our conference. There was a specific push, especially as we were in Manitoba with the Red River Métis and many other organizations there, such as the Southern Chiefs' Organization, to ensure that we had indigenous veterans and indigenous serving members at our conference, because we know and we understand that having groups at our conference, especially marginalized groups that the Minister of VAC brought up as a priority for research, makes it that much more special. We talked about how great it was and how ironic it was that six weeks ago, when I sent an email to Randi saying that she was more than welcome to come to our forum, we would be on the same panel.
Part of that discussion that my colleague talked about was the research that happens. I'll give an example of last year.
In our call for abstracts for new and emerging research, we spoke about well-being, sex, gender, EDI and intersectionality, service-related injury and illness, and mental health. One of the streams that we had in 2023, because we know there's a gap in research in Canada, had four titles. The research topics were racial disparity, female veteran homelessness, the lived experience of Black service women in the United States and using cultural safety and competency as a lens to understand BIPOC CAF members' experiences utilizing health services. The “BIPOC” was in the title, so I'm just using it there.