Veterans Affairs Committee on April 20th, 2023

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

Within this context and thinking back to Moose Jaw, there's a specific incident that comes to my mind.

Of course, Moose Jaw is a training base for student pilots. Student pilots in Moose Jaw haven't made it yet—if they have three flights that they don't do well on, they're gone. This is their life. This is their dream. They go up for a flight and then they come down and debrief. That's when they find out if they've passed or failed.

I have a really stark memory—because the incidents were only about a week apart. In one case, a gentleman student pilot found out he had failed. He disagreed with that and had a bit of an angry outburst. He picked up a chair, threw it against a wall and broke a window. We all heard about it. That kind of stuff goes across the base and we hear about it—if nothing else, just even the anger control issues for someone who's going to be a military pilot. We just heard about it and that was it.

It was about a week later that something similar happened with a female student pilot who came down from her flight. She was told that she did not pass, and she felt very strongly that it wasn't appropriate. Of course, social training didn't allow her to pick up that chair, so instead, as she was processing, she started to cry. It wasn't an ugly cry. Some tears just came out, and I think every woman knows those tears. Those are tears of frustration. As she stood there, not knowing what to do, unfortunately the person who was her pilot instructor reacted very strongly to seeing a woman crying. As she went into the hallway, he started screaming that, “See, women shouldn't be here. I've got one crying. I've never seen this before—crying.” He went and reported her to his boss, and his boss ordered her—again, in the military you're ordered—to come into the MIR for a mental health assessment, because clearly she wasn't appropriate for the military.

That was within one week. I found that to be a very good example to understand why women are not allowed to show emotion in the military. Instead, we turn our anger inwards. Again, especially on the medical side, we will show up with all kinds of internal stress-related issues, as we were hearing about on Monday—the headaches, the stomach aches, the fibromyalgia—this is turning that anger inwards. We present differently, with different issues that still can be mental health- or stress-related, but they present as physical.

That's quite an obvious example to explain how men and women present health issues differently.

[Fraser Tolmie, Conservative, Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, SK]

Thank you for sharing that with me. I appreciate it. I think that's very helpful for this committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you, Dr. Breeck.

Now I'd like to invite Mr. Sean Casey for five minutes.

Mr. Casey, go ahead, please.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

This is an absolutely fascinating panel. Thanks to all of you.

I'd like to start with something that was raised at the last meeting by Christine Wood. She advocated very forcefully for a top-to-bottom review of the table of disabilities.

I would be interested in your views on that. My expectation, Dr. Breeck, is that you're probably in the best position to speak to it. I'll start with you, and I'll ask the others to chime in if they have something to add.

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

Thank you.

I do not claim to be an expert on the table of disabilities. However, I am aware that Lisa Campbell in particular, when she was involved with Veterans Affairs Canada, certainly left her door open to enable women to speak to her and to identify different issues. I know that during her time there was work by a contractor—I believe it was Dr. Barbara Clow—to do a whole pile of reviews of that. I know that action was taken and reports were made. Unfortunately, we've never seen those documents publicly, and I know that certainly the veteran community would love to see what that subject matter expert found on those reviews.

My understanding is that they are acting on it. Maybe a whole pile of her recommendations are already actioned, but again, we don't know, so it's transparency.... I think things are happening and things are changing, but for anything that's women-specific, that's a new category.

It's easy when we tweak a male issue, but women-specific issues, such as female service-related infertility, didn't exist. To get that added to the books was many years of work. I think that tweaking something.... In prosthetics, women need slightly different prosthetics from men, but then the prosthetics are already there because it's part of the male disability issues. Anything female-specific is still a gap area that needs dedicated review. In fairness, it may be happening, but we don't know.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you, Dr. Breeck. I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa Campbell when she was in that role, and I agree with you. She made some very significant contributions. The ones I noticed most were on morale within the department. She really was an excellent leader, and it's good to see that she's done so well.

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

She's still an excellent leader, as head of the Canadian Space Agency.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Yes, I have no doubt. I just don't get the chance to talk to her about it.

I'm going to cede the rest of my time to Ms. Vandenbeld.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Eichler, Ms. Montague and Dr. Breeck, I want to thank you very much, not just for your testimony here today, but for years and years of advocacy, of expertise and of trying to be heard. I want to let you know that right now, today, you are being heard, and I thank you very much for being here.

I'd like to direct my question to Dr. Breeck.

I know you are a veteran. You are a woman and you are a physician, and you're in a unique position to look at what are the needs and the gaps in terms of women's health, both in the Canadian Armed Forces and certainly after. Many of these things may not present until after, when the women are veterans.

This committee will be coming up with recommendations. If there are particular things or particular gaps that you really feel we need to work on, what would those be?

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

Thank you. Again, it's an easy question.

Before I forget, because I want to make sure it's here somewhere, I want to acknowledge that veterans can also be RCMP members. RCMP women have been of great help and service to the military women, especially on the sexual misconduct claims. We learned a lot from them and their claim. Of course, it is now more RCMP women than CAF women who are doing UN deployments, and they are having a number of different issues there as well.

I know that there's an RCMP women veterans council, which I'm certainly hoping is going to be on your witness list so you can hear some of their issues. We've learned from them, and I know they're hoping to learn from us. I just wanted to shout out and name RCMP women as well.

If I can focus, as I said in my testimony, there's no question that there are lots of problems. I don't want to make a hierarchy out of the problems, but at your level, the things we are having the hardest problems fixing from the bottom up are the things that don't exist already. That will be, by definition, the things that are not male, that are totally different, so service-related infertility.

With the permission of the person who again, hopefully will be a witness later in this study, I met a female veteran who in that moment had given up. She had tried as much as she could. She couldn't do it anymore and she was giving up. She had spent over four years trying to get a service-related infertility recognized, without understanding that it had never happened before. It was a precedent case. She didn't know that. Again, with the help of bringing it up to a political level.... She couldn't do it herself. It was bringing it to a political level and getting people like Lisa Campbell involved to look at it that got it approved.

We had the first service-related infertility case approved, only to then find that there was nothing there for benefits. We had to start over again from zero to figure out what would be the benefits. They are different worlds. Even though for four years she had been trying to get this through...no concurrent activity, no acknowledgement ahead of time, proactively, that this obviously could have happened. Finally, after two years of fighting, she got the benefits.

Especially for infertility issues, as every woman would know, these years matter. You can't go into getting help and support if you get too old. These years matter. She was told over and over again that this was not viewed as something that needed to be time-sensitive; this wasn't something with which she could go to the front of the line. We just squeaked it in.

One concern for all of us, though, is that we haven't seen any news of this anywhere. How does any other woman know that this happened? How do we know when these precedents happen? How do we know when new policies are in place? How do we know when there are new benefits? There is no mechanism for sharing that information, not only with the women veterans, but with health care providers, adjudicators, case managers.

People who knew this person went to their case manager, saying, “Hey, I think I might be this too.” Their case managers laughed at them and said there's no such thing and there's no way that it could be female service-related.

How do we get the information flowing? This comes up over and over again. When we find something of concern.... In this specific case it was with her specialist—I'm not saying this was the cause—who said it was the permethrin in her combats. Again, how do we pass that to CAF? If, God forbid, that is true, that's an ongoing issue. How do we prevent this? How do we stop this? How do we get the information upstream? We don't have a mechanism for any of this stuff.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you, Dr. Breeck.

You can take a good breath, and I'm going to ask Mrs. Cathay Wagantall to ask the next questions, for five minutes, please.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

All right. That's wonderful.

I'm so impressed and so grateful that we get to hear from you ladies tonight. I have to say that I'm a little frustrated, because I like things to happen and get done, and to hear that it's been 30 years.... We are at a significant crossroads at this point, so I have a question for the three of you, and I'm thinking especially for Dr. Eichler.

We know from testimony at our last meeting that an organization called the Survivor Perspectives Consulting Group is already working in the field of military sexual trauma, with men and women in the military, at that level where the choice is for a “permanent, independent external oversight mechanism”, informed by the voices of lived experiences. Is that something that you would see as absolutely vital? That's my first question, because I was so overwhelmed with excitement over that program.

Secondly, there's the research that we're hearing we do not have in Canada. If we start at the ground level, how long will that take? I am wondering if, for you, as researchers, you would be at the place where you would tell the government that in the United States they have robust research that they have worked on. Would we not be wise to inform the government with a recommendation that our researchers get that information and be able to review it, while at the same time survivors are sharing their life experiences and beginning to heal throughout the military?

Have they used all these various types of research? What have they found out? What can we use or draw on for our best practices, at least to a certain level, while we look at the gaps that are still here for women in Canada who serve in the military? What is the perspective on that?

Are we looking at starting at the ground level again, rather than taking advantage of what already exists with regard to women in the military? That's my question.

[Dr. Maya Eichler]

I can get us started.

We're definitely not starting from zero. It is absolutely crucial to draw on the existing international research, but it is also important to develop some Canadian-specific research. The institutional conditions are not exactly the same. The deployment cycles are not exactly the same. The medical care system isn't exactly the same. When veterans transition, of course, they have a different health care system in Canada. The research findings are not transferable one to one, but we should build on them.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

I'll interrupt very briefly and say that we should be able to build on them. On the infertility issue, if they've been dealing with that, that would be a research gold mine for us, I would think.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Go ahead, either one of you.

[Sayward Montague]

Maya's point about relatable research is very important. One thing I'll come back to is Canadian research and making sure that it is following SAGER and GBA+ guidelines and there's transparency and accountability reporting back on that. Government-funded research through VAC and through CAF should adhere to those principles. There should be, as Maya mentioned, a pan-Canadian plan for this that provides better coordination across departments but also lays a road map for what's necessary.

Thank you.

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

I'll quickly make two points.

I remember an indigenous elder at a policy conference, who said, “Everyone's doing really good here at making quilt pieces, but what I don't see is who the quiltmaker is.” I think that's what we keep finding over and over again. There are a lot of very good people doing the quilt pieces, but there's no coordination. There is duplication. There are areas that aren't being addressed.

When we do research right now, we consistently only get the women's research compared to the men, and yet by definition, again, anything that's women-specific will never come up in that format of women versus men. Women versus civilian women is still very rarely seen in our research, yet it's more interesting. However, for a lot of what we do in the military, there is no civilian equivalent. Again, a lot of this very military women-specific occupational research has to be ideally with the Five Eyes, with our allies, and working together on our numbers for things like military types of flying and submarines and things where there is no civilian equivalent. We have this opportunity in this relationship.

If it were a topic of political will and focus, we have enough women now across the other allies to come up with some real data of meaning for things that should be simple by now, such as reproductive issues in flying, or pregnancy in the military context, or being at sea and pregnant.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you.

Now we have five minutes for Mr. Wilson Miao.

Go ahead, please.

[Wilson Miao, Liberal, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, everyone, including the witnesses who are joining us today for this very important study.

I have to say, being brought up mostly by women, that I have full respect for them. There are a lot of things that women can do much better than men, I have to admit, and I think this makes no difference anywhere, including in our veterans.

I also want to acknowledge that I just learned of the passing of a long-term veteran in my constituency, Rene Orris, who passed away just last year, in her 98th year. Her birthday was on Christmas, and she passed away on December 26. It's really sad to know that we can't share her story of how she contributed and served our country in her air force years.

It's very important in the discussion we're having today in terms of how we recognize women serving for us, protecting our country and allowing Canadians across our nation to enjoy what we have today. We need to recognize that. It's sad to have that stigma of how people interpret a medal being worn by a woman veteran and who say something silly like, “Oh, was that your husband or your grandparent who served?” I think there is a lot more awareness that we need to create.

I'd like to ask the following question. It's really a simple question: How can we change this gender culture in the armed forces and in our veterans?

The question is for all of you. Thank you.

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

Maya, go ahead.

[Dr. Maya Eichler]

Okay. Thanks.

One of the ways your committee can change the culture is to become an agent of change yourselves and to become the voice that makes women veterans more visible. You're beginning to do this in this study, but I would really encourage you to also self-reflect on the ways in which this committee itself has in the past maybe also reproduced the male veteran norm and contributed to this culture problem and what that can mean moving forward. I would be really sad if this great study you're doing right now is just a one-off, and then it's a return to business as usual.

For me, that would be really positive for you to think about: how, moving forward, we're going to change the way we do things. You are a key agent in changing the culture, just as we heard about how NAFR became active, and as we see how the veterans ombud has taken an active role in talking about women veteran issues and how the Veterans Review and Appeal Board is starting to take action. I think each of these agents has a really important role to play. That would be my response.

Thank you.

[Wilson Miao, Liberal, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you.

Dr. Breeck, maybe you can chime in on this.

[Dr. Karen Breeck]

I think it's still important, although we've all kind of grown up with the binaries of male and female, to again remember that there's actually more variation within the sexes than between the sexes—that there is no one woman and there is no one man. There's a wide spectrum.

When we start thinking about the spectrum, for me, then, it's how we include all the spectrum. I'm again focusing on especially when we do the women-specific health issues. That's on the spectrum; it's on that three standard deviations. We haven't looked at it. It's not easy to fix. Don't get me wrong. It's not easy to fix: That's part of why it's still here. It is hard and complicated.

The rest of the stuff is kind of self-resolving, but we know representation matters. We know that the more people can see themselves at the higher levels—whether it's racialized, indigenous, women at different levels—then we're inspiring the next generation up. Representation also matters within public service and within VAC—having more women veterans in things like commemoration at VAC. I think that having that kind of change in the face of commemoration would have some natural addition of how to better represent women through these different areas.

In the end, it's about participation as well and allowing the veterans a voice—giving us a way to speak and to be part of this. We want to fix things, but we need a way to speak.

[Wilson Miao, Liberal, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Montague, would you like to add something?

[Sayward Montague]

In addition to what Dr. Eichler and Dr. Breeck have mentioned, I think it's about continuing to identify some of the problems that the CMP and others have started to work on, that Justice Arbour's report revealed and that some of those additional studies have shown. Again, I come back to the pan-Canadian plan around this issue, around the research, but also around how it translates, in terms of reporting and transparency, into better coordination across departments and funding.

Thank you.

[Wilson Miao, Liberal, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you.