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.