Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me and for undertaking this historic study that puts women veterans front and centre.
I am joining you today from the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq, where I work at Mount Saint Vincent University. I speak to you as a researcher who focuses on the experiences of Canadian Armed Forces servicewomen and women veterans. I conduct qualitative social sciences research based primarily on interviews with veterans.
I want to state up front that I do not believe that you can or should look at the experiences of women veterans without consideration of the experiences of still-serving military women. This false bifurcation of women's lived experience is reflected in the institutional separation between the Department of National Defence on the one hand and Veterans Affairs Canada on the other. This institutional separation leads to less than ideal research, policy, programming and services, and so I want to urge you today to think of women's experiences across departmental lines of separation.
Over the past few years, research interest in women veterans has emerged in Canada. I will not repeat emerging research findings that other witnesses have already shared. Instead, I want to offer you a big-picture view of the state of research on women veterans in Canada and what I believe needs to change to better support women veterans and ensure equitable outcomes.
As our starting point, it is important to recognize that the military and veteran systems in place were historically designed for men, specifically Second World War veteran men. Even as more women were allowed to join the military over the decades, and especially after the lifting of the combat ban in 1989, DND, CAF and VAC did not proactively change the systems in place. However, women have bodies, experiences and needs that are distinct from men's. There is little to no support or research in place in Canada today to address women's sex- and gender-specific needs, but also, women have had to work within a system that potentially causes additional harm, injury and illness because it was built without them in mind.
While these historic biases are somewhat explicable, it is deplorable that there has never in Canada been the political will or considered effort to undo these historic biases in military and veteran systems and research. It is no exaggeration to say that research on military servicewomen and women veterans has been historically unsupported and undervalued in Canada. To a large extent, it still is today.
The much larger and more robust international research, primarily from the United States, points to sex- and gender-specific military occupational hazards and lifelong impacts on military and veteran women that remain largely unexplored in the Canadian context.
It is paramount that these gaps in knowledge be filled. This is necessary to ensure sex- and gender-informed harm prevention as well as sex- and gender-informed care for service-related injuries and illness during and after service and across the life span of military and veteran women.
Research on military and veteran women, as I've already noted, is currently experiencing an upswing in Canada; however, this new growth is unevenly developed and lacks strategic coordination and collaboration. What we see to date is that individual researchers inside and outside of government have taken the initiative to begin addressing research gaps, but I would argue that individual researchers can advance this research area only so far.
Various types of research on servicewomen and women veterans are needed that go beyond individual expertise. Clinical medical research, integrated health and social sciences research, longitudinal research, mixed-method research and more are needed.
There is an urgent need for a pan-Canadian research strategy; that is, an approach that is strategic, coordinated, collaborative, interdisciplinary, cross-departmental and cross-sectoral so that gaps in knowledge about the needs and experiences of servicewomen and women veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces can be effectively addressed.
Research matters, because it can tell us whether or not outcomes are equitable. From the emerging research that we have, we know that women are not experiencing equitable outcomes in the military workplace, in military and veteran care systems and in the transition from military to civilian life—