I don't see a huge difference. Both of those departments have been part of the same gender-blind institutional culture, so a lot of the culture we see at CAF, at DND, translated into that at Veterans Affairs.
If we look back historically a bit further, for so much of Canadian history DND, CAF and VAC have thought of women as “lesser soldiers”. We saw this in the early days of the veterans support programs being set up, and even in the way the early architects of the programs were talking about it. Women were not seen as fully-fledged soldiers. Then, in the 1990s, the institutions decided to take a gender-blind approach, and we see that across DND, CAF and VAC. My great concern now, which I see and I want to make a point of here, is that the trend I'm seeing is that all of these institutions are beginning to look at women and recognize women, but there's also this trend to lump together everyone who is not a white heterosexual male service member or veteran. We have a new problem emerging, in that everyone who differs from that norm is lumped together, and that's going to cause huge problems in the future as well.
I see this new trend across institutions, so what we really need is a sex- and gender-informed approach that does look at intersectionality—for example, the experiences of diverse women or how an indigenous woman in the military experiences service differently from how a white woman does—but does not lump everyone together.