Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I am honorary Lieutenant-Colonel Sandra Perron, the founder and CEO of Pepper Pod, a healing centre for women veterans in the territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people in Chelsea, Quebec. I too am a veteran, having served my country for 19 years in the Canadian Armed Forces, first as a logistics officer and then in the infantry with the Royal 22e Régiment.
I am also the best-selling author of Out Standing in the Field, a memoir about my time in the service.
“Pepper potting” is a military manoeuvre designed to cover one's buddy as the fire team advances on the enemy. That's what we do at The Pepper Pod, a retreat centre for women veterans. We cover each other in the advances of our lives. More than 260 women veterans and soon-to-be veterans from across the country—from Comox to Halifax and everywhere in between—have now completed a retreat with our organization. This is made possible because of the incredible support we have received from VAC. We have a 99.8% satisfaction rate, and we currently have 189 women on a waiting list to do our retreats.
I would like to share four recurring themes we hear on our retreats without compromising the confidentiality of our participants.
First of all, there is exponentially more sexual abuse than you know about. On average, more than 50% of the women we graduate have been raped at some point in their life, some of them by fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles or partners. Often, as youths, they want to escape the family abuse, and the military is a great option for them to leave an abusive family. Then they suffer a similar fate, and fewer than 5% of the women we see at our lifeshops report it. The consequences of their reporting it are too high.
Now, it may be too early to tell, but in my opinion, outsourcing the criminal investigation and prosecution of sexual misconduct to civilian authorities is adding another layer of mistrust. This is a very complex issue, so I'll leave it for now.
I also hear that more and more women are saying they've had champions, that men go up to them during their careers to say, “I'm a safe space for you. If you ever need my help, you knock on my door.”
The second theme is women's bodies. How is it that I have had 33 cohorts sit around a table and consistently be surprised that some of the changes their bodies are going through, mostly because of menopause, are normal? Apart from the hot flashes and lack of sleep, women lack knowledge about their own bodies. These veteran women are being diagnosed with complex anxiety and panic disorders and PTSD when some of them—not all of them but some of them—are simply having very normal reactions to changes in hormones. As an organization that was built by men for men, we need to learn more about women's bodies so that our young, 25-year-old platoon commanders can be better leaders to the young mother who needs a fridge to store her breast milk or the perimenopausal warrant officer who isn't getting enough sleep.
The third theme is that some women are being physically and mentally abused by husbands with PTSD, and they are being told that their responsibility as spouses is to stick it out because their husbands served their country.
Finally, women in the CAF are still trying to do it all—to be mothers, employees, soldiers, sailors, aviators and caregivers. Every single father needs to take more than two weeks of parental leave. New legislation should be considered to have that parental leave be more flexible to allow that time to be broken up so they can navigate operations, deployments and exercises.
On March 27, The Pepper Pod invited the CDS, the VCDS and the top 20 leaders of the CAF to discuss what we've learned from the 260-plus women going through our programs. Every single one of them showed up. Commanders of the army, the air force and the navy; the chief military personnel; the Canadian Forces intelligence general; and all their chiefs engaged and committed to taking actions upstream so that the next generation of women won't have to endure some of the challenges faced by our generation.
I'll end with a final comment. We are, in French, “vétéranes”, and not “femmes vétérans” or “femmes vétéranes”. We are “anciennes combattantes”, and not “femmes anciens combattants” or “femmes anciennes combattantes”. It's the same as the female version for nurses, policemen or firemen, who are in French called “infirmières, policières, pompières”. The fact that we still don't know how to refer to ourselves in 2023 shows that we still have a long way to go.
Thank you very much for the important work you are doing.
Thank you for the important work you do.