Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
As mentioned, I'm Lieutenant-Commander Tesfamichael. It's been my privilege to serve my country as a naval reserve officer for the past 25 years and counting, on operations both here in Canada and overseas, and to have literally grown up in this institution, having joined at the age of 16. I've also worked for the Department of National Defence as a civilian policy adviser on gender equity and intersectional analysis, and more recently with the directorate for anti-racism implementation. I'm proud of my service with the Royal Canadian Navy and my personal contributions to the CAF over the last quarter century.
I appear before you to support this study as somebody who has served, led and advised on the experiences at hand. Over time, I've come to understand that my experience in the CAF is directly linked to my experience as a Black Canadian. Those two things don't sit separately. They've influenced how I've been seen, how I've been assessed and how I've moved through the system.
I would also like to acknowledge, up front, that I'm deeply proud of the service of all Black members of the Canadian Armed Forces, both past and present. I wish to do them justice by acknowledging here that Black service members are not a monolith, as I'm sure all of you well know. The CAF reflects a wide range of Black identities, cultures and lived experiences. As a result, the experiences of Black service members cannot be neatly summarized by a single narrative. They are diverse, sometimes divergent and shaped by multiple factors, including role, environment and individual circumstance. Recognizing that diversity, I feel, is essential if we are to accurately understand both the challenges and the progress.
That said, there are common forces and conditions that, to varying degrees, influence those experiences, namely systemic anti-Black racism, colonialism and white supremacy.
I'd like to start by framing the conversation a bit.
When we talk about the Black experience in the Canadian Armed Forces, we're not talking about just one story, as I mentioned. There are many Black communities represented in the CAF, with different cultures, backgrounds and paths to service. Some members are Canadian-born, some are newcomers, some serve full-time and some—like me—serve as reservists. There isn't just one experience, but that doesn't mean there aren't patterns. That's really where the institution needs to focus: not on a single story but on where outcomes start to line up in a way that deserves closer attention.
This brings me to terms that often get in the way of this conversation: “systemic racism” and its remedy, “anti-racism”. I'll be honest. This is where discussions can sometimes get stuck, because people hear these terms and think about individuals being called racist. That's not how we approach it. For me, systemic racism is about systems and how they behave over time, not individual actions or conduct. It's about whether the structures we rely on for hiring, promotions, discipline and health care benefits produce consistently equitable outcomes for everyone. If they don't, we need to understand why.
We've had some extremely important moments in recent years: the class action related to racism in the CAF, the apology for systemic racism by the chief of the defence staff and the Zellars report, among others. Those matter. They create space. If I can put it simply, though, we can't stay at that level of acknowledgement forever. The next step is considerably harder. It's now about looking at how systems work day-to-day and where they can be strengthened, not only at the individual level but also at an institutional one.
There's also a tendency to focus on outcomes, like representation and readiness. Both matter, but I would suggest that this is not where we start. We often talk about representation, for example, as something we achieve, but in my experience, representation works best when it's an indicator of other factors. If recruitment, development and promotion systems are working well, representation will improve as a result. If they're not working, representation will not improve, no matter how much attention we put on it.
The same idea applies to readiness. We talk about readiness a lot—and we should—but readiness is not the starting point. Again, in this context it is the result. It's what you get when systems are fair, when people trust them and when they hold up under pressure. Sometimes it's not dramatic. It can be as simple as who gets informal mentorship, who feels comfortable raising an issue early, or who has the documentation they need when it matters most later on, which is immediately relevant to the veterans conversation. Each of those things seems small on its own, but over time they add up. They are not one-offs. They are a product of a system that was not designed for all.
There's another concept that can help make sense of this.
