Mr. Speaker, for a number of years, the member for Hull—Aylmer has worked with women within organizations in order to ensure pay equity.
With respect to the issue around recruitment, and again this is anecdotal, but I spoke to a former first nations police officer who said that he got out of the force after years because he just could not handle the discrimination that was happening. The issues around sexual harassment and the very high profile cases are a deterrent for women wanting to join the force. Therefore, it is a real problem with recruitment. We would like the RCMP force to reflect the makeup of Canada. The last time I looked, roughly 51% of Canadians were women, so we would presume that at some point the force would more accurately reflect the number of women who live in Canada.
We have a problem when there is a culture within an organization wherein these kinds of high profile discrimination cases cause women to ask themselves why they would put themselves out there. Why would they put themselves in that kind of a position where they would always have to struggle to be considered an equal member or to get their well-deserved promotions? If they dare to raise those issues, they could be sidelined or worse. We know that sometimes when people speak up, they are punished even more or they are ostracized by their fellow officers because they said something about what was going on.
Other people have talked about the legislation and regulations simply not being good enough. They are absolutely correct. We need to ensure there are human resource policies and practices in place that look at recruitment, training and education, retention and that examine the reasons for turnover. A good human resource practice is when officers quit the force before their retirement date, they should be interviewed to find out the real reasons why they left and they should be protected throughout that interview process. That would give the force a good overview of why people were quitting.
Therefore, comprehensive human resource planning and management practices would be critical to ensuring the force could recruit and retain women, visible minorities, first nations, Métis and Inuit.