Status of Women committee  That's the process of trying to refer the member back to the chain of command, to get the member to take himself or herself through in speaking with the supervisor. There are some reference materials that the member is steered to. Rather than act as the neutral third party and broker discussions, they try to get the member to have that face-to-face discussion with the supervisor.

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, in the case of a Canadian Forces member filing a grievance where there is harassment involved, the grievance process would refer the member to use the formal harassment complaint process. Our grievance process is designed to cover off situations where there is no other policy directly applicable.

Status of Women committee  That would be up to the responsible officer to determine. When a situational assessment is done on the complaint to see if it meets the grounds to carry it forward as a complaint, certainly those aspects will come into consideration. Is it a valid complaint, or is it a retaliatory complaint “because you broke up with me” and that sort of thing?

Status of Women committee  Further to the training that I just mentioned, there was pre-deployment training that some of the staff got before going on deployment to Afghanistan. The comments that were received when troops returned from Afghanistan were that the supervisors who had taken the training were very grateful that they had received the training because, in their words, had they not had that level of training in dealing with their own personnel prior to departure, it would not have allowed them to have achieved their mission as successfully.

Status of Women committee  I'm not aware of any either, Madam Chair. We'd have to defer to the ombudsman, who isn't here today, if he has any history of anything that we're not aware of.

Status of Women committee  Yes, it has. Since its inception, it has become fairly widely used. I was just out in the Edmonton area speaking to the army chain of command out there about our integrated conflict management process that we're going through. The army chain of command has fairly well embraced it, to the point where they try to send about 25% of all deploying members on a dispute resolution course prior to deploying.

Status of Women committee  All I can do is echo that it's setting out the awareness so that every single member is aware of what the policy states, what is acceptable, and going through some examples of issues that may have come up or that could come up so that there is some sort of idea of what's reasonable, and what's not reasonable.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. In the ADR process, as we mentioned before, it's always the intent to try to resolve at the lowest level. When a member comes in to a dispute resolution centre and seeks these services, one of the first things that will be asked is whether the member has approached the chain of command with the issue.

Status of Women committee  In the annex we see that of 31 cases of sexual harassment, 11 have been deemed founded. That doesn't necessarily mean 20 are unfounded. They could either have been unfounded or withdrawn, or they might still be in process. We don't have the numbers for how many were judged to be unfounded.

Status of Women committee  The database indicates that our average for a founded complaint is about 90 days. The responsible officer has up to 180 days, and I think under new Treasury Board policy it's up to 12 months. We have cases that have been resolved in as little as one day and cases that have taken up to 51 months.

Status of Women committee  Once a complaint is lodged, similar to the new five-step process that was introduced by Treasury Board, we've had that same five-step process in place since our 2000 policy. The first step is to acknowledge the complaint. The second step is to conduct a situational awareness to see if it meets the grounds.

Status of Women committee  No, I think that pretty much covers it. We have five levels of leadership development training for non-commissioned members and another five levels for our officers. In every one of those levels, any officer or NCM who's promoted into that leadership level will go through a professional development training course that will include and re-emphasize those underlying beliefs.

Status of Women committee  Because we're in the midst of the diversity foresight study at the moment, those discussions will probably occur after the foresight study completes, which should be later this month or early December. Probably early in the new year we'll get to discussing the other related issues.

Status of Women committee  We are briefing Armed Forces Council next month in hopes to get the approval to stand up a small project team of full-time resources. At the moment, the process managers involved are working this as one of many issues we're dealing with. If we can stand up this small project team, we hope to be able to have something in place, including an information management portion, in about two years' time.

Status of Women committee  The preferred method for any complainant is to approach the supervisor and at that point hopefully engage in informal resolution. The formal process is always available, and we certainly don't try to steer them away from it. If a member does not feel comfortable approaching their supervisor for whatever reason, we have workplace relations advisers in some units, and harassment advisers.