National Defence committee  I don't either. I received a categorical no. It was my dream and I asked to join for several years. I came first in a parachute jumping course, but I was told that women had no place in the Canadian Airborne Regiment.

National Defence committee  I think that the victim can choose to move at her own pace and decide whether she wants to report the incident or not. I understand that the organization absolutely wants to know about incidents in order to be able to react appropriately, but sometimes a report causes more damage than anything else.

National Defence committee  The intention is there. I have always believed that the Canadian Forces wanted to improve things and to see more women in positions of leadership. They know why there must be more women. However, the way they go about it is sometimes awkward and causes more harm than good.

National Defence committee  You can't order people to respect women. If they don't respect their female colleagues, giving orders is not going to change that.

National Defence committee  It is being talked about.

National Defence committee  There aren't many. Twenty-five years after I obtained my diploma, 0.7% of the members of the infantry, of which I was a part, are women. Progress is slow. Women are moving forward slowly, but there is progress.

National Defence committee  It depends on the women. Women are probably less familiar with combat arms. The army is used to seeing women in traditional occupations, for instance as nurses, clerks, dieticians or logistics experts. Occasionally, women are encouraged to join a combat unit. People in recruitment centres may have been told that they have to recruit women into combat units, but their beliefs mean that they are not very much inclined to encourage women to join combat units.

National Defence committee  There are several categories of answers in there that I would pursue. The first one is that we need to go upstream to prevent those things from happening. The way we do it is that, first of all, every single woman or DGM should have a mentor of her choice, whether a man or a woman.

National Defence committee  I would be prone to something in between, instead of a drastic overhaul or a tweak. I think it needs a lot more than a tweak. The second area of that is data. We need better data. Operation Honour is keeping very minimal data on the number of transgressions or complaints. We need to know by unit.

National Defence committee  What gets measured gets done. The caveat there is that units that don't have any complaints should be red-flagged, in my mind, and units that are getting a lot of complaints should be getting pats on the back and additional training and mentoring.

National Defence committee  Yes, it took me 25 years to find the courage to tell my story.

National Defence committee  First I want to say that at the time, I thought I was the problem. That is what many women think today. I thought I was causing the abuse, whether it was rape or other misconduct, rejection, or the way my colleagues treated me. I told myself I was new, that I was blazing a trail, that I was the first, and that because of that they did not understand, but that they would get used to me.

National Defence committee  These workshops are important. However, it's like learning to ride a bike. You can't gather a group of people in a room and tell them how to ride a bike. You have to learn on a bicycle. You have to make mistakes sometimes, fall and hurt yourself to realize that biking isn't that easy.

National Defence committee  We are asking leaders at every level, from sergeant up, to teach courses on diversity and harassment. They are in front of a class and they don't want to do it; they don't believe in it. They have never had problems with women themselves, so they ask why they should even be exploring the issue.

National Defence committee  The military is an old career. I won't say it's as old as some other careers, but men have been fighting wars for centuries and centuries. Women fighting alongside them have been doing so for only a few decades, so it's a culture that's going to be very long in the making, in evolving.