National Defence committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Mr. Chair, deputy chairs, hon. members and members of the committee, thank you. I'm delighted to be here with you. It is my pleasure to be here today to testify. I am really delighted by the topic. Before I go any further, I just want to state that,

National Defence committee  Yes, thank you for your question. There are 11% women in NATO's armed forces, but when you look at the deployed women, it's down to 6%.

National Defence committee  Six, yes; I think there is a challenge there in terms of not only understanding that gap between the number of women who are in the national armed forces and then how many are deployed on—

National Defence committee  The numbers I've received from Canada conflict right now. I've reached out to a third source to have that number confirmed.

National Defence committee  It was hovering around 15%, which would be quite high.

National Defence committee  I think one of the main cultural challenges is that not all 29 member states have the same definition of what gender means, or how it might be relevant to their work. I think that a second challenge is related to the fact that some officials view gender as the specialized purvie

National Defence committee  Absolutely. One of the key efforts that we see in Russia's information operations is to undermine the public support for the presence of Canadian Armed Forces in Latvia, and I suppose of the entire multinational battalion. It's doing so by basically trying to undermine the cred

National Defence committee  What I'm going to say is going to sound like we're going to compete with the Nordic countries a bit in this case, and that's true. Right now, for training our own gender advisers, we send them on a course in Sweden. Sweden is a partner with NATO, not an ally, but it has a bit of

National Defence committee  It starts at the very beginning. We have to look at the cadets, for instance. There is a curriculum review that's under way right now. I believe it's led by military personnel generation. The idea is to look at the entire curriculum and to see it in terms of the education piece a

National Defence committee  Yes, and I think he has said that, and now the gap is to make sure that gender adviser capacity is bolstered. Right now you have some gender advisers in some missions. You have some gender advisers in CJOC and CANSOFCOM and strategic joint staff, but you need a whole lot more if

National Defence committee  Right now, as far as I can tell, there has been the creation of new positions—not necessarily a reallocation of funding in terms of training, but just a request to emphasize the gender piece in existing training programs, which don't necessarily have budgetary implications. In my

National Defence committee  Thank you for your question. With regard to deterrence, there has been a fairly interesting evolution since the end of the Cold War. After it ended, we saw NATO try to focus on other pillars, such as crisis management and security cooperation. The deterrence and collective defen

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question, because this is a message that I want to highlight. We don't necessarily have to emulate what the Nordic countries have done. I think it's okay to have a Canadian approach to how to do this gender mainstreaming strategy. I think the gender-based anal

National Defence committee  Some of the deeply held gender biases that we have and we harbour can lead to faulty operational planning sometimes, or incomplete policies. I think we only need to look at missions of the past to see that those are lessons we tended to learn the hard way. Bringing this forward

National Defence committee  That's an excellent question, and I think both of your proposed answers are correct. I know that NATO allies look to Canada for leadership on this. I used to think that this expectation was not necessarily deserved, earlier on, but since the reforms that have been undertaken in r