National Defence committee  Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to join you today. My name is Dr. Denise Preston. I'm a forensic and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience dealing with harmful and criminal behaviour. I've been the executive d

Status of Women committee  It is true that Madame Deschamps' report had 10 recommendations, but many of them revolved around the responsibilities assigned to this independent centre. When the department set up the response to her report, it established the strategic response team on the CAF side of the hou

Status of Women committee  Do you mean all together, or on the counselling team?

Status of Women committee  All together there are 26 public servants.

Status of Women committee  No, the 48 are the people who work in Mr. Gauthier's program.

Status of Women committee  It means that we will ensure.... As we're decentralizing this service, we will be establishing centres. We haven't made the decision yet as to whether they'll be located at bases or wings, whether they'll be in regional centres or whether they'll be even perhaps co-located with t

Status of Women committee  First of all, I want to thank you for acknowledging that you're hearing positive things from us. We certainly feel that there has been a lot of work done in the last three years. We have a lot of things on the table that are under development that I think are going to significant

Status of Women committee  You are right that, to date, what we've been delivering is a 24-7 call centre for people, essentially. However, where we're moving with this case management system is that it's going to be a decentralized function, so we will have people represented across the country and there w

Status of Women committee  I would just add a couple of things. Part of the role of SMRC is to essentially represent a victim's interests, a victim's issues or that perspective on things. We do that in a couple of ways. One—as I mentioned earlier—is that all of my staff have expertise working with victi

Status of Women committee  I can't speak to whether or not it's feasible, or whether CAF can or will implement it, but it is certainly one of the recommendations we made when we provided essentially a briefing note to the CAF on all of the things that ought to be considered in drafting the new policy on se

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak today as part of your study of the treatment of women within the Department of National Defence. I am pleased to be here to give you an update on the evolution of the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre, as well as a snaps

National Defence committee  Do you mean victims of sexual misconduct? No, we're the only 1-800 confidential support centre.

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  I don't believe they did that. If they did, they didn't tell us that they did. They asked us extensive questions and looked at our standard operating procedures in terms of how we handle calls, but that is a fundamental premise of our service, that our services are confidential a

National Defence committee  It's absolutely not required, and we certainly understand why people would not want to provide that information.