Status of Women committee  I was going to defer to the behavioural scientist because, as a historian, it sounds like current affairs to me. The metaphor I would use is, if you have a malaria outbreak, it's fine to treat the victims of malaria, but until you drain the swamp and clear away the mosquitoes,

Status of Women committee  I'm going to speak as a historian. We deal with the past. I'm not very good at the present, so you might want to ask my students in 20 years when all the documents are available. One of the methodologies of historians is to deal with the complete record. Unfortunately, what we o

Status of Women committee  Again, I'm a historian, and as a historian we just don't have enough information on that. Again, you might want to talk to a political scientist. For me that's current affairs, and I don't do current affairs. I'm sorry.

Status of Women committee  That's one that I'm not expert on, but let me just say that this is not a problem unique to the armed forces. There have been many examples in the news of other organizations where people are bullied, harassed and prevented from coming forward. I think the key in this is to have

Status of Women committee  We have to remember that everyone in the military culture is influenced by this informal culture, including the military police officers, military judges, prosectors, everyone. There's so much discretion in the system, in the rules and regulations, commanding officers' discretion

Status of Women committee  They may be outside of the command structure, but they're not outside of the culture. They live and breathe in that culture, and they get ahead or don't get ahead in that culture. That is more influential than any formal wiring diagrams or chains of command.

Status of Women committee  I can start with the formal and informal. I'm not an expert on political leaders, so you might want to talk to political scientists about that. I'm just going to speak about the military. In the military, there's also formal and informal leadership, and a lot of the attributes t

Status of Women committee  That's a tricky one. I think I'll speak more to culture change. I think certainly one of the key ways to deal with culture change is to change the demographic. That's the idea of bringing the number of women up to 25% and to change leadership. It's a long process, and the armed

Status of Women committee  I based most of my comments on that on the 2016 Auditor General's report on recruiting and retention. That's the one to look at, I think, because it goes into great detail on all of the things that are broken with the Canadian Forces' recruiting and retention system. It also sa

Status of Women committee  I'll try to be brief. We could run a two-hour seminar on that. Basically, culture tells people how things should be done. There's a formal culture: the rules, regulations and whatnot, and there's an informal culture. Someone said culture eats policy every time. It's the informa

Status of Women committee  Very quickly, we have become most closely attached to the American military culture, which American researchers have found to be even more toxic than the Canadian military culture. It actually encourages and enables sexual assaults within the U.S. military, so they're not a very

Status of Women committee  Thanks for that. I'm a history prof. I'm used to open questions. Operation Minerva was part of a group of responses to what Maclean's characterized as the rape crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces in the nineties, and it was also part of the gender integration of the Canadian For

Status of Women committee  My understanding of this was simply that the minister delegated that responsibility to the chief of the defence staff. The chief of the defence staff, in Operation Honour, on August 15, 2015, directed that the vice-chief of the defence staff write a strategy for Operation Honour

Status of Women committee  Thanks. I'm glad to be here as a historian. I'll let Professor Okros speak for himself, but he's not a historian.

Status of Women committee  At any rate, that's okay. Basically, I think the main failure of Operation Honour was simply.... Justice Deschamps' primary recommendation was that the cause of most of the bad behaviour was the culture of the CAF, this toxic, highly sexualized culture, and she called for “compr