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Member of Parliament

Shelby Kramp-Neuman

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Hastings—Lennox and Addington
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 63%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $172,681.17

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 339 - Sep/19/24
Mrs. Shelby Kramp-Neuman (Hastings—Lennox and Addington, CPC)
  • Sep/19/24 5:31:58 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-66 
Madam Speaker, in my previous role, I had the great privilege of sitting on the national defence committee, and I dealt with a great many issues related to our Canadian Armed Forces, from housing to procurement, access to medical care and supports, recruitment retention and closing the commitment capability gap. I was honoured to get a near first-hand account of many of the issues the DND and the CAF were facing every single day. While these are all incredibly important issues, they desperately need the immediate and full attention of the government. There was one in particular that stuck with me, an issue that my colleague on the status of women committee has seen and studied far too often: violence against women. In this session alone, the committee has studied violence against indigenous women in the context of resource development and inter-partner violence, and we are currently in the middle of a study on coercive behaviour. In fact, in the last Parliament, I studied the very issue that led to today's legislation, which is sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces. Having sat on these two committees at length, so far the intersection of national defence and violence against women is an issue that I, along with my colleagues, am acutely aware of and uniquely positioned to speak to. Sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces is particularly close to my heart, as I have the honour of representing the brave woman who first brought the issue into the public sphere 26 long years ago by appearing on the front cover of Maclean's magazine. Dawn McIlmoyle appeared with the words “Rape in the military” emblazoned on the front page beside her photo. I honestly believe that the discourse we are having at several committees at the highest level in the Canadian political process would not be happening today if it were not for individuals such as Dawn, as well as the litany of other survivors who have courageously chosen to come forward with their stories. To each and every single one of them, I am so sorry that their government has failed them time and time again, but now we thank them for bravely sharing their experiences with us. We as legislators need to hear it. We as legislators need to act on it. There is so much we need to do. While Bill C-66 is a start that I look forward to perhaps studying in that committee, if they will have me, it is a very limited start, and there is a Herculean amount of legislative and cultural changes in the CAF, particularly in leadership, that need to happen to properly address this crisis. On this last point, I want to make something very clear. It will take years to change this culture. I have had the pleasure of speaking with General Eyre on many occasions, as well as many other members of the CAF, from flag officers to privates, and I have received nothing but the utmost assurances that they are taking the issue very seriously. I have never doubted any of them for a second, but all of us sitting in this room are not fools. They are not going to allow a CAF member who could be a liability to the matter to speak to someone sitting on the national defence committee. This is why the entire public relations branch exists. I trust the new chief of the defence staff, General Carignan, will take this matter extremely seriously. It is up to us to ensure that she and her team, as well as the Department of National Defence, have the tools at their disposal to get the job done. I would like to highlight exactly what I mean when I say Bill C-66 is limited in scope. I think the best way to do this is to read into the record the testimony that someone far more knowledgeable on this matter than I had to say on April 17 of this year at the national defence committee. On that day, Patrick White, a witness who came forward to committee, shared his own sexual harassment story within the CAF as it related to access to information, a key point of contention in properly addressing misconduct in the armed forces. He spoke of the grievance process, the very method through which this entire process starts. It is massively flawed. One of his many salient points is as follows: The grievance system, as it stands, requires individuals like me and others to spend our limited part-time, our free time, to fight a system that is paid and employed full-time to fight back. That's the challenge I have. I am not an expert on military regulation, military law, etc., but they have access to all of those resources. They also have access to legal advice on those issues. Members don't. What annoys me more than anything is when senior members who have never been affected in the way some of us have flippantly say, “If you don't like it, grieve it,” knowing full well that they've never had to go through those processes, or maybe they did in a minor way and had success. Unfortunately, Bill C-66 would not amend the grievance section of the National Defence Act in any way, shape or form. It addresses a very specific element of a crisis that is caked in generations of institutional rot, flippant indifference and outright arrogance in the Canadian Armed Forces, National Defence and Parliament. In that same committee meeting was Gary Walbourne, a former national defence ombudsman. He actually had to go to war with the government, so to speak, to get the information he needed to do his job. He said this: We're talking about people who have been put in positions of authority. There are guidelines on what they're supposed to do. They're well written.... However, it is funny that the farther you get up the ladder, the thinner the air gets—I'm sure that's what happens—and the blood rushes to their heads or their egos. We have a system in place.... It's circumvented by people in the system. How do we change the culture? I'll go back to this again: We have to start rewarding proper behaviour and punishing bad behaviour. Why do we promote people when they do the wrong thing? Others come forward and offer themselves up, saying, “Listen, guys, this is what's going wrong. Can we get a little help here?” These people are turned on. You absolutely have a fundamental flaw here, but it's not with your policies. Your policies need updating, sure they do, and you need to adjust a few, add a few things to them and bring in a few more nuances and codicils there, but what we have to get at is the behaviour of the people currently sitting in the seats. Mr. Walbourne is extremely clear: We do not have a policy problem; we have a people problem. We cannot fix our policy problem if we do not fix the people problem. Any framework set up by any legislation will just fall victim to the same institutional cancer. Every single policy framework in DND and CAF related to justice for victims and survivors has fallen victim to it since women first entered our armed forces, and, quite frankly, this cancer festered for decades beforehand. Again, to quote committee witness Patrick White: If I could leave the committee with one final point to think about, it's that if you really want to get to culture change and solve these issues, you need to look at every single aspect of the system and understand how it feeds back in. That includes the honours and recognition system, the promotion system, the grievance system and the military police system—all of it—but with a central view of what the effect would be on these sorts of things that we get to. Correcting the colossal problem starts with us. It comes through our willingness to, first, actually address the change and, second, strengthen, entrench and enforce legislation and policy that holds public officials accountable, including people in the Canadian Armed Forces, public servants and us, as legislators. While Bill C-66 does address some very specific issues in the CAF, there is still no single 35-page bill that will solve a crisis that was 50 years in the making. Bill C-66 needs to be the first of a suite of legislation brought forward in this place to fix this crisis in the CAF, and it needs to continue past the Liberal government, whenever that may be, into the next, whatever it may be. It also needs continued support from all parties involved. Without that willingness to move forward, men, women and marginalized Canadians will continue to be victimized, not only in our armed forces but also in our public service and society at large. I would like to end by addressing the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces, both current and former. To those who are victims, to those who are survivors, we have failed them. We know we have, but change is coming because of what they have told us. The vast majority of armed forces members recognize there is a problem, but they feel helpless because of a broken system that punishes speaking out or drawing attention to inappropriate behaviour. To them, I say to stay strong. I am not here to admonish them. Finally, to those who are a part of this problem, they are complicit. This goes for everyone from the new recruit right up to the flag officer, those who think they are entitled to another person's agency because “that is just how it goes here” and those who continuously look away because they believe the individual is a really good guy. If what I have said today upsets them, good. I want them to be upset. I want them to lie awake every night and worry that the system that has enabled and protected their behaviour for generations will collapse and expose them for what they are. They have no place in the Canadian Armed Forces, and they never have.
1736 words
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