Louise Siew, Veteran
Photo Credit: Perley Health Board of Directors
Esprit de Corps Magazine November 2023 // Volume 30 Issue 10
Let's Talk About Women in the Military – Column 56
By Military Woman
Question:
What has been happening on the “Experience of Women Veterans” study?
Answer:
In this continuing series, we share with you some of the highlights of the testimony from the first ever Parliamentary study on women Veterans, sponsored by the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs (ACVA).
The study’s twelfth meeting was held on June 12, 2023. This meeting focused on long-term disability insurance programs and Veterans Affairs Canada’s (VAC)
Entitlement Eligibility Guidelines (EEG) and Table of Disabilities (TOD).
The study’s thirteenth and last meeting before Parliament’s summer break was held on June 15, 2023. This was a powerhouse meeting. There were many “drop mike” moments and important calls for change made by Carly Arkell, Lisa Cyr, Lisa Nilsson, Nadine Schultz-Nielsen, and Louise Siew. Please consider watching this meeting’s video recording or reading its online transcript.
Louise Siew spoke about the power of government reports to act as important catalysts for change. She gave the historical example of the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada Report. Before that Report, most military women were released at the rank of private after an average of 18 months of service. As a result of that Report, married women were finally allowed to enroll, to serve after having children and to qualify for military career pensions.
By the mid 1970s, military women’s presence was often experienced in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) as “begrudgingly tolerated.” Workplace conditions at that time were often ripe for abuse — physical, mental, and sexual. Military women courageous enough to speak up were often dismissed, mistreated, humiliated, silenced, and even hurt. This period in military women’s history is often referred to as “gender assimilation” but in retrospect, “otherism” might be the more accurate descriptor.
While significant equity and inclusion progress has been made in the CAF over the last 50 years, more still needs to be done.
Witnesses called on the ACVA to use their upcoming study report to hold the CAF more accountable to document the many types of injuries and illnesses specific to women. Ideally, CAF would “step up” and better medically document the wide variations in conditions of service by decades and deployments. Each decade experiencing different levels of evidence-based military women specific research, policies, equipment, programs, training, benefits, supports, and care. CAF still needs more foundational level research and documentation on the impact of occupational and environmental exposures, including reproductive hazards, on military women’s long term health and wellbeing.
All this type of military specific background information about military women's historic occupational exposures must then be knowledge transferred to VAC.
This type of military specific information is a pre-requisite requirement for VAC to fairly and equitably adjudicate women Veterans claims.
It is no longer acceptable for VAC to deny women Veterans claims simply because their illness and injury patterns are different from the male-assumed and established EEG and TOD standards.
Therefore, until such time that CAF has collected and shared military women specific hazard research information with VAC – military women’s hazard exposure related VAC claims should be presumptively approved. Military women should not be left alone to fight these systemic bias battles with VAC to individually have to prove their service-related hazard exposure injuries and illnesses.
Although many things are the same between the biological sexes, many military hazard exposures will affect women’s health differently from men’s. Women Veterans shouldn’t have the burden to both experience these health challenges personally and then also be expected by VAC to find their own research to prove to VAC what their lived reality in the military was.
The employer, government, needs to step up, be accountable to support military women – especially those of this first generation of operationally active “career” service women.
Military women hope this “Experience of Women Veterans” ACVA study report to become the same agent of change of this generation that the Royal Commission was in the 1970s.
We have to do better. We must do better.
