Marie-Ève Doucet, Veteran
Photo Credit: LinkedIn
Esprit de Corps Magazine February 2024 // Volume 31 Issue 1
Let's Talk About Women in the Military – Column 59
By Military Woman
Question:
What else has been happening at the “Experience of Women Veterans” study?
Answer:
The seventeenth meeting of this Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs (ACVA) study was held on November 7, 2023. Serving RCMP, including the Commanding Officers of B Division, Jennifer Ebert, and J Division, DeAnna Hill, reinforced the positive impacts made by applying gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) to federally funded projects. For example, GBA Plus helped during the recent RCMP pistol modernization project to identify the benefits of offering more pistol grip options for those with smaller hand sizes.
The study’s eighteenth meeting, held on November 9, 2023, included particularly poignant and personal accounts from two former Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members.
Marie-Ève Doucet, worked on and around the CF-18 Hornet Jet for over twenty years – first as an Aviation Systems Technician and then as a Non Destructive Testing Technician. She outlined to the committee her extensive exposure to radiation and multiple carcinogens, including ultrafine air particles. Diagnosed with a pineal gland brain cancer in her late thirties, which has since spread into her spinal cord, she was dismayed at the swiftness with which Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) denied her disability benefit claim. In the denial, VAC cited the lack of available research to prove a service relationship to her rare medical condition.
She notes that not only is there scant workplace hazard surveillance documentation in her military records but what government research studies that are available, are largely male only studies. This ongoing bias in government research actively discriminates against military women, especially for health conditions where women may present with different symptoms and disease patterns then found in men.
Compounding her concerns, is VAC's apparent expectation that it is the impacted Veteran themselves that should be held responsible for the lack of military specific research available to support Veterans’ disability claims. Why would it not be the Government of Canada, their employer, with the responsibility to ensure and prove workplace safety? This apparent catch-22, no win possible, situation feels like an institutional betrayal.
She therefore hopes that ACVA supports her recommendation for presumptive VAC claim approvals for all military women with known occupational hazard exposures and potentially related health conditions at least until the formal establishment and implementation of a CAF-VAC military women’s research plan. Such a longitudinal surveillance research plan must also include the review of female-sex specific reproductive workplace hazards and their potential for epigenetic and other health related impacts on military women’s offspring.
Jennifer Smith testified to truly horrendous experiences on naval bases and at sea during the early days of CAF gender integration. She explained how her military experiences continue to negatively impact her today in all domains of her wellbeing – physically, mentally, socially, housing security, employment, financially and sense of life purpose.
She provided specific examples of ongoing unmet needs from VAC to address her specific situation. She underscored that many of her challenges with VAC seem to be specifically because of her status as a woman, who is single, and with largely invisible injuries. Despite marital and family status being a mandated Canadian Human Rights Act equity consideration for all VAC benefits, programs, services, and research – the many inequities that result from VAC’s ongoing privileging and prioritizing of supports for married Veterans over single Veterans remains stark.
Smith called on VAC to modernize its disability benefit adjudication process, benefits, programs and services, and case manager training to better support women's health issues and needs. She would also like to see VAC accept, without questioning, civilian health care practitioner’s recommendations and prescriptions. Lastly, she calls on more investments in women Veteran specific research and for VAC to stop its unstated assumption that all Veterans will have a co-located, caregiving capable, spouse in place to provide the injured/ill Veteran with their first line of supports.
VAC clearly has room for improvements, especially to better address the unique challenges faced by women Veterans. Hopefully this ACVA study’s final report, due out in early 2024, will provide the Minister of Veterans Affairs with a roadmap of how to rapidly evolve her department into a more fair and inclusive experience better able to meet the needs of ALL injured and ill Veterans, women included.
