Title: FLSQ - Garnet Families: Creating a research ecosystem centering defence and public safety families

Date: Monday, November 10, 2025

Description: In 2022, Dr. Cramm consolidated her research program under the interdisciplinary and international Families Matter Research Group (FMRG) (https://garnetfamilies.com/fmrg/). The concept of “Garnet families” has become a unifying framework for the group’s research, network and partnership activities.

Garnet families experience a unique combination of lifestyle factors — risks, identities, logistics and mobility — that interact dynamically throughout the life course. Most members of the FMRG team have personal connections to Garnet families, viewing their research as a form of service to that community. These connections deepen their commitment and provide insights that enrich the work.

Dr. Cramm serves as project director for the SSHRC-funded Garnet Families Partnership (2024–31), an international collaboration among Garnet families and those who study, serve and support them. Using a collective impact approach, the partnership aims to strengthen networks, expand knowledge and build capacity.

Speakers:

• Dr. Heidi Cramm - Professor in the School of Rehabilitation Queen’s University

Podcast: 

Transcript: 

00:00:00
Okay, so it's 101, a perfect time to start on November 10th.
00:00:07
So it's my distinct pleasure to welcome you all today for our last speaker in the Fall 2025 Visiting Speaker Series for the Feminist Legal Studies Queens.
00:00:18
As you know, I'm Vita Amani and I'm here, I will, to welcome Dr.
00:00:23
Heidi Kram momentarily, but I will begin with the land acknowledgement.
00:00:28
Queen's University is situated on the traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory, and it is important to spend a little bit of time always acknowledging the ancestral holders of this land and the significance of this land to the communities that predated colonization and the people whose practices and spiritualities continue to develop in relation to the territory and its other inhabitants.
00:00:58
The Kingston Indigenous community continues to reflect the area's Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee roots and the significant population of Metis community that are also here, as well as first prequels from across Turtle Island.
00:01:13
And it's important to do this as an act of towards the truth and reconciliation commitments that are being have been made and need to be lived out on a daily basis as praxis.
00:01:25
So I am
00:01:27
privileged to get to live, work, play, and mostly work and play on this land.
00:01:34
And so I'd like to begin by just acknowledging that.
00:01:37
I'd also like to acknowledge that this talk is really in a timely moment in terms of being the day before Remembrance Day, which is another opportunity of important reflection for us all.
00:01:48
So it's my distinct pleasure to welcome Dr.
00:01:50
Heidi Cram to provide this guest lecture for us.
00:01:55
in honor of that day as well.
00:01:57
So a little bit about Dr.
00:01:59
Cram.
00:02:00
She's a professor in the School of Rehabilitation dedicated to better understanding and addressing the mental health and well-being challenges faced by Garnet families.
00:02:07
That's military, veteran, first responder, and public safety families through research.
00:02:13
The title of the talk is From Silence to Systems Change, Collective Strategies.
00:02:17
Oh, sorry, that is wrong.
00:02:18
The title of the talk is Garnet Families, Creating A Research Ecosystem Centering Defense and Public Safety Families.
00:02:25
My apologies.
00:02:26
I got the pleasure of meeting Dr.
00:02:28
Cram through the working group on the Kaleidoscope Institute at Queen's University.
00:02:33
And through that, we established a very good relationship through which we came to be a bit familiar with each other's work.
00:02:39
Heidi is a phenomenal leader, a formidable researcher, academic colleague, a mover and shaker in actually shaping the ecosystem, research ecosystem for families.
00:02:52
So, Gornet Families has evolved as a unifying construct that anchors the research network.
00:02:56
and partnership activities of the group.
00:02:58
Garnet families experience a unique stacking of lifestyle dimensions, risks, identities, logistics, and mobility all at once in dynamic fashion across the life course.
00:03:09
The majority of the Families Matter research group team is personally connected to Garnet family, seeing the research as a form of service to the Garnet family community.
00:03:18
So she will tell you more about this in a moment.
00:03:21
Dr.
00:03:21
Cram is project director for the SHRC.
00:03:24
This is the Social Science Humanities Research Council.
00:03:26
funded Garnet Families Partnership.
00:03:28
It's A partnership that runs from 2024 to 2031.
00:03:33
It brings together people from across the world.
00:03:36
So it's an international convergence of effort with Garnet Families and those who study, serve and support them.
00:03:42
And through a collective impact approach, Garnet Families Partnership, the partnership will strengthen the partnership network, advance knowledge and build capacity.
00:03:50
Feminist Legal Studies Queen's is delighted to be one of the institutional partners and we've committed to helping disseminate some of that work through an annual speaker in the speaker series and ultimately eventually a conference we hope to provide and to celebrate the work and disseminate it for social impact.
00:04:09
Thanks very much.
00:04:10
Without further ado, thank you.
00:04:12
Thanks, Peter.
00:04:15
So yeah, I think for your speaker series, you probably don't always have people just coming in around the corner because we're just over on Barrier Street.
00:04:22
So that's kind of a nice thing for us.
00:04:25
I'm curious before I start, anyone here who's personally connected either through a parent, sibling, grandparent, step-parent to military, veteran, first responder, public safety populations?
00:04:39
Okay, we've got a couple of folks.
00:04:41
So I think that it helps if you have a sense of that already, but we're going to go with the idea that you haven't yet had the opportunity to think about it in these kinds of ways.
00:04:51
So to really kind of get your head around why do we care about families?
00:04:54
Why does it matter to me as a Canadian?
00:04:57
Where does this fit in terms of policy and legal reform?
00:05:01
How do we think about all of these different groups of people and how they interact with each other?
00:05:06
And no better time than
00:05:08
during this week, Veterans Week, when we're really engaging in that point of remembrance.
00:05:14
And when we think about remembrance, we also kind of think about points of reflection.
00:05:19
So these flowers, anybody recognize what these flowers are?
00:05:23
Anybody have a name for these ones?
00:05:27
These are the forget-me-nots.
00:05:29
So I'm a first-generation Canadian.
00:05:31
My parents were born in Newfoundland before Confederation.
00:05:34
So they were in a whole historical anomaly around fighting for the British Empire.
00:05:42
And there was a horrible, horrible battle as part of the Battle of the Somme, the same day, like that same week in July 1st in 2016, we celebrated the 100th year anniversary of the loss of Newfoundlanders.
00:05:58
And so we were kind of cannon fodder for the British as part of the colonies.
00:06:02
And so over 800 Newfoundlanders went over the ridge and fewer than 70 answered the call the next morning.
00:06:11
It was entire decimation of all the young men, all of the, there were 14 pairs of brothers who died on that day.
00:06:20
I just think of the scale of loss was so huge.
00:06:25
This is what started the spiral.
00:06:27
towards Newfoundland needing to join Canada in 1949.
00:06:34
So it's a whole other part of history.
00:06:36
Anybody here of the university called Memorial?
00:06:41
Ever wondered why it's called Memorial?
00:06:45
It is a living monument to those who served in war.
00:06:51
So Newfoundlanders are kind of shaped a little bit by their experience.
00:06:55
I didn't realize how much I was shaped by it until I kind of moved to Ontario and went, oh, okay.
00:07:00
So forget-me-nots are actually the remembrance flower from those early times of Newfoundland.
00:07:07
And so I have the privilege of having a pin today that was from the 2016 special issue from the Legion that has both the forget-me-nots and the poppy.
00:07:15
And so when I was growing up, my grandparents wore the black armband for the military commemoration day of July 1st.
00:07:23
Canada Day happened like after dark.
00:07:25
Daytime was commemoration.
00:07:28
And so when we think about, you know, the people who serve for our collective safety and security, that is really what we're here this week to really talk about more than at other times that we might not even think about.
00:07:42
So that's kind of what I bring to you in my own kind of positionality for the work and kind of what kind of started things off.
00:07:49
And certainly, as for many of you, the avenue into where you end up in this classroom is not a direct one.
00:07:58
I started at Memorial, I did English and I did Latin, and then I came here and did English.
00:08:03
And then I was like, yeah, I need to do something different.
00:08:06
And I started to do occupational therapy.
00:08:09
And then
00:08:10
I started working here in Kingston in child psychiatry 25 years ago.
00:08:15
And that's where I met Lisa Delaney at the back there.
00:08:18
And so Lisa and I worked as occupational therapists in a military community where we're like, what's happening for all these military kids?
00:08:26
Why do we see so many military kids?
00:08:28
I didn't have any of those answers.
00:08:30
When I ended up doing research training and then coming back and starting here at Queen's,
00:08:36
the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research was in my department.
00:08:40
And Alice Aiken, as the founder, said, you do mental health, you do families, why not make it about military families?
00:08:45
I'm like, I can get behind that.
00:08:47
I think that's really important.
00:08:49
And then not very long into the work, I started thinking, well, what about families like mine?
00:08:55
Because my husband's A firefighter.
00:08:56
What about families like police?
00:09:00
How does it all work?
00:09:01
How do we understand all those things?
00:09:02
So
00:09:04
Having the brain of a three-year-old helps as a researcher because it's like, why, That's kind of what happens A lot.
00:09:10
So there's a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity.
00:09:13
There's an endless supplies of whys and not enough answers.
00:09:16
And that's how we get ourselves into things like garnish.
00:09:19
So why not is kind of more where I go with it.
00:09:24
So I had the kind of clinical background to really kind of
00:09:30
ground the work.
00:09:31
And the other thing that occupational therapists do that people don't know that we do is community development.
00:09:37
So we do systems level change and we do it really well.
00:09:41
And so being able to do that and see the kind of work.
00:09:44
So Lisa and I did some of that in our private practice.
00:09:47
We did community development, clinical kind of hybrid.
00:09:49
So we're really circling towards this for decades without even knowing that it was coming.
00:09:56
I started here, did my PhD here, started on faculty in 2013.
00:10:04
And in 2022, we really convened together this kind of idea that families matter in their own right within these jobs.
00:10:13
Because when we look at occupations, we look at the people who work on the occupations.
00:10:16
That's kind of the policy frame.
00:10:18
But
00:10:20
we were thinking that maybe families are in the mix too.
00:10:22
Families are serving alongside and are quite shaped by these jobs and in turn shape them as well.
00:10:28
And that's evolved into this role within Garnet Families, which has really become a bigger, a bigger phenomenon.
00:10:36
So when we think about, you know, public safety or military, you know, who's the natural focus?
00:10:42
So I mean, you know why I'm here to talk to you about families.
00:10:45
So it's a bit of a giveaway.
00:10:48
But when we have
00:10:50
an occupational group and you're looking at things from an occupational perspective, you start to pull on, well, what drives me to look at people in certain kinds of occupations?
00:11:03
What are the drivers for doing that?
00:11:06
And so when we're thinking, and Bita introduced the term public safety.
00:11:12
So there is a federal Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness that I think is in the process of getting renamed, actually.
00:11:20
But there are 17 different public safety sectors.
00:11:24
Kingston is actually quite a geographic region for a lot of these things, like corrections.
00:11:32
border services, RCMP.
00:11:34
Yes, we have police, we have dispatch, we have fire, we have paramedic, but we have a lot of these other public safety sectors that aren't always as visible.
00:11:44
So when we start to think about things around equity, we also think about sizes of some of these things, because some of these sectors are actually quite small.
00:11:54
So it helps us expand also the view beyond first response, which are first on scene,
00:12:01
to all the folks who are supporting those roles and those jobs who also are shaped by the lifestyles that go along with these jobs.
00:12:12
So I wanted to kind of twig to you some of the things that drive us to focus on the personnel.
00:12:18
So, and if anybody has any immediate thoughts, I welcome them.
00:12:24
No, why do we look at the personnel and personnel first?
00:12:29
What are some of the things that help us focus on that?
00:12:36
Think policy, think law.
00:12:39
Yeah.
00:12:40
I mean, that's the root of where the interaction kind of stems from.
00:12:46
If they didn't have that interaction, they didn't cause that thing like the depression and anxiety, that it wouldn't be a subject matter in the 1st place.
00:12:56
For sure, there are exposures that go along with the job.
00:13:00
But when we focus, when we think about public safety personnel or military, we don't tend to think about families.
00:13:07
We tend to think about the people who are in the service roles first.
00:13:11
And there's really good reasons for that.
00:13:14
So what are some of those reasons?
00:13:20
Who do they have?
00:13:21
Yeah, go ahead.
00:13:22
More like existing research RV on it.
00:13:26
Yeah, I'm thinking policy and law.
00:13:28
Also, you're right.
00:13:29
There's way more research on the personnel because our eye goes towards the personnel themselves first.
00:13:36
Yeah.
00:13:38
Be on the lines and there's going to be different policy initiatives to like pretend about you.
00:13:43
So where are the protections for the people who are subjected to increased risk?
00:13:48
So the, yep, go ahead.
00:13:51
I think because families are seen as kind of secondary and not thought of in the sense that they're not actually there, so they're not being impacted in the same place.
00:13:59
They don't want to make policy or put money towards forming that kind of research.
00:14:04
So the families are secondary, they're maybe not thought of, they're not on the front line.
00:14:09
And then I also heard a decision about where resources go, which I think is something that you want to think about the whole way through the talk.
00:14:16
Yeah.
00:14:19
Somebody else?
00:14:23
Maybe it's, sorry, maybe it's easier to make policy if you have people that are actually employed by, the government or whatever, other than a family that's just kind of a third party.
00:14:33
Yes.
00:14:34
So that employee-employer relationship is at the core of, you know, where are their responsibilities?
00:14:42
Where are their rights and responsibilities within those domains?
00:14:45
So where do families fit?
00:14:48
We tend to see a very heavy bent towards neoliberalism when it comes to families, where it's a push not just towards like private responsibility in industry, but individual responsibility.
00:15:00
So it's behind closed doors.
00:15:02
That's things that are like family domain.
00:15:07
And family domain is often code for women's work also.
00:15:12
But the family domain absolutely is something that happens
00:15:17
in individual places, private, not subject to public scrutiny or public resourcing, because it's within individuals.
00:15:28
We also have this interesting phenomenon that we understand from our colleagues in family science called familialism, which is a way of thinking about what families actually do and what their capacities are.
00:15:43
So when you think about family policy, it tends to think,
00:15:47
or cast families in a light that they are loving, caring, and sources of infinite care.
00:15:56
Instrumental supports, endless.
00:15:59
That may be true for many families, but that is not true for all families.
00:16:04
So the bias, though, is there that kind of looks at families in a certain kind of way and has a certain set of assumptions about what families mean to the people.
00:16:16
But we also have a really strong traditional family representation historically around these kinds of families in these kinds of jobs.
00:16:27
There's this old adage that they use in the military, which is if the military wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.
00:16:37
So how do we deal with families in these occupational spaces?
00:16:42
Well, families
00:16:43
traditionally are seen as kind of a distraction, something that pulls you out of, you need to have your mind set if you're going to battle, to war, if you're defusing a bomb, you can't be thinking about what's going on at home.
00:16:58
So how do you manage all of those things?
00:17:00
Well, it used to be managed with you go to work and the woman is at home managing the home, the kids, all the family responsibilities.
00:17:11
So do you think the traditional family still kind of holds for most Canadians these days?
00:17:18
Yeah.
00:17:19
I would say that in a binary sense where, you know, outside is the public safety personnel and inside in the traditional sense would be the women to be served, everything else domestic.
00:17:36
I would say
00:17:38
actually that's where we're finding a lot of the issues too now.
00:17:42
Maybe the female is a main support at home and that's her role or she could also have her own career and profession and also on top of that maybe is a public safety personnel as well.
00:17:57
Absolutely.
00:17:58
So I think you had about 5 different answers and I agree with all of them.
00:18:01
So it really is looking at how the role of the traditional family
00:18:08
in supporting these operational tempos has diminished because a lot of folks with the general cost of living and things like, women have rights and jobs and careers and all of those bits, that there's now, if you have two people in a family who are adult, they're working.
00:18:36
generally speaking.
00:18:37
So this introduces all kinds of new logistical challenges for how a family is going to balance the now competing careers or jobs within the home that weren't there when the traditional family was in play.
00:18:53
The traditional family actually made things much smoother for these jobs.
00:18:57
So you got a posting notice, you got to move, okay, let's get ready.
00:19:01
And that's how it went.
00:19:04
In the fire service, which is still predominantly men in service, we still have 93% of career firefighters are still men.
00:19:16
The fire service has a very odd shift schedule.
00:19:19
So it worked really well to not have to worry about when you are home and when you're not.
00:19:23
When you're home, it's great.
00:19:25
Value add.
00:19:26
But there can't be a reliance on you being home because we can't rely on you being home because of your job.
00:19:33
So these things really have played out in an increasingly problematic way over time.
00:19:41
And we certainly talked about the occupational health legislation around the focus on employer employee responsibility.
00:19:47
So where does the line get drawn in terms of what employees are responsible for, employers are responsible for in terms of their employees?
00:19:57
As you said, like if they're a third party or family's considered third parties in this kind of frame.
00:20:03
So what that means when we look at, a group of public safety personnel, we're going to see a bunch of what?
00:20:08
do we see here?
00:20:12
So, what are they?
00:20:14
What are the shapes?
00:20:16
Yeah?
00:20:16
A bird's looks like a duck, but also be a bunny on the ground.
00:20:24
Oh, wow.
00:20:24
Okay, so duck, duck, duck, duck.
00:20:27
Anybody see a bunny?
00:20:31
What if I change your orientation?
00:20:32
Do you see the bunny now?
00:20:35
Yeah.
00:20:36
So it depends on how you look at it.
00:20:38
So they're both there all the time.
00:20:39
So you have ducks, you have bunnies.
00:20:41
Like, is it a duck?
00:20:41
Is it a rabbit?
00:20:42
Which is it?
00:20:43
So if we only see the duck and we can't see the rabbit who's been there the whole time, it's really going to change.
00:20:52
what we bring from a policy perspective.
00:20:54
So there's certain kinds of families that are represented, even when they do make it into policy, there's only a certain kind of family that makes it in to policy.
00:21:04
So part of our goal is helping people actually see
00:21:09
the rabbit and not just the duck.
00:21:12
So that's part of what we've been trying to do.
00:21:14
So I think that, your false start on the title, that could have been us too, from silence to system change.
00:21:19
Is that what you said?
00:21:20
Yeah, sure, I can go with that.
00:21:22
We can call that.
00:21:24
also works.
00:21:25
And I think that trying to bring things that are hidden in plain sight, the family care economy is a big part of what helps these jobs work.
00:21:37
And we as Canadians,
00:21:39
looking to ensure and enjoy sustained safety and security need defense, public safety, first responder folks to really be well in their families.
00:21:54
So families.
00:21:55
So families mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
00:21:59
We talked about familialism.
00:22:02
Because everybody has this idea of like,
00:22:05
I come from a family of some sort, you have an idea about what families might be like or could be like.
00:22:11
But families really come from a lot of different places.
00:22:14
Like you have a family of origin, whatever that origin story was, however your childhood kind of looked, however you've now connected in and where you are on your kind of life course, on who's in your family.
00:22:28
Are they, you know, biological?
00:22:30
Are they there through marriage?
00:22:32
Are they there through choice?
00:22:34
How are you actually creating them?
00:22:37
And when we think about families, we need to keep in mind as well that families are not just collections of individuals.
00:22:45
They're actually complex systems.
00:22:47
So if something happens for a group of, for one person in the family, the rest is affected.
00:22:55
Think about something that it maybe is more common.
00:22:58
Think about someone in your close family or your more extended family who's had a terminal diagnosis that does not just affect the person with the terminal diagnosis.
00:23:10
It changes the priorities in the family.
00:23:14
You know, are we going to do that reunion this year?
00:23:16
Are we going to wait next year?
00:23:18
You know, who's there to support?
00:23:20
Are there people to support?
00:23:21
It changes the questions that we ask of ourselves and of our families and the systems.
00:23:26
If someone's doing poorly, even if you think about, going up through school, if you're really stressed and you had a, you got a cold and you had exams, how stressful that was and how it rippled out into the rest of your family.
00:23:39
Or if somebody wasn't able to drive you because they had a different,
00:23:44
set of expectations, how stressful that was for you.
00:23:47
It's very much multi-directional in family systems.
00:23:51
You know, here we've shown you some Gurnett families whose these are real Gurnett families in our network.
00:23:58
And what's nice is that Lisa was able to do this wonderful thing in developing the website where one of the things that we know about Gurnett families is that they're often not together for occasions because somebody's at work.
00:24:13
And so Lisa invited a bunch of Garnet families to come together for a photo shoot to help build our Families Network website.
00:24:25
And one of the nice things at the end was that they had the opportunity to have a professional family photo done as a thank you.
00:24:33
And for some of the families, it had been 15 years since someone had, they'd all been together to actually have that done.
00:24:40
And it just speaks to, you know,
00:24:42
the realness of what this is.
00:24:44
So this is what probably most Garnet families might look like.
00:24:50
We tend to see representation of Garnet families, and Dean and I were talking about this even from some of the conferences that we've been at together.
00:24:58
We don't always see equitable representation of different folks in these sectors yet, but I think there are also system changes at play that make it more
00:25:10
possible for folks to join in.
00:25:12
So one of the things that happened last year was at the provincial level is Ford and his government decided to waive the $17,000 Ontario Police College requirement that individuals had to come up with.
00:25:29
So you can imagine as a new generation Canadian coming up with $17,000 cash to fund your tenure
00:25:37
to be at a police college that you may not graduate from would be a fairly significant outlay and commitment from a family perspective.
00:25:46
So by changing that, it creates more equitable opportunities for different groups who historically may not have had the opportunity to participate.
00:25:55
So here what we see is the families, when we talk about families, we're talking about all kinds of families.
00:26:02
We're talking about families at different stages of their life course.
00:26:06
And we're talking about members of families who aren't traditionally in the policy frame.
00:26:10
So think of parents.
00:26:13
If you're joining one of these services at 21 or 25, odds are the most important family member, your next of kin, is probably going to be your parents.
00:26:27
It's probably not going to be your spouse and young children.
00:26:30
But the policy frame that we tend to see really looks at
00:26:35
young married couples with young children.
00:26:38
And that's what policy sees as families, and that's how programs then follow policy.
00:26:44
So if we really kind of challenge some of the policy representation, then you can start to see an impact on the nature and diversity of the programs that are developed.
00:26:56
Okay, so why do we, or should we, hear about families in these occupational spaces?
00:27:04
So we did a bit of work, some colleagues and I, a couple of years ago, we really wanted to look at, when we talk about PSP, we're talking about public safety personnel.
00:27:14
Why do organizations actually make the move to more family forward policy and programming?
00:27:23
So we took, okay, well, what other jobs have some of these kinds of dimensions?
00:27:30
And we found, okay, there's the expat community, say veterans, or people who are in business, living out of country, professional athletes, like people who have to move a lot, who have a hard time reconnecting to community.
00:27:46
The spouses may not be able to connect into an employment pathway because they're the trailing spouse.
00:27:52
The children are disrupted.
00:27:53
You know, what does this look like?
00:27:55
And in those jobs, a lot of the time it's talked about, it's a two-person career.
00:28:00
It takes two people to make those jobs work.
00:28:03
We don't think about that as much in military and first responder in Garnet families.
00:28:10
But what we did find in the jobs that really look at this, what they're looking at, the biggest reason is retention and recruitment.
00:28:19
So if the family is struggling with you participating in these kinds of non-standard hours with high risk, then the family may not tolerate you doing that job for long periods of time and may kind of pull you out of it.
00:28:36
In the 70s, Segal, a sociologist, talked about the greedy institution and that the military is a greedy green machine.
00:28:46
It wants all of you.
00:28:48
But the reality is, so does the family.
00:28:51
So you have these two societal institutions now competing for the same human.
00:28:58
And it feels like some sort of epic battle of tug of war where only one will win, or eventually one side wins.
00:29:05
So we imagine a way where maybe we can balance that score a little bit and get ahead of some of the things that are foreseeable, challenges and increasingly contemporary family representation.
00:29:19
So on Saturday, Stephanie Shapiro from Together We Stand, which is a charity that supports military families, had a lovely piece in the National Post that talks about, in lieu of this whole federal budget, has anybody been paying attention to the federal budget?
00:29:39
Does this come up in class at all, federal budget?
00:29:43
it like shapes our next number of years.
00:29:46
Like every time everyone's like, okay, all the policy people are like, what is going to be funded?
00:29:51
And how does that shape our direction?
00:29:55
And so we have 84 billion increase in defense spending over the next five years as there's a drive to kind of meet NATO expectations.
00:30:05
And whether or not some of that money is going to get diverted towards families, this is
00:30:10
part of what Stephanie is saying.
00:30:12
So she's noting historic challenges with recruitment and retention, and without the people, our ambitions will be lost.
00:30:19
Military families must be placed at the center of that renewal.
00:30:23
So I think, I encourage you, there's no paywall around this.
00:30:26
It's a really well-articulated piece.
00:30:29
It would take you like 2 minutes to read it, but to get your head around, okay, the timeliness of this.
00:30:37
When we think about the human infrastructure, it's not just about the tanks.
00:30:41
If you have no one to run the tanks, are we just relying on AI to do everything now?
00:30:47
You know, what does this look like in five years if people
00:30:50
are not going to be renewed in their families.
00:30:55
So a few years ago, we really had to give some serious thought as we tried to kind of chart our path towards, well, how do we make the case?
00:31:04
What does this look like?
00:31:06
How do we understand these families is to look at.
00:31:10
The Ombudsman report is where we kind of started from 2013, which had the parents of, sorry, the non-serving parents in military families really talking about their concern that their children were paying a price for their loved ones' military service.
00:31:29
And so they really identified that there's mobility, there's risk, and there's parental separation.
00:31:35
So in parental separation, what do we hear in what kind of family we're talking about?
00:31:41
When I even say parental separation.
00:31:46
Yeah.
00:31:48
Nope, we're talking about being apart from your parent.
00:31:54
Allies right from there.
00:31:55
Yes.
00:31:56
Yeah.
00:31:57
And that's why I bring that out because separation in civilian terms means something different.
00:32:02
Here it means you're going to spend a lot of time growing up in a family where your parent is not around.
00:32:07
because they are away for training or deployment, not just military conflict.
00:32:13
Some of these vocations are away six to nine months every year, just for the nature of doing their job.
00:32:20
So we needed to think about, okay, we had some funding coming in through COVID to focus on public safety families.
00:32:30
So we tried to make some lemons with our kind of,
00:32:34
Making lemons.
00:32:35
We're making lemonade out of lemons, not making the lemons themselves.
00:32:37
That's not what I meant to say.
00:32:40
But we looked at, are these things the same or are they different?
00:32:44
So how do we understand mobility separation and risk?
00:32:49
Are they the same?
00:32:50
And so what we found actually is that the more we pull them apart, so army was experiencing COVID differently from Navy, from Air Force, and then fire and paramedic, like everybody was experiencing a little bit differently, but yet there were core things.
00:33:04
that everyone was feeling the same kind of way.
00:33:09
So that's what we tried to look at is how they mapped on and what was the same and what was different.
00:33:14
And so we started to do this integrative synthesis.
00:33:17
So we took a lot of different reviews that we were working through.
00:33:21
There was so much information that we were bringing forward.
00:33:25
We use this approach called framework analysis, which is used very much in policy work, which comes with some a priori kind of criteria that we're looking at.
00:33:34
And then you're looking for where's the information that we understand and what is the new stuff.
00:33:38
So it gives you some inductive and deductive kinds of ability.
00:33:42
And we spent a lot of time with a big team trying to really factor iterative, collective understanding of what this framework was going to look like.
00:33:52
So this is familiarization, getting the thematic framework right, indexing.
00:33:57
So we spent a lot of time like figuring out how to reconcile different perspectives within our team and then charting.
00:34:07
So what were the categories?
00:34:08
What were the labels?
00:34:09
And boy, they're hard to name.
00:34:10
They're really hard to name.
00:34:12
And then mapping that out into, you know, what that means.
00:34:16
And so this was one of the readings that you had was the output of all of that.
00:34:22
We developed these vignettes that really helped us test, are we getting it right?
00:34:25
Are we getting it right?
00:34:27
And what we saw was that, yes, there's risk.
00:34:29
So everybody knows there's risk in these jobs.
00:34:30
You sign up for these jobs, you know that you can die.
00:34:33
These are jobs that there's a lot of elevated risk, some more than others.
00:34:39
But there's this complicated issue around identities and feeling like you belong or are separate from the communities in which you serve and are embedded.
00:34:48
And that really came out.
00:34:49
And then the grind, the logistics stuff, that came out in spades.
00:34:56
So the risk, there's physical and psycho-emotional risk and hazard.
00:35:01
They ripple out into the family.
00:35:02
So those kinds of pressures, the risk, the worry, people don't get to come home because they're at a, you know, they're at a fire and they can't make it back in time.
00:35:15
The social exposure,
00:35:16
real world media coverage.
00:35:19
that is, you can look at anywhere in the world and find out what's going on in real time in a way that did not used to be, there used to be barriers cognitively between what you're living with and what they're living with.
00:35:33
And that's no longer really the same.
00:35:35
And that hypervigilance can really spill forward into the home as well.
00:35:40
And here's the tricky bit, right, is that it's really adaptive to be hypervigilant when you're on the job.
00:35:46
Really, it keeps you alive, keeps your partners alive.
00:35:49
It's not that great when you're at home.
00:35:52
So how do you make that switch?
00:35:54
And for public safety personnel who are coming in and out of the home, in and out of the home, it's harder than it would be than if you were away and back.
00:36:02
So, oh, okay, so that plays out a little differently.
00:36:05
And the potential for secondary trauma, those are real things.
00:36:10
We also see a lot of variety around that identity around being a public safety family.
00:36:16
The community confers expectations.
00:36:18
So, oh, so like people regularly ask me like, oh, what happened at that call?
00:36:23
You know, was your husband at that?
00:36:24
Like, tell me more.
00:36:25
So I get this conferred expectation.
00:36:29
Police families may not,
00:36:32
share that they're police families.
00:36:34
They might say, oh, my spouse works for the city because not everybody loves police these days, turns out.
00:36:41
So that social capital can be very variable and we're really sensitive to those things because it can really create and amplify these feelings of separateness, aloneness, isolation, and being quite out of sync with what's going on for the rest of the community as the community celebrates certain things.
00:37:00
There is an expectation from the organization as well as from the community at large that, hold down the fort at home.
00:37:09
That's kind of what is expected.
00:37:11
And that then becomes part of what you're expected to do as a family member.
00:37:17
Families, there's this idea, I don't know if you've ever heard, military families are resilient.
00:37:23
And then you turn the page and it's like, military families are broken.
00:37:25
It's like, well, which is it?
00:37:27
And it really depends on the conditions.
00:37:28
And I would say like we're all resilient until we're not.
00:37:31
And under the right conditions, people can be and enjoy resiliency, but they can also, things can, if it's can feel kind of like a house of cards sometimes if the right supports aren't in place, then people can feel quite unwell.
00:37:44
So logistics and mobility, we see logistics as that kind of, ongoing on the daily changes, the 24-7 kind of non-standard work.
00:37:52
But mobility is like when you have to up and move, it's a special kind of logistics.
00:37:57
Or where you can't actually live in the same place because the work is in one place from where the family lives.
00:38:06
And that happens for lots of reasons within these groups.
00:38:11
The micro transitions in and out between work and home can be really challenging because if you think about the family needs to manage everything when you're not there capably.
00:38:25
And then when you're back, you need to have a real authentic role and feel valued.
00:38:31
So how do you manage that in out?
00:38:33
Because it's not a straightforward process.
00:38:37
Managing things like sleep,
00:38:39
spousal career demands, child, elder, or pet care.
00:38:43
These can also, when you're, every week is different, that can really be an amplifying stressor on families.
00:38:54
And so what we really saw is that all of these things, while we separate them out, they're quite interrelated.
00:39:01
And they really do come together in a way that you experience all four of them all the time.
00:39:08
in these families.
00:39:09
So there might be other occupations where you might get one or two of them, but in these families, you're experiencing the consequences of all of them all at once.
00:39:19
So that's what we really found is that naming and framing them really gave us a collective kind of phenomenon to name.
00:39:25
And that was really resonated with people, really landed with folks.
00:39:30
The dimensions help us balance out that there is positive, there is negative.
00:39:34
So we don't just have a presumption that it's a negative positioning.
00:39:38
It is, it allows for that dimension to be pro or con in different ways over the family life course, over the career life course.
00:39:48
And what it helped us see is what was and wasn't known in policy programming and research.
00:39:54
So, and I think that's the power of a taxonomy or a dimensional categorization system is it allows you to see the absence of something as much as it allows you to see what is present.
00:40:06
So I think that's been really helpful for us in being able to identify, well, where do we put our efforts next?
00:40:12
So really bringing clarity to that occupational families research.
00:40:16
And then what came out the other end was the Garnett family's experience.
00:40:20
And in our drive towards
00:40:22
inclusivity and equity.
00:40:24
We spent 18 months doing a crowdsourcing partnership consultation to come up with the perfect name, but we couldn't find it.
00:40:35
So even after international naming competition, it was like, So ultimately, ChatGPT helped us out a little bit to help find a representation of the experience.
00:40:48
And what we discovered through that process is that garnets are symbols of love, loyalty, and safe return to family.
00:40:55
And by naming it Garnet Families, it helps us make it about the families rather than the families of the person.
00:41:02
Because turns out the people are also members of their own families.
00:41:07
So that's a whole other level of complexity that we get into.
00:41:11
So from that and through that, we've evolved into this kind of three-armed body.
00:41:18
So research, network, and partnership.
00:41:22
And so Lisa and I is the research lead for the Families Matter Research Group, and Lisa is the lead for the Garnett Families Network, really kind of working in this infinity loop.
00:41:32
We're hearing what the community needs.
00:41:34
Okay, what do we know about that?
00:41:35
How do we get the information out?
00:41:36
So really working on things that are
00:41:40
priorities for the community.
00:41:41
So things like life after service, things like suicide prevention.
00:41:45
These are things that the community wants to know about.
00:41:49
So how do we help mobilize the research community to be able to do that?
00:41:54
And the team continues to grow.
00:41:56
So this is the core families, occupational researchers.
00:41:59
So you see Shannon at the back.
00:42:03
So this is where from the research arm, we've got a bunch of different professions.
00:42:10
for different countries, really that interdisciplinary perspective on policy, on research, on families is, it really helps us do the work because there's nothing straightforward about families.
00:42:25
So just to give you a sense of like some of the things that we've done, so being able to create a resource for families.
00:42:33
So this was the first of its kind internationally.
00:42:35
We had a big international team and we looked at creating a well-being resource for public safety families.
00:42:42
And so we had a lovely group, Natalie and Heather with me and a whole team of folks.
00:42:49
to really create PSPNet families.
00:42:51
This was through some money that came from the Public Health Agency of Canada, and to look at trying to create an online resource for internet cognitive behavioral therapy, which was existing for public safety personnel.
00:43:03
So we wanted to build a companion to that existing with PSPNet families.
00:43:10
And so we did primary, secondary, tertiary mental health.
00:43:14
prevention.
00:43:15
So your psychoeducation about what do you need to know to be on the job as a family member?
00:43:20
What are some of your relationship education?
00:43:22
Like what are some strategies and skills that you could develop to get ahead of some of these things that will happen?
00:43:28
And then if you're really struggling with anxiety, with depression, with substance use, the internet cognitive behavioral well-being course that is tailored to you as a family member.
00:43:39
The nice thing for us is that it is free for people to use, does not require a referral.
00:43:44
So it doesn't matter where you live in Canada, if you have an internet connection, you can get in, you can do it.
00:43:50
So that's really a big part of our equity focus.
00:43:56
The website gives you the three strands of information, strategies and skill building, and then the wellbeing course.
00:44:02
And it gives you a way of figuring out which path you most need right now.
00:44:08
And we think of it kind of like choose your own adventure way that it unfolds.
00:44:13
We're also doing things like taking that information and creating a resource for service providers.
00:44:19
So kind of reverse engineering it.
00:44:21
So how do wellness coordinators and corrections, say, work with people around issues for families?
00:44:27
How do psychologists or social workers in the community?
00:44:29
We want to make it easy for people to do really high quality families work.
00:44:34
So we've got that.
00:44:35
That's coming soon.
00:44:37
Natalie's done this work with Ashley now on a new resource for PSP youth and kids because we kept hearing, well, what about the teenager?
00:44:45
What about the youth?
00:44:46
What about the kids?
00:44:47
To create this PSPYK hub for that part of the family life course.
00:44:55
And then my student now completed
00:45:00
Lauren Roberts recently developed this quality participation framework and really looking at when we start to support maybe policy and programming about how much family, where are we starting?
00:45:11
Do you have no family?
00:45:13
Are you kind of like families as an add-on?
00:45:16
Are you families as a derivative?
00:45:18
Are you there for families?
00:45:20
Really trying to lay that out.
00:45:22
And we increasingly have really great research
00:45:25
So Marilyn Cox, who's just magical in her capacity, hi Marilyn, because she's probably watching online, being able to lead this work on sleep and applying an ecological perspective.
00:45:38
So when you put that family lens on sleep, there's like millions and millions of dollars that go into sleep intervention for public safety personnel.
00:45:46
And they all focus on individuals.
00:45:49
They do not look at people in their homes.
00:45:53
Now, sleep practitioners do do that in real life, but the apps and the programmings are really focused on the individuals rather than, okay, so who do you sleep, like when you're trying to sleep, what's going on in your household?
00:46:08
What do you have control over and vice versa?
00:46:10
What is your family trying to do while you're trying to sleep?
00:46:13
And you start to see different opportunities when you start to change the lens.
00:46:18
Lisa's done an incredible job at building out the Garnet Families Network and really building this complex network following this line of readiness and responsivity, starting from nothing during COVID where we had nothing for public safety families and those.
00:46:34
the 1,300 jurisdictions or municipalities in Canada and the 17 public safety sectors across three or four different jurisdictions, depending upon how they're structured.
00:46:46
There's a lot of players.
00:46:47
So how do we actually connect them and how do we give people what they need?
00:46:51
Because from an organizational perspective, from a policy perspective, families is going to be a priority for these folks, like in your priority list was probably #5 or 6.
00:47:03
It's how do you make it number one when you have geopolitical safety, security, climate change, disaster, you know, how are families ever going to make it to the top in these occupational priority groups?
00:47:16
And so what we want to do is to make it easy for people where it's number five or six, it's our number one.
00:47:22
So we're just going to make it easy for you to do.
00:47:25
So that's the goal.
00:47:26
And so this is where Lisa's done this great job on the website.
00:47:30
And then we have lots of things in terms of round tables of mixed kind of groups coming together.
00:47:36
So we hear from each other on what the policy and program priorities, what the research priorities are.
00:47:42
And then the newsletter, the quarterly series, the Tired Side of Service was one that we did recently.
00:47:49
And then those are
00:47:51
recorded and available.
00:47:53
There's a new one coming up on caregiving in a couple of weeks.
00:47:58
And then we've also been able to come out with this SSHRC-funded partnership, which is a pretty competitive process.
00:48:05
And it's a long grant in granting terms in Canada for a seven-year grant.
00:48:10
And so what we have is 50 different partners and government collaborators from different universities, but also from those who study, serve, and support the families.
00:48:22
and who have an interest.
00:48:23
So from APCO, like the Association of Professional Communicators, we've got philanthropy, you've got, I mean, there's just so many different types of players in this mix that really help us get that concerted effort.
00:48:40
And here we'll see Bita down on the slide.
00:48:43
because the Garnet Families Partnership has now taken our core kind of families focus and added another layer of folks with another layer of interdisciplinary from nursing and law and library, library science, all these different extra layers that help us get to the crux of what we're needing to get at.
00:49:12
Oops.
00:49:14
And so really, we've created this with the idea that when one serves, the whole family serves.
00:49:19
We get it, we've lived it, but we're also really creating that evidence base, that knowledge base, those free, accessible resources, and building the community capacity to respond to these safety and security issues by indirectly coming at it around the families.
00:49:37
So I think that from a policy perspective, we've really changed.
00:49:41
We've really helped
00:49:43
to be part of that process of how we're thinking in the communities around families.
00:49:47
When I talked about that ombudsman report, families recently up until that point had been included, and I quote, as furniture in effects.
00:49:57
So, okay, you've got a sofa that needs to get moved, you've got a family that needs to get moved, okay, objects, not people.
00:50:05
So that is how the military considered families, furniture in effects.
00:50:10
I spent a lot of time kind of feeling like I had a placard saying, and families, like, don't forget about families.
00:50:17
And, oh, we got something in the middle.
00:50:20
There we go.
00:50:21
The dependents or the derivative.
00:50:23
I think this is a really important one when we think about policy in particular, because you are only eligible to access services if you are current dependent of a person in these jobs.
00:50:36
So dependent and current.
00:50:39
being really important here for your consideration.
00:50:43
In 2022, I said the Families Matter group, and then we've evolved into this Garnet Families.
00:50:49
So a couple of things then for implications, and we've got a few minutes to chat.
00:50:54
When we think about implications for policy and legal reform, I'm going to give you a couple of examples.
00:51:00
So Public Safety Canada a few years ago was engaged in a consultation that ended up with an action plan on post-traumatic stress injuries.
00:51:09
And so families were sort of included in this.
00:51:14
And so they were included.
00:51:17
Can I read this?
00:51:18
Can I see this?
00:51:19
These are two different questions of read and see these days.
00:51:27
I made it small and then I did that deliberately.
00:51:31
Can someone read that for me at the back where it says support for families?
00:51:34
Yeah.
00:51:37
The role that first responders play in protecting Canadians, the Memorial Grant of First Responders is intended to recognize their service and sacrifice, resulting in a well-supported community of first responders and families.
00:51:49
Launched on April 1st, 2018, the Memorial Grant Program provides A one-time, lump-sum, tax-free direct maximum payment of $300,000 to the families of first responders who have died.
00:52:01
as a result of their duties, including deaths resulting from occupational illness or psychological impairment, such as suicide, while keeping Canadians safe.
00:52:11
Thank you.
00:52:12
So this is where families were included, as the bereaved.
00:52:17
So we thought that maybe we could move them a little bit more into the policy, you know, get them more into the thinking.
00:52:23
And
00:52:25
What's nice about things like the partnership is that you really get to have these kinds of conversations with policy makers, with policy developers, and to really be able to provide feedback.
00:52:35
So as part of our partnership grant meeting last year, we invited Public Safety Canada
00:52:41
to speak to what they were looking for around consultation on how to update the action framework.
00:52:48
And so we were able then to solicit feedback and to synthesize feedback and to provide them with an input.
00:52:54
And so some of these pillars that you see kind of there in their coordinated action plan, we are told will be moving towards more of that life course
00:53:05
Families will be included, the life course will be included, and those intentions have been stated publicly by Public Safety Canada.
00:53:14
And I think that that's where it's a joy as a researcher to be able to do work that is connected to policy, because if we can change the policy, then some of the funding may follow some of those policy changes, and then how programs
00:53:33
look at the diversity of families may also change.
00:53:37
So one of the things that we hear with some regularity is, yeah, the parents are part of families too.
00:53:43
Yes, and I think we did our parents, where do I fit kind of thing about a year and a half ago on parents, because we were hearing it from the community.
00:53:54
So those virtual series that we do, there's not a lot of evidence for those
00:54:00
we don't have enough research on those topics.
00:54:03
So we use them as more conversation starters.
00:54:05
So they acknowledge what we hear from the community to continue the conversation and to really build like, okay, some deep thinking around what do we do about this?
00:54:14
So those are really helpful things.
00:54:17
Other hot topics.
00:54:20
defining family and why it matters.
00:54:23
So I do this international military family roundtable thing every year.
00:54:27
And the kind of ongoing haha is families look a certain kind of way across the five eyes.
00:54:33
Well, at least along the colony end of things.
00:54:38
So families look a little bit different in the US.
00:54:41
And I think that that's continues to change in policy for lots of, you know, present reasons.
00:54:47
But in Australia, in Canada, UK, New Zealand, families are defined in a very certain kind of way.
00:54:56
And you look at anything at a military family resource center type thing, and it's typically going to be the man in the uniform, the civilian represented spouse, 2.3 kids.
00:55:11
And the only thing that we see difference is the breed of dog.
00:55:15
And that is
00:55:17
what we see.
00:55:18
So, defining family.
00:55:22
We did something, I think it was like almost 10 years ago, it needs to be updated.
00:55:26
We looked at defining families, like what makes a military family in policy, and we did a cross-country comparison around that.
00:55:35
And I mean, the US is so large in its military, it's like as big as Canada.
00:55:40
So we used Alabama as one of the feeder states as the kind of,
00:55:46
a microcosm of the US military to do the comparison, because all of us combined are not as big as the US military.
00:55:55
And really seeing that, say in the US, family means married, not kind of living together, but married.
00:56:05
So there's certain drivers to even what it looks like to have
00:56:10
membership or eligibility for benefits for healthcare in the US that are huge other drivers for policy and access.
00:56:19
The derivative eligibility, one of the things that comes up, I was at the Canadian Caregiver Summit last week, and this comes up all the time, where people are genuinely concerned about like, why can't veteran families access services?
00:56:32
There are a lot of services that are defined within Veterans Affairs Canada for families,
00:56:39
But the central node of benefit needs to be the veteran.
00:56:44
The Veterans Act shapes how those programs are defined.
00:56:49
So for example, as a caregiver, I can be a caregiver to a veteran and I can get an allowance through the veteran caregiver benefit.
00:56:59
So I can get that.
00:57:01
But if I am a veteran who is a caregiver, then that is, that benefit does not apply to me.
00:57:07
It's only if the veteran
00:57:10
is at the center of the care or benefit.
00:57:13
So if I as a spouse need mental health services, the veteran's mental health team has to say that that's because it would help the veteran's mental health.
00:57:25
So that is what we were talking about.
00:57:26
We're talking about derivative eligibility.
00:57:29
Health service access, when you move every two to three years across jurisdictional
00:57:35
bounds.
00:57:36
That's really challenging.
00:57:38
A colleague of mine here and project co-director, Dr.
00:57:42
Allison Mahar, does a lot of health services work around veterans as they attach to primary care when they leave the Canadian Forces Health Services.
00:57:52
But military families, unless you're in a remote region like Goose Bay, Labrador,
00:58:00
you do not access Canadian Forces Health Services.
00:58:03
You are accessing civilian health care services.
00:58:06
And based on the work that we've done, even with the Canadian Pediatric Association, pediatricians are not aware of this.
00:58:14
So if you don't know that the child you're seeing can't access contiguous health care through the military, you may not understand what some of the delays and disruptions to health service access might look like for your particular
00:58:30
child on who you're assessing.
00:58:33
This is where we see policy initiatives like seamless transition.
00:58:36
So Shannon has testified parliament is, you know, PhD students, like, you know, low pressure, right?
00:58:42
So she's done some great work on military connected students and their migration around and the challenges there are for military connected students.
00:58:52
But seamless Canada is intended to
00:58:55
Mitigate some of these jurisdictional boundaries where there's a federal fund, but then it's enacted at the provincial level for things like healthcare.
00:59:04
Protect the North.
00:59:06
So at Simvers Forum a couple of weeks ago, we saw an incredible keynote on Arctic service and what it looks like and the imperative to protect the North.
00:59:18
And so with the Arctic now due to climate change passable,
00:59:24
by ship, it now changes the imperative of protecting the North.
00:59:29
And what's that going to mean for the families of those who are deployed up to remote locations?
00:59:38
So for those who haven't seen, the Manitoba legislature this week unfolded this incredible, I think there's 85,000 puppies in their blanket.
00:59:50
And I just am very struck by this note of remembrance because I think that we often take it for granted and we don't we don't think enough about those who serve and those who serve alongside.
01:00:06
So that's it for me.
01:00:13
Thank you.
01:00:14
Dr.
01:00:15
Kramp for an exceptional coverage of both, you know, the rehabilitation aspects, the law and policy considerations, the conceptual significance, the care implications, just a lot of dimensions that you're able to address, the relational aspects, which if you were writing in the space, you could also approach from a relational feminist perspective.
01:00:34
That's so intricately tied to the relational concept of family as well.
01:00:39
So really wonderful all around.