Thank you.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I am Allan English and I teach Canadian military history in the history department at Queen's University. I have also taught senior officers at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. I served 25 years in the RCAF and CAF as an air navigator on the C-130 Hercules, as well as on a number of instructional tours.
The title of my presentation, “Culture Eats Policy Every Time - Sexual Misconduct in the CAF”, comes from a statement by former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Michel Bastarache, when referring to attempts to change the RCMP's culture through policy changes. His statement applies equally to the CAF, which over the last 30 years has attempted to address sexual misconduct through policy changes and added training without successfully implementing what Justice Marie Deschamps referred to in her report on sexual misconduct and sexual harassment in the CAF as the “comprehensive cultural change” necessary to eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour within the CAF.
In evaluating the success of Operation Honour in testimony before a Senate committee in May 2018, almost three years after the operation started, Justice Deschamps made these comments, which she reiterated in her testimony here this week. She said, “...in the public policies, the changes that have been made to them are so minor as to be virtually superficial. Much more could have been done in three years.... What I see is that not a lot of progress has been made.”
In August 2015, in the Operation Honour campaign plan, General Vance required the vice chief of the defence staff to complete a comprehensive strategy by September 30, 2015. However, no strategy was produced until 2020. Lacking a guiding strategy, much like Operation Minerva, one of the CAF's piecemeal and uncoordinated plans to implement mandated gender integration and to respond to its “rape crisis” in the 1990s, its actions in response to Justice Deschamps' report have been uncoordinated and unprioritized. While many early changes made by Operation Honour were positive and addressed the CAF's initial priority of meeting victims' needs, they only addressed the symptoms of the problem, they did not deal with its main cause, the CAF's “hostile organizational culture that is disrespectful and demeaning to women”.
Leader buy-in is essential if desired culture change is to be made and successfully implemented. Yes, despite emphatic public statements promising to eliminate sexual misconduct in the CAF, we now know that its senior leadership did not fully accept Justice Deschamps' conclusions, starting with the response to her report by the CDS at the time, General Tom Lawson, who said, “I do not accept from any quarter that this type of behaviour is part of our military culture.”
Recently former vice chief of the defence staff, retired Lieutenant-General Guy Thibault, who was charged with the oversight of Operation Honour during its first year, said, “I know that I and many of my colleagues initially had a hard time believing the picture painted by Justice Marie Deschamps in her 2015 report on sexual misconduct as her descriptions of the CF work environment simply did not match our lived experience in the forces.”
It is reported that the current CDS, Admiral Art McDonald, also recently acknowledged that as a senior leader, “he was himself guilty—even though it was unintentional—of having perpetuated some of the problems that the military is now trying to address.”
The latest allegations of sexual misconduct against General Vance are not the first indications of his lack of acceptance of the Deschamps report's findings. His reaction to the December 2017 “party flight” cast doubt on the CAF's commitment to eliminating sexual misconduct.
In response to media reports of inappropriate behaviour on the “party flight”, Vance said that what happened on the flight might have been exaggerated. That statement, combined with the lack of action to stop inappropriate behaviour by the senior CAF leaders on the party flight indicated to many that two years after being implemented and just over five months into Operation Honour's final maintain-and-hold phase, the CAF initiative to eliminate sexual misconduct in its ranks had failed.
In case there is any doubt that the CAF still does not fully accept Justice Deschamps' conclusions, “The Path to Dignity and Respect: The Canadian Armed Forces Strategy to Address Sexual Misconduct”, released in October 2020, only calls for “realigning” the CAF's culture, not comprehensive culture change.
In conclusion, until the CAF makes the comprehensive culture change called for by Justice Deschamps, any change made by the bureaucratic methods used to date will be ephemeral and inconsequential, as was the case with Operation Minerva in the 1990s.
Unless the CAF addresses the cause of its problems, its culture, not just its symptoms, and has its actions monitored by effective external oversight, it is likely to face disappointment and problems in the future as the sources of the CAF's sexualized and hostile culture remain in place.
Thank you.