Madam Chair, I will say to my colleague once more that, if he had been following my comments in the House last Wednesday, he would have understood that my remarks are directly related to the topic. I'll continue and I will ask him not to interrupt me.
The National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) was therefore founded to push for the implementation of the 167 recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. This included pushing for implementation of the recommendations relating to women in the military. However, NAC struggled with its anti-militarist stance while it lobbied for women's full integration into the military.
The National Action Committee on the Status of Women explicitly did not advocate women's involvement in the military but also strongly argued that the military should not receive an exemption from the Charter. The struggle to end discrimination against women in the military was further advanced by the founding of the Association for Women's Equity in the Canadian Forces in 1985.
At the time, the Canadian Armed Forces had a gendered quota policy—a “minimum male requirement”—for each military occupation, based on a Canadian Forces Administrative Order. The minimum male requirement ranged from 100% in combat roles to 0% in the dental professions.
The Canadian Armed Forces asserted that in some occupations, especially combat roles, mixed-gender units were a jeopardy to operational effectiveness. This gendered quota policy was challenged by a case brought to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (Brown vs. the Canadian Armed Forces). In 1989, the Tribunal ordered the Canadian military to fully integrate women over the next decade. The CAF leadership resisted women’s full integration into combat roles, arguing that their presence would undermine unit cohesion and that women were not up to the physical demands of combat operations.
The CAF had used implicitly gendered arguments about cohesion and operational effectiveness to support its case against women’s employment in combat roles. Once again, the Tribunal paid no heed to this institutional resistance. It ruled that an emphasis on equality can strengthen the cohesion which is so highly valued by the Canadian Armed Forces. Operational effectiveness is a gender neutral concept. The Tribunal concluded that there was no risk of failure of performance of combat duties by women sufficient to justify a general exclusionary policy.
As a result of the ruling, all occupations were opened to women, with the exception of submarine service, which was opened to women in 2001, and the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy.
As this brief overview shows, the Canadian military has a long history of banning women from combat roles and incorporating them into other roles depending on the needs. Canada's military leadership long resisted the full integration of women, citing fears that their presence would disturb the cohesiveness of fighting units. In this approach, the military was explicitly constructed as a gender unequal institution. Operational effectiveness, it was argued, required discrimination on the basis of sex.
However, pressure from strong feminist movements and from social and legislative reforms has pushed the Canadian Armed Forces to allow women into command positions.
Thank you, Madam Chair.