Most issues that confront the federal government can be resolved with relatively quick fixes – a ministerial decision, a cabinet order, a patch applied to an item of legislation. But other issues seem to defy resolution. They hang around for years, even decades, to bedevil successive administrations. They are studied to death, nothing happens, and bulging files are passed from one government to the next.
A case in point, as the newly re-elected prime minister assembles a new cabinet to meet the Parliament, is the seemingly intractable problem of sexual misconduct in the Canadian military. It was headline news again last week.
Major-General Deny Fortin was back in court, arguing that he had been removed from his post as head of the federal vaccine rollout for purely political reasons and should be reinstated. Admiral Art McDonald, declaring that he had been cleared of alleged sexual misconduct, demanded to be restored to his position as chief of the defence staff (CDS). Meanwhile, the interim CDS, General Wayne Eyre, came under fire when it was it was revealed that he had written a positive character reference for a major-general who had once been found guilty of sexual assault. And the Department of National Defence announced that the incoming head of the Canadian Army, Lieutenant-General Trevor Cadieu, has been sent home on leave while “historical allegations” of sexual misconduct are investigated.
As if those four were not enough, the week ended with the chief of military personnel, Lieutenant-General Steven Whelan, being placed on leave Friday when it was revealed he had been under investigation for months for sexual misconduct. Whelan had assumed that position in May, replacing Vice-Admiral Haydn Edmundson, who is on leave while military police investigate a sexual misconduct complaint against him.
All this in one week. Not to mention the predictable political response – the leaders of both the Conservative and New Democratic parties called for the resignation of Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.
Sajjan’s chances of retaining the portfolio he has held since 2015 seem exceedingly slim. He has failed – as the eight men before him who held the portfolio from 1998 to 2015 had failed – to change the institutional culture of the Canadian Armed Forces, a culture that tolerates aggressive sexual behaviour as an element of military life.
I chose 1998 because it was the year when sexual misconduct burst out of the barracks into public view in a dramatic series, “Rape in the Military,” in Maclean’s magazine. As managing editor of Maclean’s in those days, I worked with a team of investigative reporters who did what the military brass did not or would not do.
We investigated a swelling chorus of complaints. We interviewed women, from recruits to mid-level officers, who told of experiences of physical assault, including rape, at the hands of drunken servicemen, of unwanted touching, of emotional abuse, insults and sexual innuendo, and of being coerced into intimate relationships with more senior officers who had control over their careers. We documented their stories and published our findings.
Liberal Jean Chrétien was prime minister at the time. His defence minister, Art Eggleton, said he was outraged to learn of the misconduct. He created a new office, the military ombudsman, to receive and investigate complaints, but he did not give the ombudsman the authority to act against offenders.
The Chrétien government handed the file to Stephen Harper’s incoming Conservative government, which sat on it. It did commission retired Supreme Court of Canada justice Marie Deschamps to advise on what to do about the mess in the military. Harper received the Deschamps report, and quickly passed it to the incoming Trudeau Liberals. The sum of the Liberals’ actions on the file: the appointment of two more retired Supremes to re-till (twice) the ground already plowed by Marie Deschamps.
It would not be accurate to say that nothing has changed with the military. Drunkenness has become a firing offence. And sexual misbehaviour, once seen as a problem confined to the lower ranks, has moved up the chain of command to the generals at the very top.
When Parliament reopens, the misconduct file will be in Trudeau’s lap and the opposition will be at his throat. He’ll need a plan to break that boys-will-be-boys culture – while at the same time protecting the reputations and careers of forces’ members who may be falsely accused. He’ll also need a new defence minister, a tough, no-nonsense leader to do the job that his or her nine predecessors could not or would not do.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, has just been published. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com.