The Canadian Armed Forces’ “Me Too Moment”
Disclaimer: This post is inspired from Dr. Allan English’s conference papers for the Inter-University Symposiums of 2016 and 2018.
Let us make a jump in time and fast forward to 2014, when the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) faced another wave of public revelations about how common and normalized sexual misconduct remained.
In 2014, the Québec magazine L’Actualité published a special report titled “Crimes sexuels: le cancer qui ronge l’armée canadienne.” In this exposé, journalists Noémie Mercier and Alec Castonguay revealed the damning conclusions of their one-year investigation into sexual misconduct in the CAF: up to five servicemembers could be sexually assaulted each day, and the victims who came forward often faced reprisals to make them withdraw their complaint or faced the dismissal from their chain of command.
Mercier and de Castonguay told the story of Lise Gaulthier. In 2007, when she was an air force master corporal with thirty years of service in the CAF, handed a 159-page report detailing the sexual assaults she had been through to her superior. He dismissed the report, saying that her accounts were “implausible.”
The journalists also spoke with Stéphanie Raymond. One of her superiosr had sexually assaulted her in 2011, and the military police dismissed her, telling her she should have tried to say “no” more firmly. But she persisted, made her chain of command uncomfortable, and was asked to stop the complaint process. She was released in 2013, allegedly because she was “unfit for service.” But her complaint finally bore fruits, and her assailant was court martialled. He was acquitted. However, after L’Actualité’s dossier, the Department of National Defence asked the case be retried, and made its way to the Supreme Court. At the heart of the case: whether a court martial is the legitimate procedure to try a sexual assault case, even when it involves servicemembers only.
The revelations from L’actualité eerily echoed the ones Maclean’s had brought forward over late spring/early summer 1998. Both magazines pointed out frequent sexual assaults which the chain of command would not take seriously, as well as victims facing risks of reprisals, leaving the service, and never receiving justice or closure. And in some cases, victims had to seek help at a psychiatric hospital –which happened to Dawn Thompson in 1993 and to Lise Gaulthier in 2007.
Following the 2014 revelations, the CAF senior leadership mandated an External Review Authority to investigate the issue of sexual misconduct in the organization. Former Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps conducted this investigation and issued her report in 2015. Deschamps concluded that the Canadian military’s culture was “sexualized,” hostile to women and members of the LGBTQI+ community, therefore conducive to sexual misconduct.
Marie Deschamps made ten recommendations:
1) Acknowledge the problem and “undertake to address it”
2) Create a strategy to achieve culture change
3) Create an “independent center for accountability”
4) Allow member to report to the independent centre for accountability “without triggering a formal complaint process”
5) Develop definitions, with the help of the independent centre for accountability
6) “Develop unified policy approach (in a single policy using simple language)”
7) “Simplify the harassment [reporting] process”
8) Allow victims of sexual assault to request transfer of the complaint to civilian authorities, with the help of the independent centre
9) “Assign responsibility for providing, coordinating and monitoring victim support to the independent center for accountability”
10) “Assign to the center for accountability… responsibility for the development of the training curriculum.”
The Chief of Defence Staff at the time, General Tom Lawson, responded to these findings by officially agreeing with the recommendations “in principle.” Yet, he circulated a directive among his most senior officers stating that the “current sexual misconduct investigation and justice system will remain unchanged.”
A few months later, in August 2015, there was a change in command, and General Jonathan Vance became Chief of the Defence Staff. One of his first announcements as the highest-ranking leader of the Canadian military was to establish Operation Honour, a “campaign” to “eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviours within the CAF.” General Vance saw that conceptualizing the fight against a culture of gender-based violence in the military as a military operation would adequately engage the chain of command as a whole and empower every leader to take action.
The CAF saw the failures of addressing sexual misconduct of the past to a misunderstanding of the pervasiveness of the problem, as “it was generally believed that the cases of sexual misconduct that had periodically surfaced in the intervening post-2000 period were isolated cases that frequently occur in any large organization.”
The Chief of the Defence Staff also viewed the problem of sexual misconduct in the CAF to be an issue of “operational readiness” – as the aggrieved servicemembers lost trust in the peer(s) that had done them wrong, and had lost faith in a chain of command that would often dismiss them. General Vance conceived the flea Marie Deschamps had identified an issue of dignity of the individual – which became a talking point for the military.
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