A Lack of Accountability: Why Operation Honour Has Failed
by Allan English
In December 2018, over three years after its launch in August 2015, the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), General Jonathan Vance, declared that Operation Honour was the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) “highest institutional priority.” That statement came as a surprise to some as Operation Honour was supposed to have fulfilled its “mission” to “eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour within the CAF” by 30 June 2017, twenty-two months after it began. This achievement was then to be preserved “in perpetuity.”
CAF leaders apparently knew that Operation Honour was not going to achieve its mission as planned because in December 2016, six months before its end date, the CAF announced that it was now an “enduring” or a long-term operation. Despite this extension, incidents on a military VIP flight involving the abuse of alcohol that resulted in “harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour,” the so-called “party flight,” were widely reported in the press one year later. These incidents in December 2017 occurred in the presence of some of the most senior CAF leaders, thereby calling Operation Honour’s effectiveness and its ability to “rebuild trust between CAF members and senior leadership” into question. They were further questioned five months later when Justice Marie Deschamps, the author of the “External Review Report on Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces,” was asked in her Senate testimony on Operation Honour if the CAF had implemented her report “in a rigorous and determined way.” She replied that “…not a lot of progress has been made.”
A major reason for Operation Honour’s lack of progress was its failure to implement the “comprehensive cultural change” that Justice Deschamps said was necessary to transform the “underlying sexualized culture in the CAF that is hostile to women and LGTBQ members” – the source of much of the sexual misconduct in the CAF. This failure can be attributed to the lack of either a strategic or culture change plan for Operation Honour. Consequently, the CAF’s actions in response to Justice Deschamps’ report have been uncoordinated and unprioritized, much like Operation Minerva, one of the CAF’s “piecemeal” and “uncoordinated” plans to implement mandated “gender integration” in the 1990s. 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 source – the CAF’s culture.
In February 2019, the CAF acknowledged its “failure to produce strategic direction and a campaign plan to guide the necessary culture shift” and its failure to produce and implement performance measurement criteria, “creating an emphasis on statistics vice performance measures,” despite the CDS’s order that Operation Honour’s activities at key stages of the campaign plan were “to be measured, with the results reported to [him].”
As the special team executing Operation Honour’s functions are “re-absorbed” into the Department of National Defence bureaucracy, becoming part of the Directorate Professional Military Conduct—Operation HONOUR organization, coupled with the dilution of its emphasis by its alignment with the CAF Diversity Strategy, the chances of achieving its mission are further diminished.
The moral of this story is that, as with many CAF culture change initiatives in the past, success is rarely achieved unless effective external oversight is in place. Despite the CDS directing that results be measured and reported and that strategies be produced for Operation Honour, his orders have not been carried out. It is, therefore, clear that internal CAF accountability measures have not worked in this case.
Unless an external monitoring group can report on culture change progress in the long term and provide effective oversight of CAF actions (not just advice) little success can be expected. Therefore, Operation Honour is likely to end like its predecessor, Operation Minerva, with disappointment and future problems as the causes of sexual misconduct in the CAF remain in place.
References for further reading: Allan English, “Why the CAF Cannot ‘Eliminate Harmful and Inappropriate Sexual Behaviour'” at https://medium.com/centre-for-international-and-defence-policy/why-the-caf-cannot-eliminate-harmful-and-inapprOperationriate-sexual-behaviour-5d91448dd1e9 ;
Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, “Towards a Diverse and Inclusive Canadian Military: The Lessons from Gender Integration in the CF in the 1990s”:
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