Saying Time’s Up to Canada

With its feminist foreign policy; Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security; a Department of Women and Gender Equality, and a gender-balanced Cabinet, Canada appears to be a leader in women’s rights and gender equality. 

But, in April 2018, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women visited the country. In her report, she wrote that despite Canada’s “long-standing record of support at the United Nations to issues related to violence against women,” gender-based violence remained a reality for women living in the country, and the government remains to implement fully certain provisions of the international agreements on violence against women Canada itself had initiated.

So far in 2019, there has been 118 murders of women and girls that were directly connected to gender-based violence in Canada, and there remain 21 cases that the police deems “suspicious.” Two of the most violent terrorist attacks on Canadian soil, the massacre of Ecole Polytechnique (1989) and the 2018 Toronto van attack, were acts of gender-based violence.

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability told The Globe and Mail in late November 2019 that there was a need for a federal action plan to address gender-based violence in Canada. There is in fact one: in 2017, Canada released: “It’s Time: Canada’s Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence.” The Special Rapporteur had welcomed the document in 2018, but criticized it for being too project oriented and its lack of legal framework and comparable data collection. The progress report mainly emphasizes investments made and victim support, but more needs to be done. 

Also striking is how the discourse never connects gender-based violence in the civilian world with the one occurring in the military – the underlying assumptions that contribute to this violence are the same, despite the different setting. 

Three years after the launch of Operation Honour, the Auditor General published a report outlining the issues the CF has yet to address and reiterated many of the recommendations Justice Deschamps had made in 2015. On January 29, 2019, then Vice Chief of the Defence Staff (VCDS) Paul Wynnyk; Chief Military Personnel Charles Lamarre; Deputy Minister Jody Thomas; as well as Dr. Denise Preston of the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre sat in front of the House Committee on Public Accounts to respond to the Auditor’s General report. 

During this session, the DND officials formally accepted the report’s recommendations, stated that there was “an absolute buy-in from the senior leadership,” and suggested the lack of commitment to resolve issues of sexual misconduct were concentrated in the lower levels of the chain of command. 

In its fourth progress report, the CAF Strategic Response Team-Sexual Misconduct repeats some of the points the CDS and VCDS have been making: it is junior leaders that have to carry the core of work for Operation Honour to succeed. However, close to four years after General Vance issued a news release announcing the creation of “a campaign plan,” the lack of a strategy limits the extent to which leaders at the lower ranks can support the eradication of sexual misconduct, which translates into an absence of meaningful results. And while former VDS Wynnyk would emphasize that the success of Operation Honour is a priority to the senior leadership, the CAF partly implemented three out of ten of Deschamps’ recommendations, mainly focused on victim support. 

As of 2019, Operation Honour has not met any of its deadlines.

The government of Canada’s message for the 16 Days Campaign of 2019 is #OurActionsMatter; their social media campaign emphasizes what bystanders can do to fight gender-based violence. There is a consensus among civil society, academics, and practitioners that “naming and shaming” is a critical tool to change the culture at a micro-level. 

But many also argue that culture change is first a question of leadership. The government’s #actions #matter as well. For now, there is too much of lip service, not enough action, as this blog has tried to reveal for the past 15 days. 

However, so far, leaders have yet to really act, to monitor one another and hold each other accountable – it is up to the population to make sure measures are really implemented. 

If ratified, International Labour Organization’s Convention 190 and Recommendation 206 provide steps through which governments can combat gender-based violence in the world of work, such as ensuring gender-responsive, legal and extra-legal mechanisms of reporting and dispute resolution, empowering authorities to deal with gender-related issues at all levels of an organization (ILO C 190 art. 4-10); protecting freedom of association; undertaking risk assessment analyses to identify the factors that make violence and harassment more likely; and shifting burden of proof from the complainant to the defendant (ILO R206). 

Having knowledge of these steps is necessary to put in place measures of accountability. But remains the question of how to make the government fully accountable, i.e., fear consequences of not putting in place the measures it had promised. This is where voting rights and freedom of association matters. Naming and shaming should also be targeting those in power.