The CAF and the National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security

By Allan English

https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/assets/pdfs/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/gender_equality-egalite_des_genres/DND-wps-fps-MDN-17-22-eng.pdf

Background

The preliminary material in the DND/CAF progress report 2017/18 gives this background information on their contribution to Canada’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2017-2022 (emphasis added):

The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF) recognize that armed conflict, natural disasters, and humanitarian crises affect women, men, girls and boys differently. As noted in Canada’s new defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged, women’s participation is vital to achieving and sustaining peace, and has a tangible impact on the operational effectiveness of our forces. Women broaden the range of skills and capacities among all categories of personnel, improve the delivery of peace and security tasks, enhance situational awareness and early-warning by facilitating outreach to women in communities, and improve a military force’s accessibility, credibility and effectiveness in working among local populations.  

DND/CAF support for Canada’s renewed Action Plan builds on a number of recent, new directives and initiatives – as set out in Strong, Secure, Engaged – aimed at integrating gender perspectives into our internal policies and into our operations abroad, notably as it relates to recruitment, diversity, responding to inappropriate behaviour, and training/education.  DND/CAF will use targets and indicators to track our progress as we implement our strategies to achieve the above goals. 

Over the course of the renewed Action Plan 2017-2022, DND/CAF will focus on implementing and tracking these initiatives, with a view to delivering results – for example to further integrate Genderbased Analysis Plus (GBA+) within DND, meet recruitment targets, and increase the number of uniformed women deployed to international operations.  DND/CAF, as a committed partner, has identified a number of priority activities to support the ongoing implementation of the Action Plan, consistent with Canada’s new defence policy.

DETAILED COMMENTS ON SELECTED POINTS IN THE REPORT (EXCERPTS FROM THE SWC REPORT IN ITALICS)

1. GOVERNANCE

Target 1.2: Effective support for and implementation of the CAF Diversity Strategy and Action Plan.

Progress achieved as of March 31, 2018:  MOSTLY ON TRACK/Internal efficiency & capacity 

• A CAF Diversity Strategy and associated Action Plan have been published and are currently being implemented, monitored, reviewed and reported on annually.

Results and Progress: DND and CAF have identified that diversity in the work place is an important enabler.  Differences in ethnicity, language, gender, age, culture, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and religion, can improve the Defence team’s ability to make common or complex decisions on operations and in institutional settings… The Defence team is focused on promoting diversity and inclusion as core institutional values and has appointed a team of Champions for Gender and Diversity for Operations to lead change, support a culture of inclusion and advance the CAF Diversity Strategy. 

As noted above, the CAF “Diversity Strategy” uses some of the same approaches as Operation Honour and other failed CAF culture change initiatives, for example the “strategy” disperses responsibility for achieving its goals throughout the CAF (with over 40 different groups assigned responsibility for achieving 13 different objectives in the Action Plan) and there is no central organization that is accountable for the execution and success of its strategy. Therefore, it is unlikely that the CAF’s Diversity Strategy will make any measurable contribution to the “priority” of “Continue to implement the tenets of UNSCR 1325 and related resolutions and implement all aspects of the Departmental Diversity Strategy.”

2. RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION 

Context: Further to the Chief of the Defence Staff Directive on Recruitment, the CAF will continue to seek to increase the number of women within the CAF, and in turn the number of women available to be promoted to senior positions or for deployment. Recruiting processes including advertising, wait process times, job availability, application procedures, testing, medical and fitness standards are all aspects that affect the decision process of a potential new recruit. In addition, aspects such as family balance, job enjoyment, selection for professional development, velocity of promotion and a safe and harassment free work environment are all factors that contribute to making the CAF an Employer of Choice.  

This section of the report contains long lists of actions that the CAF has taken to “Increase the percentage of women in the Canadian military by 1% per year to achieve a desired goal of 25% by the end of FY 2026.” However, as noted above, longstanding failures by the CAF recruiting system, as documented by the AG in three reports dating back to 2002, especially having no strategy to achieve this goal, will likely thwart any efforts to increase the diversity of the CAF: “…it is unlikely that the Regular Force will be able to reach the desired number of members by the 2018–19 fiscal year as planned. We also found that although the Canadian Armed Forces had established a goal of 25 percent for the representation of women, it did not set specific targets by occupation, nor did it have a strategy to achieve this goal.” (For details see my 2018 IUS paper and Canada, “2016 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada Report 5—Canadian Armed Forces Recruitment and Retention—National Defence” (2016), para 5.11)

Conclusion. Like the SWC report and previous CAF reports on this issue, this DND/CAF report merely lists selected DND/CAF “initiatives” in response to Canada’s GBV Strategy. It does not measure outputs or outcomes. In Feb 2019, the CAF acknowledged that it need a “more mature and sophisticated performance measurement approach” in the future and that one was “being developed.” (“Canadian Armed Forces Progress Report Addressing Sexual Misconduct,” dated 26 Feb 2019, p. 13)