Canadian Forces still can’t define ‘hateful conduct’
OTTAWA – The video footage shows a Canadian Forces soldier with a history of white supremacist activity gleefully declaring in Somalia: “We ain’t killed enough n—–s yet.”
In another video a Canadian soldier involved in the Somalia mission yells, “We’re not racist — we just don’t want n—–s in the Airborne.”
Twenty-seven years later, the Canadian military has yet to come up with a definition of what is “hateful conduct.”
Senior military leaders say they are working hard on that goal and Department of National Defence sources say new policies could be rolled out as early as the summer.
But until the Canadian Forces can define “hateful conduct” it is hard to discipline soldiers and keep good statistics about how many are involved in white supremacist and far right activities, Brig.Gen. Sylvain Menard, chief of staff operations for military personnel, told the CBC in a recent interview.
Menard didn’t explain why the Canadian Forces hadn’t, in the 27 years since the problem-filled Somalia mission, come up with a definition of hateful conduct.
Part of the reason it is now working so hard to define hateful conduct is the publicity surrounding the case of an alleged far right extremist Patrik Mathews. The former Manitoba-based Canadian Forces reservist is now in jail in the U.S. Last year a journalist with the Winnipeg Free Press exposed Master Corp. Mathews, his connections to the Canadian Forces and his role in recruiting for the far right organization, The Base.
The Canadian Forces, which states it was aware of Mathews and his activities, put the soldier under investigation. But because of the seriousness of the allegations against him, the military fasttracked the soldier’s request to be released from service, according to the DND. Mathews disappeared shortly after, slipping into the U.S. where he joined forces with other alleged far right extremists.
It was the FBI who grabbed Mathews in an undercover operation into white supremacists. Prosecutors in the U.S. say Mathews wanted to start a race war and advocated derailing trains, killing people and poisoning water supplies.
The Canadian Forces calls its actions surrounding the Mathews case a “success story,” even though no disciplinary action was ever taken against the soldier.
After the Mathews case became public in August, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance said the military was at the early stages of dealing with the problem of extremists in the ranks. He stressed that the military had no room for vile ideologies and it would boot out anyone who was so inclined.
“I’ve had discussions, and I assure you that we will take this as seriously as Canadians would expect us to take it,” Vance told journalists. “But it’s going to take some time for us to think about how to do it right.”
Right now, hateful conduct in the Canadian Forces is lumped into a category of behaviour that involves a military member not measuring up to expectations, the senior Canadian Forces leaders pointed out the CBC.
But Bernie Farber, head of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said it is incomprehensible the military still doesn’t have a definition of hateful conduct after all these decades. “The Somalia inquiry for the 1990s recommended they produce these definitions and they have a strategy to deal with these issues and they just didn’t do that,” said Farber, referring to the public inquiry into the 1993 torture-murder of a Somali teen at the hands of Canadian troops. “Where is the leadership?
Farber points out that over the decades there have been plenty of incidents that should have pushed the military leadership into action.