Independent oversight urged for military
Alleged misconduct has led to ‘messy, potentially difficult reckoning‘
When Gen. Jonathan Vance took over as chief of the defence staff in 2015, he had a stern message for abusers in the armed forces.
“Any form of harmful sexual behaviour has been and always will be absolutely contrary to good order and discipline,” Vance said in his inaugural address. “It is a threat to morale. It is a threat to operational readiness and a threat to this institution.”
The comments — and Vance’s establishment of “Operation Honour” to combat sexual misconduct within the ranks — were seen as a turning point at the time for an institution rife with such problems.
The situation had been laid bare just before Vance took office in a scathing report from retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps, who concluded that sexual misconduct is “endemic” in the armed forces and that leadership has tolerated abuse.
Nearly six years later, Vance is retired but now faces allegations of inappropriate behaviour, first reported by Global News, and is under military police investigation. He’s denied any wrongdoing.
His successor, Admiral Art Mcdonald, who used his first address in January to apologize to victims of military sexual misconduct, stepped aside this week after only about a month in the top job, and is also under military police investigation.
According to several media reports, that probe is tied to an allegation of sexual misconduct. The Star has not independently verified the allegations against either Vance or McDonald.
Meanwhile, experts who study gender integration and sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces say the main recommendations of the Deschamps report — which could have led to real culture change — have been left to gather dust and not much has changed in the military.
They expressed hope that the probes of Vance and McDonald could finally lead to the creation of an independent oversight body to implement the change that is needed to protect service members from abuse, harassment and inappropriate behaviour.
“I think it’s too late to say the military can do this on its own. I think the last five years have shown that it can’t,” said Maya Eichler, Canada research chair in social innovation and community engagement at Mount Saint Vincent University, who specializes in sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces.
“I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in just new affirmations of, ‘We’ll try harder, we’ll do better on our own.’ I think it is really time for some independent oversight.”
Global News reported this month that Vance allegedly had an ongoing relationship with a woman he significantly outranked, including while he served as chief of the defence staff, and that he allegedly made a sexual comment to another much younger soldier prior to assuming the top job.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan confirmed this week that McDonald voluntarily stepped aside Wednesday and is the subject of a military police investigation. According to CBC, the allegation against McDonald involves a female junior officer and occurred in 2010, when McDonald was a naval captain.
Amid the ongoing probes and calls for even more investigations and reviews — and demands to know who in government knew what and when about the allegations and what did they do about it — experts point to the Deschamps report as a blueprint for change.
It’s long past time the government and the armed forces fully implement its recommendations, they say.
“We don’t even really have a defence force, or government, that collects proper data on this problem — let alone addressing it — so I think external oversight would be amazing for addressing the problem, but also to help the public understand,” said Megan MacKenzie, Simons chair in international law and human security at Simon Fraser University, who specializes in sexual misconduct in the armed forces.
“I think that is a messy, potentially difficult reckoning and no government wants to handle that hot potato.”
A main recommendation from the Deschamps report was the creation of an “independent centre for accountability for sexual assault and harassment” outside of the Canadian Armed Forces.
The centre would be responsible for receiving reports of sexual misconduct, as well as to monitor training, victim support and accountability, and be the “central authority” for the collection of data.
What was instead created in the wake of her report was the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre, which reports to the civilian arm of the Department of National Defence rather than the armed forces.
The centre provides support to victims of misconduct and advice to military leadership, but it typically does not publicly highlight problems within the military, nor does it have direct access to data.
At the very least, critics say, an independent oversight body should be reporting directly to Parliament, and could have the power to publicly criticize what the military is doing wrong in terms of fighting sexual misconduct.
Deschamps, who declined the Star’s request for an interview, told the House of Commons’ defence committee this week, “I have the impression that very little has changed.”
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said Friday that “this unsafe culture must change,” and that a Conservative government would create such an external body.
The defence minister has promised a “thorough and deep independent investigation” separate from the chain of command, and said in a statement that everything is on the table, including the creation of an independent oversight body.
“The Canadian Armed Forces has traditionally had a culture of masculinity. There are toxic elements of masculinity that have risen to the fore on numerous occasions,” Sajjan said.
“To bring about a complete and total culture change, we need to acknowledge this and tackle this head on. Though institutional culture change is complex and takes time, the time for patience is over.”
Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said it’s crucial that an independent have actual teeth, beyond just writing recommendations that the military would never be required to implement.
“Sexual misconduct is a symptom of a problem,” said Duval-Lantoine, who studies gender integration and leadership in the Canadian Armed Forces during the 1990s.
“It’s a bigger problem in terms of leadership, in terms of what the structure rewards and punishes, because you can connect that to the issues of racism, of non-sexual harassment and diversity.”
Eichler acknowledged there have been some positive changes stemming from Operation Honour, including greater awareness about the harms of sexual misconduct in the military, and more training, supports for survivors, and engagement with outside experts.
She said some of the major flaws with Operation Honour is that it didn’t try to understand why sexual misconduct was happening in the first place, and that the armed forces tried to self-monitor its progress rather than have external accountability built into the operation.
“At the root of sexual misconduct is military culture, it’s that broader military culture that needs to be changed,” she said.
This month, McDonald inadvertently illustrated problems with military culture far too well when he tweeted a photo of eight white men sitting around a conference table (with one woman on a screen at the back of the room) with the message:
“Conversations on diversity, inclusion, and culture change are not incompatible with our thirst for operational excellence. I count on my senior leaders to champion culture change. Diversity makes us stronger, inclusion improves our institution.”
After backlash from the public, he tweeted later that day that the makeup of the armed forces’ predominantly white and male leadership needs to change.
“It’s indicative of an institutional problem of a lack of understanding of power and of how power operates,” MacKenzie said of the tweet, noting it would almost certainly have gone through other staff members before being posted.
“That tells you just how blind the leadership is to how power operates and how white and how male the defence force is.”
In an all-staff email on Friday, Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre, acting chief of the defence staff, said the institution must remain resilient in the face of uncertainty.
“We must strive to ensure we look after our people — all of them — and ensure we are an institution in which Canadians can see themselves,” he said. “How we do things is as important as what we do.”
Eichler emphasized that while the political debates on what to do continue, people are still being harmed. Far too often, it’s the survivors of misconduct, including junior-ranking officers, who have had to go public with their stories to bring attention to the issues.
“That’s not a good accountability mechanism,” she said.
There needs to be a national conversation — involving the military, politicians and the public — about what the Canadian armed forces should look like, she said.
“The problem is once you open that box, you have to ask all sorts of questions: What does a soldier look like? What is the identity as a military member? What are the values?” Eichler said.
“That’s why there’s so much resistance, and why it’s so difficult, and why the military can’t do it on its own.”
“The Canadian Armed Forces has traditionally had a culture of masculinity. There are toxic elements of masculinity that have risen to the fore on numerous occasions.”
DEFENCE MINISTER HARJIT SAJJAN
Liberal fireball François-Philippe Champagne may be brand new to his portfolio as innovation minister, but already he says he will stop at nothing until he “onshores” enough pharmaceutical know-how and investment to make sure Canadians are pandemic-proof from now on.
There’s an urgency in his pitch, tight timelines in his mind and a calendar jammed full of virtual meetings with CEOs around the world.
But while Champagne’s energy is formidable, so are the challenges he faces.
The federal government’s history with the pharmaceutical industry has been anything but smooth. Plus, onshoring, by definition, involves a large amount of government participation and he doesn’t have a budget set aside specifically for what he calls his “mission.” And on top of all that, the political optics of cosying up to big pharmaceutical companies are just plain uncomfortable.
In an interview this week, Champagne admits readily that “onshoring” is about resiliency, and not about efficiency. He wants to persuade and entice companies involved in making vaccines, therapeutic drugs and biomanufacturing more generally to set up shop in Canada, with the goal of making sure the supply of anything Canadians need to fight a future pandemic are made readily, right here at home.
It’s the opposite of globalization, the mantra of the past few decades that has led companies to source their materials all over the world for the lowest price and most efficient production.
“I think there’s been a rethinking, that we need to put more emphasis on resiliency. I think people demand that our supply chains be more resilient. And I think companies feel the benefit of having supply chains that are more resilient,” Champagne says.
The thing is, there are hundreds of ingredients and parts involved in making each vaccine, therapeutic medicine or even syringes and gloves. And Canada has not been a major player in that global industry for years and years.
Champagne wants to change that by March 12 — the end date for his consultations with industry players so that his officials can compile the sector’s commitments to move to Canada, send it to the Department of Finance and nail down some funding in time for the mid-April budget.
For sure, Champagne isn’t starting from nothing. He highlights dozens of research and development initiatives the federal government has helped fund during the pandemic, and points to Novavax’s recent commitment to produce its COVID-19 vaccine in Montreal starting later this year as just a sign of what’s to come.
“You’ll see in the coming months, a number of deals coming,” he says.
The biomanufacturing firms are drawn to Canada, he argues, because we are smart, skilled, hard-working, diverse and stable.
But he does start with some serious baggage.
For decades, the federal government has had a bitter relationship with Big Pharma, urging the industry to increase its R&D in Canada while at the same time resisting demands for better patent protection, quicker approvals for new products and better market access.
In the never-ending tug-ofwar for market share between generic and brand-name companies, Big Pharma believed the federal government too often took the side of the generics, and would only listen to the demands of multinational companies under duress — in a lawsuit or a trade negotiation.
Two recent developments entrenched their suspicions: a Trudeau government decision to change the way pharmaceutical prices are controlled, and a Liberal election commitment to embrace pharmacare.
Health Canada has been trying for years now to change the formula for the board that controls maximum drug prices in Canada so that Canadians won’t have to pay so much in the future. Those changes are on hold, again, because of the pandemic. But they’re due to come into force this summer.
And if full-fledged pharmacare is ever to become a reality, federal and provincial governments will need those lower drug prices to be able to afford a national plan.
Still, that’s a big “if” right now. The federal NDP put forward a private member’s bill to move forward on pharmacare only to see it defeated this week by the Liberals and other parties.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told the Star on Thursday that he has no intention of giving up that fight. But with the Liberals focusing their budget on the pandemic and immediate economic recovery, it’s becoming clear that any intentions on rolling out pharmacare are a long way off.
Does a short delay in drug price changes and an indefinite delay in pharmacare amount to a signal to global manufacturers that they should feel compelled to do business here in Canada?
Champagne recognizes that despite all his urgency, the March 12 deadlines and his commitment to announce new deals in the next few months, he has a long game to play here too. Firms may persuaded by the “health emergency” to manufacture in Canada right now, Champagne said, but larger discussions about how life sciences, patents, research and development and drugs are treated in Canada will have to take place eventually.
“The focus is clearly now on the health emergency, certainly as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “At the same time that you do that, you can have these discussions with respect to long-term policy.”
History has shown that even a high-energy minister with a sense of urgency will also need a deep pool of fortitude to make a success of that.
WASHINGTON—At 5 p.m. Monday, the funeral bell began to toll on Mount St. Alban, selected in 1896 as the site of the National Cathedral because it was “the most commanding spot in the entire Washington area.” The majestic stone church was built over the course of 83 years, according to authors Mary Yakush and Erik Vochinsky, in order that “people of all faiths would gather to pray, mourn the passing of world leaders, and to confront pressing moral and social issues.”
It has often been a national mourning spot — four presidents have received state funerals there, one is buried there, seven more have been memorialized in services there. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon there before he was assassinated. This week’s tintinnabulation marked not the passing of a single leader, but of a vast swath of citizens in every corner of the country.
“Bongggggg,” the bell sounded, its note resonating for six seconds, barely starting to recede before the clapper struck the bowl again.
“Bongggggg.” And then six seconds later, again. “Bongggggg.”
It was bright, the sky blue like highlighter ink, a few fluffy white clouds over the horizon. The temperature was near freezing. Several dozen people stood silently on the lawn between patches of snow. Seniors in COVID-19 masks alone, a couple embracing and gazing up at the steeples, a mother and child with a dog on a leash.
“Bongggggg,” the bell sounded again. And again. And again.
It would strike 500 times, to mark 500,000 American deaths from the coronavirus. The first of those was publicly reported in Washington state slightly less than a year ago — on Feb. 29, 2020. Then, with 70 known cases, an atmosphere of fear was setting in for some, though then-president Donald Trump tried to insist on calm — “there is no reason to panic,” he said after that first death, days after characterizing media fears of the virus as a “hoax.”
And then.
Toilet paper shortages. Overwhelmed hospitals. Business closures. Sourdough bread hobbyists. Zoom meetings. Masks. “Bongggggg.”
Fights over masks. Anti-lockdown protests. A plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. The promise from Trump, constantly delivered, that the county was “rounding the corner.” “Bongggggg.”
A mobile hospital unit constructed of tents in Central Park in New York City. A secret disaster morgue made up of truck trailers in a parking lot in Washington, D.C. Bodies found stored in a shed outside a nursing home in Andover, New Jersey. Bodies in refrigerated trucks in Fort Worth, Texas.
“Bongggggg.” The tolling of the bell in Washington this week was relentless, like the virus has seemed.
So many deaths. The scope, in under one year, is hard to fathom. Five hundred thousand is more than the number of Americans killed in combat during both World Wars and the Vietnam War combined. Half a million people: it is almost 10 Rogers Centres full of people; it is the population of the city of Atlanta.
Nearly 1,400 deaths per day, every day. Almost one every minute.
When presidents are laid to rest here, the pews inside are packed with royalty and elected officials and celebrities. Long eulogies detail the lives they lived, the things they did, the memories of the people who grieve. This week, there was just the silent witness of local residents and passing dogwalkers, and the tolling of the bell.
“Bongggggg.” You could try, hearing a strike, to visualize a single person whose life had ended prematurely because of the pandemic. Someone you knew, or heard about, or read about.
Maybe Rose Giroux Kalinski, who according to NBC was a physical therapist from Oklahoma who loved Hawaiian ham sandwiches and throwing football tailgate parties, and whose husband and children and friends remember her only ever wanting to help people before she died in November, just days before her 49th birthday.
Or Helenmaire White, the former salon owner in southeast Washington who, according to the D.C. school board, was beloved not just by her five children and nine grandchildren but by the hundreds of students at Ballou STAY High School in Anacostia where she taught, who remembered her for extravagant hair shows, potluck meals, and for making “everyone feel important” right up until she died earlier this month at age 62.
Each strike of the bell commemorates 1,000 dead Americans.
You can barely conjure the thought of one of them before the bell tolls again.
It’s hard to contemplate, too, how much else has been lost. The health of the many millions who have been hospitalized. Jobs. Businesses. A national sense of invulnerability to this kind of crisis. Stability. The confidence that in times of crisis, the U.S. might pull together rather than come apart. “Bongggggg.”
It is entirely possible that some of those who stood listening to the bell’s memorial rhythm had already been vaccinated. More than 92,000 D.C. residents have been at least partially vaccinated, and all residents will be able to book appointments by the end of the week. It’s a hopeful part of this pandemic story — Trump’s promises that the virus would go away proved foolish, but his prediction that a vaccine would be developed in record time proved accurate. The delivery of those vaccines has not been seamless, but it is proceeding fairly quickly. And over the past month, new case rates have been declining steeply.
But it is not over. In the U.S., even the encouraging decline in new cases could not hide a number this week that is higher than last year’s spring and summer peaks. The death toll continues to mount. One hundred thousand people died of coronavirus in the U.S. between the end of May and the middle of September 2020. One hundred thousand people died of coronavirus between Jan. 19 and Feb. 22 this year.
On Monday, the funeral bell at the cathedral tolled every six seconds for 49 minutes. During the time it was ringing, 83 American COVID-19 patients died.