Could next defence chief be a woman?

• The search is on for the next leader of the Canadian Armed Forces — and it’s long past time that a woman became chief of the defence staff, observers say.

Canada has had 21 fulltime defence chiefs since 1964, all of them men. The current top commander, Gen. Wayne Eyre, is due to retire this summer.

The military has long grappled with what a damning external report by former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour called a toxic culture of sexual misconduct.

At the same time, it is dealing with what Defence Minister Bill Blair described this week as a recruitment “death spiral.”

The forces need “a woman or an openly queer person” as their next leader if real change is going to happen, said veteran Sharp Dopler.

“We’ve been doing this dance with men at the helm for a very long time,” said Dopler. “Look where we are.”

Until 1992, Canada’s official military policy required that gay people be excised from its ranks.

Throughout the subsequent “LGBT Purge,” as it’s known, military members with LGBTQ+ identities endured persecution and discrimination even after that policy changed.

Dopler was forced out in 1997.

Canada has paid millions of dollars in reparations to the people who were targeted, and the prime minister apologized for the purge in 2017.

But the military’s record of failing to welcome people with different identities lingers. Women still only make up 16 per cent of the Armed Forces, though there is a goal to increase that share to 25 per cent within the next two years.

“It is about time that we have a chief of the defence staff who’s a woman, whether it’s this cycle or the next,” said retired Lt.-gen. Guy Thibault, himself a former vice-chief.

Thibault, who is also chairman of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, said it’s been almost 35 years since women were first allowed to serve in combat roles — about how long it takes to rise to the senior ranks.

“It would be disappointing at this point if we hadn’t developed ... a good bench of senior female general officers who could potentially be a chief of the defence staff,” Thibault said.