DEFENSIVE DEPARTMENT

Earlier this week, Defence Minister Jason Kenney ordered his department to release data gathered during an investigation into its Joint Personnel Support Unit (JPSU), which is tasked with taking care of ill and injured soldiers while helping troops transition to civilian life. Although many laud the JPSU concept, the program reportedly suffers from understaffing and underfunding, leaving people to suffer without the help they need.

Kenney was forced to step up because the Department of National Defence, which had already been working on a report since 2013, quietly shelved the project and said it wouldn’t be releasing any details until 2017. Four years. Not good enough, said DND ombudsman Gary Walbourne, who wanted the data gathered thus far so he could finish the work. He’ll get it now.

This is becoming a bit of a theme of late for a department that is stumbling from crisis to crisis with seemingly no end in sight.

First, there was the recent report into the military police’s handling of war veteran Stuart Langridge’s suicide, which turned up “serious flaws” in three separate probes conducted by poorly supervised military investigators who struggled with basic police work. Not only did the department try to keep its responses to the report recommendations secret, it was both openly and surreptitiously vindictive toward the dead soldier’s family.

Then there’s the report by retired judge Marie Deschamps on sexual misconduct in the military, which found evidence of a “sexualized culture” resulting in harassment and assault that is often overlooked — if it’s even reported at all. As if it weren’t bad enough that (thankfully) outgoing Chief of Defence Staff Tom Lawson agreed to only two of Deschamps’ recommendations outright, he then went on the CBC and argued “biological wiring” was ultimately to blame for the military’s problems (he later apologized, obviously). And now this. Here’s the thing: people love to make a big show of “supporting the troops.” They put yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and don red T-shirts on Fridays and stand and clap when soldiers rappel down from the rafters at hockey games. But supporting the troops also means demanding better of their employer. Maybe DND and the Canadian Forces should worry less about keeping their various crises under wraps for fear of how they’ll play in public and get down to the difficult business of fixing the myriad problems making life more difficult than it should be for our soldiers.