Military misconduct: this time, take action
Another week, another allegation of sexual impropriety levelled at a member of the Canadian military’s top brass.
This time, the Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces jointly announced Friday that Maj.-gen. Dany Fortin, the officer overseeing Canada’s vaccine rollout, was under investigation for sexual misconduct concerning an incident more than 30 years ago.
Nothing has been proven, of course. Fortin, who vehemently denies any wrongdoing, is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
But there’s no escaping the fact that his case is but the latest in a string of sexual misconduct allegations that have rocked Canada’s military high command this year.
Earlier this month, Maj.-gen. Peter Dawe, commander of Canada’s Special Forces, was placed on indefinite leave after reports that four years ago he wrote a letter of support for an officer who had sexually assaulted a fellow officer’s wife.
In March, Vice-admiral Haydn Edmundson, commander of the military’s human resources section, was put on leave while investigators probe allegations he acted inappropriately with female subordinates in the late 1990s.
And then there are the investigations announced earlier this year into alleged inappropriate behaviour by Gen. Jonathan Vance and Admiral Art Mcdonald, both defence chiefs of staff.
The multiple ongoing military investigations suggest not much has changed since a scathing report in 2015 by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Marie Deschamps, which found sexual misconduct “endemic” in the Canadian Armed Forces.
As we wrote in this space in March, the latest scandals strongly suggest the military remains a closed system where chain of command is all-powerful, and sexual misconduct by male senior officers, despite rhetoric to the contrary, is still tolerated.
Deschamps’ key recommendation from six years ago — the creation of an independent agency outside the military’s chain of command to investigate sexual misconduct in the ranks — was ignored by successive federal governments, first the Tories under Stephen Harper and then the Liberals under Justin Trudeau.
This year’s revelations prompted the Liberals in April to again turn to a former Supreme Court of Canada justice, Louise Arbour, to lead yet another external review into sexual misconduct in the Canadian military.
Arbour says she accepted the job only because she was given a broad mandate to take a piercing look at not only how the military deals with sexual misconduct, but also the entire command structure system to see if it is part of the problem.
It’ll be at least a year before Arbour returns with a final roadmap for action, although she has the option of issuing interim recommendations.
Prime Minister Trudeau acknowledged when Arbour was appointed that the military’s system for dealing with sexual misconduct is broken.
When Arbour comes back in 2022 with, almost certainly, a blueprint for sweeping change, Ottawa must not sidestep the issue again — as it so shamefully did after the Deschamps report.