44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 19, 2024 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, the Minister of National Defence has made it clear that he is committed to ensuring that the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces are workplaces where all members, military and civilian, feel supported, respected and included. While much has been accomplished toward this goal, there is still more to do.
Bill C-66 is another critical step toward lasting institutional reform, as well as toward strengthening trust and confidence in the military justice system. It is the next step in the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces' efforts to implement recommendations from the independent external comprehensive review and the third independent review of the National Defence Act.
Apart from the recommendations addressed in Bill C-66, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces have also made progress on recommendations from the minister's advisory panel on systemic racism and discrimination report and the national apology advisory committee report.
Overall, these four reviews have helped define how DND and CAF are undertaking changes to the military justice system and culture change. That is why today I would like to provide the House with an overview of these independent external reviews and the progress the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces have made to implement their recommendations to date.
I will begin with the independent external comprehensive review, also known as the IECR. This review was launched in April 2021 and led by former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour to examine harassment and sexual misconduct in National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, as well as policies, procedures, programs, practices and culture, including the military justice system.
I apologize; I should have mentioned at the outset that I need to split my time with the hon. member for Hamilton Mountain.
The final report was made public on May 30, 2022, and the minister at the time welcomed all 48 recommendations. When the final report was received, there were 17 recommendations for which implementation could actually be undertaken immediately. These included, but were not limited to, the implementation of recommendation 48, appointing an external monitor to oversee the implementation efforts of the IECR's recommendations.
The minister at the time appointed Madame Jocelyne Therrien as the external monitor, who provides monthly progress reports to the minister on the implementation of the IECR's recommendation. She also provides biannual progress reports that are made available publicly.
The minister also announced the implementation of recommendations 7 and 9, changes to the military grievance and harassment process, in August 2023. With the implementation of these recommendations, any CAF member who has experienced sexual harassment can now choose to direct their complaint directly to the Canadian Human Rights Commission without first exhausting the internal grievance and harassment process.
More recently, in June 2024, the minister announced that in response to recommendations 1 and 2, the CAF had issued interim policy guidance to abolish the definition of sexual misconduct for its policies and to include sexual assault as the stand-alone definition, referring to the Criminal Code as the applicable law.
In response to these recommendations, the term “sexual misconduct” has been replaced with three new terms: “conduct deficiencies of a sexual nature”, “harassment of a sexual nature” and “crimes of a sexual nature”. Sexual assault is also included as a distinct definition in relevant policies. These changes will provide better coherence and clarity, reduce confusion and better capture the range of inappropriate conduct.
The minister also announced the repeal of the duty to report regulations in response to recommendation 11. Madame Arbour found that these regulations, while well intended, took away the agency and control of survivors in the reporting process, potentially leading to the revictimization of those they were meant to protect.
The repeal of the duty to report came into effect on June 30, 2024. As we see with Bill C-66, the department is seeking to remove the CAF's investigative and prosecutorial jurisdiction over the Criminal Code sexual offences committed in Canada, which would address a part of recommendation 5 of the IECR. Since December 2021, all new Criminal Code sexual offence charges are now being laid at the civilian justice system and no new sexual offence charges are being adjudicated in the military justice system. Bill C-66 would also address recommendations from the third independent review of the National Defence Act.
In November 2020, the hon. Justice Fish was appointed to conduct an independent review of specified provisions of the National Defence Act and their operation. In June 2021, the minister tabled the report before Parliament. Justice Fish provided the minister with 107 wide-ranging recommendations that support the ongoing modernization of the military justice system, military policing, military police oversight and the grievance process. This is the most comprehensive independent review and far-reaching examination of the military justice system since the reviews led by former chief justice of Canada Brian Dickson in the late 1990s.
Bill C-66 would address eight recommendations from the review. The amendments would seek to, among other things, modify the process for the appointment of the Canadian Forces provost marshal, the director of military prosecutions and the director of defence counsel services. They would also expand the class of persons who are eligible to be appointed as a military judge to include non-commissioned members, and change the title of the Canadian Forces provost marshal to the provost marshal general, to align with the titles of other senior designations in the CAF. The amendments would seek to strengthen trust in the military justice authorities operating independently from the chain of command and to bolster the trust and confidence of Canadians in the military justice system.
DND and CAF are also building on previous external and internal reports and recommendations focused on racism and discrimination. The minister's advisory panel on systemic racism and discrimination was created to identify ways of eliminating racism, prejudice, discrimination and gender bias within the military. Through the report, DND and the CAF have established the director of anti-racism implementation, formerly the anti-racism secretariat, under chief professional conduct and culture to inform and focus our institutional efforts to address racism and discrimination. We are also collaborating with other government departments in the development of Canada's anti-racism strategy and expanding the availability of anti-racism resources.
There are many intersections between this report and the national apology advisory committee report, which included eight recommendations for the Government of Canada. These included an apology for the treatment of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, the largest all-Black military unit in Canada's history. The government made this historic apology in July 2022.
The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces maintain an unwavering commitment to implementing the recommendations of former Supreme Court justices Arbour and Fish, as well as the recommendations from the minister's advisory panel on systemic racism and discrimination and the national apology advisory committee. The legislative changes proposed in Bill C-66 would play a critical role in helping us implement some of the recommendations from former justices Arbour and Fish and help rebuild trust in the military justice system.
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Madam Speaker, in my previous role, I had the great privilege of sitting on the national defence committee, and I dealt with a great many issues related to our Canadian Armed Forces, from housing to procurement, access to medical care and supports, recruitment retention and closing the commitment capability gap. I was honoured to get a near first-hand account of many of the issues the DND and the CAF were facing every single day.
While these are all incredibly important issues, they desperately need the immediate and full attention of the government. There was one in particular that stuck with me, an issue that my colleague on the status of women committee has seen and studied far too often: violence against women.
In this session alone, the committee has studied violence against indigenous women in the context of resource development and inter-partner violence, and we are currently in the middle of a study on coercive behaviour. In fact, in the last Parliament, I studied the very issue that led to today's legislation, which is sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Having sat on these two committees at length, so far the intersection of national defence and violence against women is an issue that I, along with my colleagues, am acutely aware of and uniquely positioned to speak to. Sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces is particularly close to my heart, as I have the honour of representing the brave woman who first brought the issue into the public sphere 26 long years ago by appearing on the front cover of Maclean's magazine.
Dawn McIlmoyle appeared with the words “Rape in the military” emblazoned on the front page beside her photo. I honestly believe that the discourse we are having at several committees at the highest level in the Canadian political process would not be happening today if it were not for individuals such as Dawn, as well as the litany of other survivors who have courageously chosen to come forward with their stories.
To each and every single one of them, I am so sorry that their government has failed them time and time again, but now we thank them for bravely sharing their experiences with us. We as legislators need to hear it. We as legislators need to act on it. There is so much we need to do.
While Bill C-66 is a start that I look forward to perhaps studying in that committee, if they will have me, it is a very limited start, and there is a Herculean amount of legislative and cultural changes in the CAF, particularly in leadership, that need to happen to properly address this crisis. On this last point, I want to make something very clear. It will take years to change this culture.
I have had the pleasure of speaking with General Eyre on many occasions, as well as many other members of the CAF, from flag officers to privates, and I have received nothing but the utmost assurances that they are taking the issue very seriously. I have never doubted any of them for a second, but all of us sitting in this room are not fools. They are not going to allow a CAF member who could be a liability to the matter to speak to someone sitting on the national defence committee. This is why the entire public relations branch exists.
I trust the new chief of the defence staff, General Carignan, will take this matter extremely seriously. It is up to us to ensure that she and her team, as well as the Department of National Defence, have the tools at their disposal to get the job done.
I would like to highlight exactly what I mean when I say Bill C-66 is limited in scope. I think the best way to do this is to read into the record the testimony that someone far more knowledgeable on this matter than I had to say on April 17 of this year at the national defence committee.
On that day, Patrick White, a witness who came forward to committee, shared his own sexual harassment story within the CAF as it related to access to information, a key point of contention in properly addressing misconduct in the armed forces. He spoke of the grievance process, the very method through which this entire process starts. It is massively flawed. One of his many salient points is as follows:
The grievance system, as it stands, requires individuals like me and others to spend our limited part-time, our free time, to fight a system that is paid and employed full-time to fight back. That's the challenge I have. I am not an expert on military regulation, military law, etc., but they have access to all of those resources. They also have access to legal advice on those issues. Members don't. What annoys me more than anything is when senior members who have never been affected in the way some of us have flippantly say, “If you don't like it, grieve it,” knowing full well that they've never had to go through those processes, or maybe they did in a minor way and had success.
Unfortunately, Bill C-66 would not amend the grievance section of the National Defence Act in any way, shape or form. It addresses a very specific element of a crisis that is caked in generations of institutional rot, flippant indifference and outright arrogance in the Canadian Armed Forces, National Defence and Parliament. In that same committee meeting was Gary Walbourne, a former national defence ombudsman. He actually had to go to war with the government, so to speak, to get the information he needed to do his job. He said this:
We're talking about people who have been put in positions of authority. There are guidelines on what they're supposed to do. They're well written.... However, it is funny that the farther you get up the ladder, the thinner the air gets—I'm sure that's what happens—and the blood rushes to their heads or their egos.
We have a system in place.... It's circumvented by people in the system.
How do we change the culture? I'll go back to this again: We have to start rewarding proper behaviour and punishing bad behaviour. Why do we promote people when they do the wrong thing? Others come forward and offer themselves up, saying, “Listen, guys, this is what's going wrong. Can we get a little help here?” These people are turned on.
You absolutely have a fundamental flaw here, but it's not with your policies. Your policies need updating, sure they do, and you need to adjust a few, add a few things to them and bring in a few more nuances and codicils there, but what we have to get at is the behaviour of the people currently sitting in the seats.
Mr. Walbourne is extremely clear: We do not have a policy problem; we have a people problem. We cannot fix our policy problem if we do not fix the people problem. Any framework set up by any legislation will just fall victim to the same institutional cancer. Every single policy framework in DND and CAF related to justice for victims and survivors has fallen victim to it since women first entered our armed forces, and, quite frankly, this cancer festered for decades beforehand.
Again, to quote committee witness Patrick White:
If I could leave the committee with one final point to think about, it's that if you really want to get to culture change and solve these issues, you need to look at every single aspect of the system and understand how it feeds back in. That includes the honours and recognition system, the promotion system, the grievance system and the military police system—all of it—but with a central view of what the effect would be on these sorts of things that we get to.
Correcting the colossal problem starts with us. It comes through our willingness to, first, actually address the change and, second, strengthen, entrench and enforce legislation and policy that holds public officials accountable, including people in the Canadian Armed Forces, public servants and us, as legislators. While Bill C-66 does address some very specific issues in the CAF, there is still no single 35-page bill that will solve a crisis that was 50 years in the making. Bill C-66 needs to be the first of a suite of legislation brought forward in this place to fix this crisis in the CAF, and it needs to continue past the Liberal government, whenever that may be, into the next, whatever it may be. It also needs continued support from all parties involved. Without that willingness to move forward, men, women and marginalized Canadians will continue to be victimized, not only in our armed forces but also in our public service and society at large.
I would like to end by addressing the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces, both current and former.
To those who are victims, to those who are survivors, we have failed them. We know we have, but change is coming because of what they have told us. The vast majority of armed forces members recognize there is a problem, but they feel helpless because of a broken system that punishes speaking out or drawing attention to inappropriate behaviour. To them, I say to stay strong. I am not here to admonish them.
Finally, to those who are a part of this problem, they are complicit. This goes for everyone from the new recruit right up to the flag officer, those who think they are entitled to another person's agency because “that is just how it goes here” and those who continuously look away because they believe the individual is a really good guy. If what I have said today upsets them, good. I want them to be upset. I want them to lie awake every night and worry that the system that has enabled and protected their behaviour for generations will collapse and expose them for what they are. They have no place in the Canadian Armed Forces, and they never have.
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