Is Canada Moving Backward When it Comes to Addressing Military Sexual Misconduct: June 2024 Arbour Report Card Update

The last few years have been called a ‘watershed moment’ for addressing sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces. After dozens of high profile cases of sexual misconduct and a class action lawsuit showing systemic problems, Justice Louise Arbour issued 48 recommendations for addressing this problem in 2022. Over two years later, our Arbour Report Card, which tracks progress on each of these recommendations, has found that the CAF seems to be moving backward on some of these recommendations. Rather than progress and implementation, we found setbacks, roll backs, and general failure to follow through. This calls into question whether this has indeed been a watershed moment, or if the CAF is back to business as usual, with victims of sexual misconduct abandoned.

This post tracks some of the biggest setbacks- for a look at all of the recommendations and their status, check out our full report card here.

The first major set of recommendations to focus on are #7 and #9 (both associated with establishing the option for complainants to go through the Canadian Human Rights Commission for sexual harassment or discrimination allegations).

For the first time, this Report Card has reversed these two recommendations’ status from previously being slotted as ‘Implemented’ to now being categorized as ‘Underway‘. This is due to new information on the limited extent to which these major changes to reporting have been communicated and disseminated throughout the organization, raising questions on their implementation in the substantive, and not just formal, sense. This is just one example of the numerous setbacks that the June 2024 update details, and one part of a more general concern over timelines in the CAF’s culture change plans.

As of June 2024, 14 recommendations have been implemented, 33 are underway, and 1 remains to be started. These numbers reflect mixed progress since the Report Card’s last update in February 2024, where 16 recommendations had been implemented, 30 were underway, and 2 had not yet been started. As with the last Report Card update, these results continue to undermine the milestones and timelines announced by Minister Blair in his December 2023 statement on culture change reforms. 

The dominant theme of this update is an overall pattern of delays in original timelines.  Several recommendations have been pushed back from their initially announced date for implementation – some well over a year from their scheduled date. A number of these delays also carry a domino effect, where holdups in certain areas impede progress on other fronts. Such is the case for Recommendation #11 on amending the Duty to Report. Here, the continued use of the Defence Administrative Order and Directive (DAOD) outlining the Duty means that several other policies and directives that reference this DAOD cannot be updated to reflect culture change recommendations. The fact that Recommendation #11 has been pushed 6-months past its initially scheduled implementation date means that yet another CAF training season, where a large number of new recruits receive their basic training, still instruct with this now outdated, problematic approach.

The External Monitor’s Third Status Report cited a misuse of working groups, arbitrary consultations that return to the debate of implementation itself rather than developing the strategy for doing so, and a lack of accountability in new policies as bureaucratic delays impeding culture change efforts. While a comprehensive plan with timelines for all recommendations was announced for release a number of months ago, this is still not yet publicly available. Once published, this multi-year plan will offer important insight into the strategy and metrics being used by DND to move the organization towards its goal of culture change. Further, it will establish a concrete benchmark from which to measure progress beyond the only partially available schedules and timelines announced by DND since these efforts began over two years ago.

See the full updated Report Card here.