The Canadian Liberal Party’s Ideological Gender Integration Will Reduce Frontline Combat Power
By Julian Spencer-Churchill
October 05, 2023
U.S. Army photo by Michael Wilson
As in most militaries in NATO, the Canadian government is belatedly intervening to deal with an epidemic of sexual misconduct. A quarter of female members reported in 2015 of having been at least sexually harassed, a startling value because it is so high, and yet it is lower than equivalent figures in the UK. Despite a high profile initiative to attack the problem, institutional momentum has defied successful intervention. The latest response has been a class-action lawsuit that has seen a surprisingly large number of 19,000 claims for the nearly $700 (U.S.) million compensation set aside. Forty-two percent of the claimants are male.
Concurrently, there is an emerging trend of making conscription gender neutral, in 2015 in Norway, 2018 in Sweden, although similar legislation was defeated in the U.S. Congress in 2021, although it is still being considered. Although only two percent of Canada’s combat arms were women at the height of its operations in Afghanistan in 2010 (250 out of 14,000), the eventual likelihood of gender neutral conscription legislation in Canada requires a serious look at how personnel will be allocated to the combat arms, in particular the infantry, which typically suffers the highest rate of casualties.
However, Canada’s criminal justice system presumes a modicum of privacy and personal space that is simply not met under battlefield or realistic training conditions. The current definition of sexual assault in Canada’s Criminal Code, which has been expanded to include sexual touching that violates the sexual integrity of the person, is incompatible with close living arrangements of military life. The civilian legal process will take months if not years to resolve sexual misconduct cases on the battlefield, and the severe criminal penalties will hang over soldiers on operations, and this will erode morale, shatter cohesion, cripple efficiency, and produce defeats. Worse still, suffering victims will be locked in positions subordinate or alongside their exploiters, although delayed justice is better than no justice, which is the current problem. One solution, which is to remove the accused, violates presumptions of innocence, and disrupts cohesion and leadership. A civilian system of sexual crimes adjudication in combat would effectively criminalize being a young male adult, and quickly inflate the sex crime registry. In contrast, military summary trials enforcing discipline are quick and harsh, but put primacy on reintegrating and destigmatizing the individual to preserve the organization’s combat power.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/10/05/the_canadian_liberal_partys_ideological_gender_integration_will_reduce_frontline_combat_power_984095.html
