It will take years to change military culture, head of reform says

The military leader heading up culture reform in the Canadian Armed Forces amid ongoing sexual misconduct investigations says her team is working on a five-year timeline to achieve concrete results.

Lt.-Gen. Jennie Carignan said on Thursday that she’s more hopeful than ever before that the right leaders are around the table to make change happen.

“The horizon that I’m working with right now is five years to have instituted and effective, irreversible positive changes, but we have to understand that keeping vigilance over our culture never ends,” she said.

“In my 35 years of service I have never seen such engagement and commitment to the issue of culture change as it is right now.”

Carignan was speaking during a military technical briefing and providing an “overview of the department’s approach to conduct and culture change.”

Some of the new initiatives include expanding the reach of the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre’s resources by creating regional sites across the country, a mobile app to serve as a centralized online platform for support services, and a program to provide independent legal advice to victims of sexual misconduct.

Carignan said her team – now a group of more than 200 – is currently analyzing how to measure success.

“Success will look like defence team members who feel psychologically safe showing u to work every day…this is the vision that we are setting forward. Now we will design a framework for measurement of this progress, it’s going to be a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data,” she said.

The Liberal government appointed Carignan as chief of professional conduct and culture in April as it launched yet another review into sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces aimed at providing recommendations about what an external reporting system should look like.

More details to come…