Missing the Target
and the contested space of conduct and culture
If you have been living under a rock, let me break the news to you: over the past month and a half, concerning incidents have come out from the Canadian army:
The Blue Hackle Mafia Facebook group, in which a number of members from the Cameron Highlanders made inappropriate posts and comments;
The Royal Canadian Military Police (RCMP) arrested and charged two serving member of the 22ème Régiment royal (Vandoos) for attempt to facilitate a terrorist attack;
The Army suspended five soldiers after a video of them doing a Nazi salute emerged.
To add some flair to this crap cupcake, the Canadian Armed Forces’ hateful conduct tracker has seen a doubling of reported cases. The emphasis here is important; a DND spokesperson noted to Global News’ Sean Boyton that “the data only reflects when reports are received, not necessarily when the incident occurred.” This opens the door to the fact there might be instances when members did not report the “hateful conduct.”
I am not here to debate the data; I do not know how the Hateful Conduct Incident Tracking System functions. Reporting rates, how the military tracks cases that are reported years later, what sort of “hateful conduct” is included… are metrics that matter and can change how we view the data. We could comfort ourselves that the data could be the result of increased awareness and trust in the chain of command, but the most recent Statistics Canada survey on sexual misconduct (which revealed that likelihood and willingness to report incidents has not improved over the years) would suggest otherwise. The truth is, it is difficult to know without qualitative analysis.
A couple months beforehand, in May 2025, the Government quietly released the fifth report of the External Monitor (remember her? from that Arbour report thing?). Oh and we also have this case of a Colonel being fined for calling one of his superiors (although not in his direct chain of command) a “f–ing c–t.”
Conduct issues are silent, until they’re not. And we assume the culture has changed and that nothing is happening until extreme examples resurface.
This weekend, this is what we are going to sit with.
And it is going to suck, big time.
Before You Buckle Your Seat Belt
It is as all of this hateful conduct news unfolded that my M.A. Supervisor, Queen’s University Professor Allan English released his latest book From Failure to Failure: The Canadian Military’s Attempt to Manage its Sexual Misconduct Crises, 2000-2022. To help in my PhD dissertation research and to give myself a break from cumbersome archival research, I have spent this past weekend reading it.
Another stackie on conduct was long-overdue, and this monograph came (unfortunately) at the perfect time. My analysis of the latest news will be interlaced with Allan’s analysis of the fight against sexual misconduct since 2000, my thoughts on the book and on CAF culture, and how they all connect with incessant flow of news regarding conduct in the military.
Last chance to strap in – given how emotionally uncomfortable this is going to be, I recommend grabbing your favourite chocolates. You’ll need the dopamine and serotonin hits throughout.
Success, Insanity, Incompetence, or Malice?
From Failure to Failure starts with English interrogating whether Churchill’s “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm” is applicable to the CAF’s attempts at “eliminat[ing] harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour” within its ranks.1
Before you get reassured with this approach, English brings you back to reality very quickly. While Churchill intended to underline the importance of resilience, learning lessons, and not giving up reaching the desired outcome, English suggests that the military has taken this quote a bit too literally. To him, the Canadian Armed Forces has declared success without having eliminated sexual violence in its ranks, going from failure to failure.
In fact – and to mangle citations and lose my audience before this piece hits 1,000 words, the history English is documenting could be interpreted as one of insanity, often quoted as meaning “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”2 The issue with going with the insanity plea, English would tell us (and he will tell me as he reads this humble stackie - hi Al!) is that we could apply the insanity defence or – more simply and without angering my lawyer friends and critics – incompetence.
Except that, after at least three decades of failure, the military can no longer plea incompetence.
Anyone who has any meaningful conversations about defence and military culture with Allan English knows that one of his cardinal rules is to follow Hanlon’s razor: “one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” In the early days of my graduate career (which coincided with the first three years of Operation HONOUR), Allan would often cite this maxim when I would get heated over a variety of matters, the most prominent of which was conduct and culture issues within the military. He has now thrown it out the window, arguing that Hanlon’s razor is no longer a useful analytical tool for the study of culture change within the Canadian Armed Forces. He writes:
in looking at culture change or transformation initiatives over the past 30 years, which a true comprehensive culture change would be, a pattern of behaviour emerges in which one can detect, if not malice, then at least hostility on the part of senior Canadian military leaders towards change that would threaten their power and influence and control of the organization (p. 17, emphasis added)'.
Mind you, this conclusion is all the more biting as his analysis includes the first year of Chief Professional Conduct and Culture and the immediate response of the government to former Justice Louise Arbour, which was a time of cautious optimism for many. The book ends its analysis in 2022, and sitting here in 2025 – after years of engagement with the military and the government – the history English presents and the prognosis he offers are convincing and impactful.
Hold On Now – Hostility or even Malice?
Yes, and to many (especially those who have directly experienced the violence the CAF has long allowed in its ranks), it was a conclusion they had made years ago. What Allan English does here is putting the suspicions’ of many down to paper in a thorough historical analysis.
The arguments as to why the military should have known better is simply because it was not the first time it pursued culture change (and therefore failed). He highlights that even the Hillier transformation attempt, which enjoyed a high degree of buy-in at the highest level of the organization, was not entirely successful. In principle, unification, gender integration, the post-Somalia reforms, the Management Command and Control Re-engineering team, the Hillier transformation, and the Leslie transformation should have opened the military’s eyes to what the “comprehensive culture change” Deschamps recommended in 2015 entailed.
To add insult to injury, English underlines that by the time leaders such as General Tom Lawson and General Jonathan Vance took some of the most senior roles of the military, they had been taught principles of organizational culture and culture change at the Canadian Forces College. This also means that these leaders had access to experts that could have supported them in the change process, had they wanted to.
The history English tells is one of an organization unwilling to admit its own weaknesses and that passes the blame onto the individual, and rejects external support and monitoring. The main tactics he identified include:
using “doublespeak,” i.e., using military jargon to muddy the water for a civilian audience (e.g., calling Operation HONOUR a “campaign plan” or saying that Operation HONOUR had “culminated")
doublespeak that is at times at odds with Canadian military culture. The definition of Op HONOUR as a “campaign plan” did not align to the way the CAF pursues operations. Jon Vance knew it, embodied by his Canadian Forces College paper (which he turned into a book chapter in an edited volume) “Tactics Without Strategy or Why the Canadian Forces Do NOT Campaign.”
On a personal note, a number of service members would highlight that the “CAF does not campaign” when I mentioned Op HONOUR was a campaign plan – in their views, it showed my lack of understanding of the military and Operation HONOUR – and it felt like a “gotcha” moment that would allow them to shut down the conversation.
engaging in a “flurry of activities” (an observation shared by former Justice Arbour), i.e., publishing new policies, creating new structures, making announcements after the other – giving the impression that change is happening.
Note that the flurry of activities comments also deals with: lack of strategy and the quality of the policies and activities. For example, one of the issues that arose with Operation HONOUR is that some policies were contradictory.
The flurry of activities also take the form of a plethora of consultations, town halls and meetings with CAF members across the country, experts, and people with lived experience. Those engagements often lacked direction and seemed performative.
The lack of a proper strategy (yes, The Path to Dignity and Respect exists, but it was published in the Fall of 2020, over 4 years after Op HONOUR was launched and 26 months after Op HONOUR was supposed to have entered its “Maintain and Hold” phase, and its fate after the “culmination” of Operation HONOUR less than 6 months later is unclear.
Those issues have the effects of stalling change and manufacturing culture change fatigue, with the longer effects being loss of trust. These repeated cycles, especially under Operation HONOUR and in the early stages of CPCC (reminder: this book ends at 2022), did or were doing little to effect long lasting change.
The culprit, ironically, is culture.3
Personalizing Culture
In From Failure to Failure, Allan English underlines aspects of the Canadian military culture that have led to this state of affairs: adhesion to the warrior ethos, the tyranny of the posting cycle, and the elevation of operational primacy and the “tooth to tail” ratio to the detriment of critical organizational considerations.
What I want to focus on is the “bad apple” narrative, and the reduction of culture to an individual behaviour problem. To be even more specific, I want to discuss the personalization of conduct issues and how culture is tied to identity. The dynamic worth exploring is how criticism of the culture becomes a criticism of service members, their service, and their morality – and, at its heart, their character and honour.
At long as we do not detangle ourselves from this dynamic, we will not effectively address any form of societal issue (whether it is violence in the military or in society writ large).
Do not get me wrong, I do get this defensiveness – culture and identity are often inextricable from one another, and it is undeniable that the military offers a stronger sense of identity than any other professions.
Hearing about the imperative for culture change can then become personal, become an attack on one’s identity – and even worse at times, on one’s service.
This is where we get to the real knot where organizational culture and the self confront each other.
The military – as any organization (and I’ll get back on that later) – has two sets of values: espoused values (think, what’s outlined in Trusted to Serve) vs. values-in-use (think, “truth, duty, valour, don’t get caught” or “Hop on Her.” or the values reflected in the members’ behaviours). Usually, it is values-in-use that influence the way an organization is structure, and this structure in turn reinforces these values-in-use. In short, the way the military organizes itself shapes behaviours.
To make it clearer, think of:
What kind of performance gets you a positive PaCE? What kind of performance gets you promoted?
What kind of roles and postings are considered the most prestigious?
Whose trades are most represented in the senior leadership (both NCM and officers)?
But it can go to discipline as well, and mostly would answer the question: what – and whose – behaviour gets disciplined and how?
Unfortunately, it can happen that someone can be promoted or even posted to the role of their choice despite unconscionable behaviour. We have examples in Captain Rainville, who was posted to the Canadian Airborne Regiment in 1992 and was not removed before deployment to Somalia despite being involved in a serious incident in Quebec City and a series of inappropriate conduct while in the Airborne. The Van Doos knew about his behaviour, as did the Commander Special Service Forces. Rainville ended up implicated in the questionable death of a Somali teenager during Operation DELIVERANCE in March 1993.
The 2021 sexual misconduct crisis also hinted at this dynamic, and particularly so in the case of Vice-Admiral Haydn Edmundson. It was rumoured Edmundson held the nickname “Mulligan Man” for how he would allegedly get away from inappropriate behaviour towards subordinates.
While those are anecdotal evidence, the Deschamps report, the Fish report, the Arbour report, repeated Statistics Canada surveys, and decades of service women and women veterans’ experience should give us pause. The same is to be said about any form of hateful conduct.
Before we blame subordinates and peers for not “calling out” that behaviour (which does not guarantee that the behaviour will change, and in this current organizational in the CAF, will do more harm than good for the person going against the grain), general officers ought to ask themselves:
Have we made sure that everyone has the right tool to handle certain types of misconduct? Are the disciplinary and administrative tools fit for purpose? What do we do with behaviours that are contradictory to the military’s espoused values, but do not fall within the remit of “personal deficiencies”?
And while the trigger to this conversation is inappropriate and violence conduct that impacts women, LGBTQ+, and racialized service members in greater numbers – the root of the problem includes but goes beyond issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We can actually see similar patterns when removing the diversity, equity, inclusion layer to the problem. If we look beyond “conduct” to look at how the organization functions on a day-to-day basis, we see the similar fault-lines (which I wrote about in my book and in 2023 for CGAI, and which Leonard Wong and Stephen Gerras highlighted in their study of the U.S. Army).
When we discuss those dynamics without touching issues of violence or misconduct in the rank, many are very much aware in the discrepancies between what is being said and what is being actioned.
Mêle-toi de tes oignons (or we’re no worse than the rest of society).
It is hard to review From Failure to Failure and not try to just write the book in my own words – and it would not be fair to Allan’s work to do so. I think complements well the work of Maya Eichler, Megan MacKenzie, Stéfanie von Hlatky, Tammy George, and Vanessa Brown (to name a few), and I find it extremely validating as someone who has been following the issue closely since September 2017.
Reading this book made me angry and frustrated – because so many people have pointed out the issues for decades, with testimonies and documentation going as far back to the time that my parents were children under 10 years old.
How many people with lived experience will it take?
How many scholars will it take?
This book reminds me of why I have wanted to give up; why I have taken a step back on dealing with some of those issues. It is already a tasking endeavour, and I have had a hard time disentangling it with my own experiences with gender-based violence.
And then there is the criticism – on one side you are accused of wanting to destroy the career of an honourable leader; on the other, you are told you are actively harming survivors. On top of that, I had to defend myself for being born and raised in France (I am a citizen now), for being a civilian, and at times for not having experienced the right kind of sexual violence.
But this is the point. It is a defence mechanism. It goes hand in hand with the constant comparison with civilian society and its own record with all forms of violence.
Let me go on a limb and say: it is all unacceptable, regardless of the context. Cultural relativism is not applicable in this context: when harm is the consequence, we should concern ourselves with it. Instead of being defensive, how about we treat them as “one is one too many,” and ensure the entire organization is set up so that it follows this principle?
Discussing the issue of conduct often gets us to a slippery slope, one that revolves around:
Who do we see as the right kind of aviator, sailor, or soldier?
Should women, LGBTQ+, or racialized people be allowed to join the military
This question is assuming that violence does not happen in seemingly homogenous groups, and this can lead to a snowballing of exclusion (the LGBT Purge is a gruesome example of this)
It also raises the question of citizenship and freedom – if some cannot serve their country, are they as free and as much of a citizen as others?
History of the World Wars and the Purge have shown that people resist exclusion and will join nonetheless.
This rhetoric becomes a problem real fast when we have to deal with professional militaries of the size they are.
Militaries operate on trust, esprit de corps, and cohesion. Whether it is swift trust, task-oriented cohesion, or through the good ol’ Regimental system, these elements cannot happen when individuals are not recognized as members of the team and face violence for it.
But the utilitarian arguments have mattered very little, and English highlighted how problematic it is to link people’s well-being to operational readiness. The espoused values of the military should be enough to justify combatting any form of misconduct.
There is no softening the blow
Reading From Failure to Failure felt like therapy, in a way. It confirmed some of the impressions I had – and I do not think that a reader who does not know Allan English can fully grasp how much of a turning the tide it is for him to write that Hanlon’s razor is no longer a useful guide on which to view the Canadian military’s record on sexual violence. Seeing written this explicitly from him adds to decades of critical (both in importance and in their approach) scholarship and testimonies.
The question remains whether it is going to nudge the military to the right path.
Article image by: Corporal Brendan Gamache, Formation Imaging Services (https://www.flickr.com/photos/cfcombatcamera/54744675130/)
The goal of “elimination[ing] harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour” was set up by then CDS Jonathan Vance as part of Operation HONOUR in 2016.
This quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein, but seems to originate from Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel Sudden Death. I personally thought that it came from Gogol’s Diary of a Mad Man.
I am using “ironically” almost ironically (I know I am obnoxious). Everyone studying issues of misconduct in the military knows that culture is at the heart of this – and the military knows it too, I think: when she was Chief Professional Conduct and Culture, General Carignan did repeat the maxim “culture eats strategy for breakfast”…