DEI, Gender, and the Military | J.O. Michel Maisonneuve, Barbara Maisonneuve, & Mark Norman | EP 468
We still enjoy an incredible level of privilege and wealth, and that is fragile. We can never take that for granted, and part of not taking that for granted is that we are part of a very complicated global system. All these things that are important to us as Canadians, both domestically or internationally, are premised on a secure global system. That system is under threat, but it is real and it is coming.
Hey everybody, so today we're doing a bit of a dive into the state of the Canadian military and, um, it's not just that because it's also a deep dive into the state of the Canadian political situation. And then more broadly, I would say somewhat of an analysis of a very important fragment of the culture war, which is, let's say, the relationship between postmodernism and critical race theory and DEI equity nonsense and the most patriarchal of all institutions, the military.
It's an issue of broad international significance with a Canadian focus. There's a bit of a crisis in the Canadian military, especially with regards to personnel retention and recruitment, and that's emblematic of a much deeper problem. And so we're going to dive into that problem. It's taken me a while, but I found some people from the Canadian military who are willing and able to speak: Mark Norman from the Navy, Michelle MNU from the Army, and Barbara Kage Meenu from the Air Force.
So we're all going to talk today about the crisis that's facing the Canadian military and perhaps the military elsewhere, and why the military in Canada is necessary, what role it's going to play in the future, and what problems it's suffering from that can't be, let's say, easily gathered under the rubric of DEI emergency, because perhaps that's the last of the serious problems that's truly facing the Canadian military.
Let's start. Sir, will you introduce yourself and I'll go through all three of you, and away we go.
Thanks, Dr. Peterson, for having me and the rest of us here. My name is Mark Norman. I'm a retired naval officer, a third-generation Canadian military officer. I served 39 years in the Royal Canadian Navy, starting as a reservist mechanic and rising through the ranks having a whole bunch of great opportunities to do a bunch of really fun and some not-so-fun things over that career. I retired in 2019 after having commanded the Navy itself, the actual institution of the Royal Canadian Navy, as part of the Canadian Forces and a brief tour as the Vice Chief of Defense Staff, the second-in-command of the Canadian Forces.
Since then, I've been doing a variety of different things in the private sector and trying to push the narrative and open discussion dialogue about defense and security issues in Canada. So I really appreciate being invited here today; thanks.
Sure, I'm Michelle MV. I served 35 years in the army, the Canadian Army, and I was an armored core officer. So, I went through a military college in Kingston, and then my last job in uniform was as the Chief of Staff of the NATO headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, which we stood up after a change from being a naval headquarters to a transformation headquarters.
Once I removed the uniform, I moved to the civilian service, the civilian national defense, and I was appointed the academic director, the principal of the Military College in Saint-Jean, which was reopened in 2007. I did that for 10 and a half years and, by the time I left, we got it back up to university level. So I retired completely from both those jobs in 2018, and since then I've been speaking out as well about the state of our, not just the armed forces but our country.
I'm Barbara Krossy MOV, and I served for 21 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I started in the early 80s. I did not join as an officer; I joined as a private with the military police—a trade that women had only been allowed in for a few years—and then I was fortunate enough to go to the Royal Military College and Royal Roads, and then I became an officer in the logistics branch. I served in incredibly amazing places, and I feel very blessed. I retired, as I said, after 21 years.
Then I spent two years in the procurement world, and since then I feel that I would still like to give back. So I do various nonprofit work; I work with the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum. Since the whole sexual harassment thing broke in the military, I have wanted to tell my side of the story. I think I speak for the majority, but there are very few people that are willing to listen. So I really appreciate being here, Dr. Peterson, to be able to have a chance to do that; thanks for having us.
Oh yeah, I'm thrilled that you're here. It's a real privilege to be able to discuss these things and to come to, I hope, some deep understanding. Let's start with the 20,000-foot view. I think I definitely want to delve into the issues of sexual harassment and hypothetical sexual misconduct in the military. We also need to talk about the role of women in the military in a very frank way, as that's a very complicated problem. But let's start with the state of the military in Canada in 2024.
Mark, maybe we'll start with you if you don't mind. What issues do you think are paramount, and in a manner that bringing to public attention would be useful?
I think it would not be an overstatement to describe the Canadian Armed Forces as being in a crisis. That crisis has many dimensions to it, and it is a very complicated equation. To use a mathematical analogy, there is no one single thing that stands out as being problematic. By definition, wicked problems, as soon as you start to mess with one element of that equation, you throw the other elements out of balance.
So that's the context for my answer, which would be that we have at least three or four significant strategic challenges. Starting outside and looking in: first of all, we live in a country that traditionally has not really understood, although it accepts the need for armed forces, it doesn't understand why armed forces are necessary. Those are two different conversations.
The global security situation we find ourselves in is eroding rapidly, and this is another aspect of what I would describe as not a naïve perception on the part of Canadians writ large, but rather a sense that it's not really affecting us on the part of the machinery of government. We have an organization that has been chronically underfunded and under-supported for decades, and this has been both episodic and constant over my entire time in uniform, and I'm sure my friends here would agree.
We have a human resources problem, both in terms of quantity and quality, where there have been, until recently, more people leaving the Armed Forces than joining it. The institution is shrinking, and there are issues around the quality of individuals that are being brought into the organization. So we have a quantitative and qualitative problem as it relates to the strength of the Armed Forces.
Then, as you mentioned in your introduction, we have broader issues with respect to equipment, purchase, procurement, and maintenance, and these are all combining to create what I believe is a genuine crisis. Add to that external concerns around the credibility—not of the individual soldier, sailor, or aviator inside the Armed Forces—but of the institution. Can it actually do what it's required to do? Is it credible? Is it reliable on an international level?
This goes right to the grand strategic level: Is Canada really supporting its military the way it should? Right? The 2% argument—all these things—right down to can Canada really be relied upon to help the alliance and other key allies? I think that this is kind of a messy mélange of really significant concerns going forward.
Let me take some of that apart, and then we'll go to Michelle and then Barbara. Let's strike at the heart of the matter. So let's say that I'm being a realist and a cynic, and I might say, "Well, why can't Canada merely ride on the coattails of the U.S.?" Ten times our population, much stronger economy, outstanding military; they're going to defend Canada when push comes to shove. We're adding a relatively small contribution even if we pulled our fair share, pulled our weight.
We'd be adding a relatively small contribution, and given the proximity of the Americans and the fact that we're under their defense rubric, why not just attend to other things and let the military shuffle along? Now, that goes to your point about being underfunded and under-supported. We've been able to, let's say, get away with that, so to speak. But you could make a case, if you felt like it, that that was a very pragmatic thing to do given that we have the Americans on our doorstep.
So a counterargument to that one might be: well, you can't play games with your primary military ally without paying a price for that. Canada should pull its weight not least so that our opinion is given some weight. I guess you'd make the same case internationally: if we're not pulling our weight on the military side and with regard to our international agreements, why should anyone take us with any degree of seriousness, including ourselves?
I think we've seen that already—a massive erosion in the perception of Canada's reliability on the international front. I don't think Canadians have any idea how badly this government has devastated Canada's international reputation, partly on the military side, but that's not the only reason.
Okay, so what else would...
Yes, before you go on, if I may, I agree with everything that Mark said. I see it as a perfect storm. The international security environment has completely changed. We never thought we'd ever have a state-on-state war again. There's a situation in Gaza, of course. There are rogue nations out there that are trying, economically and in other ways, eventually perhaps militarily, to try to have the upper hand.
So the international situation is forcing people across the world to look at their security situation. That's a huge thing. At the same time, as Mark said, there are all these issues within Canada, within the Canadian forces, that are making it currently that we are undefended. If I can just say, in my view, we are undefended.
The NORAD agreement took too long to get upgraded, so now they've made the decision to do that, and that is now having an impact, as you say, on our standing in the world. I think one of the things that Canadians don't understand in terms of the importance of armed forces is that they are a means for us to demonstrate our involvement. A ship, for example, when a ship goes off and docks somewhere in any country, they’re the greatest diplomatic tool we can have because they're there to demonstrate Canada's there. Our sailors are fantastic diplomats; they get out there and they talk about what they do, they talk about their country, they spend money in the economy of that country that they're visiting.
So that’s just a small role, but it’s an important one. Right now, because we have not been supporting our armed forces, they feel unsupported. They are underappreciated. What do you think that does to them?
They feel demoralized. They are smart, motivated, patriotic people for the most part who really love what they do, and they're doing it because they genuinely believe in it. When they see that there is not the level of support, both politically, nationally, and even inside the institution itself, that becomes demoralized. It is demoralized.
Well, you're going to put your life on the line; you want to make sure that people are behind you, right? So Mark's intervention was really good for two reasons. One, he made a couple of really good points and gave me a chance to think about how to respond to your question. I think you laid out some of the elements of the answer in your own question in that back to the essence of why not just let the Americans look after us.
We have done that brilliantly for decades, and I don't think that's an overstatement at all. In fact, I could be somewhat provocative and say that all of these governments up to and including the current government that have played this game have done so brilliantly. The problem is they've done so in a very short-term micro view without understanding the implications of what they're doing, both in terms of the state of the institution, which some are more concerned about than others, and we can come back to that, but more so with respect to Canada’s reputation.
And what's happening now is not the global security situation but the expectations have changed. We're now in a world where it is not just security; it’s not just a finite, discreet activity. It permeates a whole bunch of different dimensions of how nations and individuals, whether they're rogue states or whether they're organizations that are transnational, interact.
And it’s not just the traditional physical notion of military security; it has far broader implications, which means that you need to be looking at it more seriously, more strategically, and looking at all the elements of it.
So, the military is a key component of that because it is, in essence, the insurance policy. It’s an overly simplistic characterization, but it's true. Now, a lot of people don’t have the luxury of insurance for a variety of reasons, but ultimately we could afford that. We're not a poor country.
We have basically traded one degree of opportunity for another, and I’ll be more specific: we have underfunded defense and security and other things—like infrastructure—a whole variety of other things nationally. Because we have believed two things that are now fundamentally flawed. The first one is that there isn’t really—it's a threat versus consequence conversation. The probability of something happening is really, really low, and therefore, there are other higher probability problems that need to be addressed.
The second one is the very premise of your question, which was that the United States will always look after us. Well, the United States is basically saying, “Look, yeah, we’re partners here, but you are not living up to your obligations with respect to the expectations of the partnership.”
The U.S. has noticed.
Oh yeah, they knew it. Well, Trump definitely noticed.
And now, we've got members of the Senate publicly calling out the government of Canada in an open letter. That doesn't happen by accident.
It would be easy to toss all of your discipline to the side for the summer, but a life of greatness doesn’t happen by taking the easy route. The Hallow app offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers, which are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. For the third year in a row, Hallow is having their wildly popular Saints in Days prayer challenge, where over the course of four weeks, you'll journey through the life of an incredible saint, learning more about their faith story and ultimate surrender to the will of God in their life.
The challenge will kick off August 5th with Joe Missoula, the coach of the Celtics, and St. Sebastian, the patron saint of athletes. Then, Rio Wahlberg will lead meditations on the life of St. Elizabeth Seton, followed by Jonathan Rumi walking through the powerful story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who sacrificed his own life for the life of another at Auschwitz, closing the series with Father David Michael Moses and Blessed Pierre Giorgio Frassati.
Saints in seven days goes deep into the lesser-known part of a saint's life to show that while their journeys to sainthood were filled with God's grace and glory, they also included human struggles, great suffering, mistakes, and a profound need for God's mercy. Download the Hallow app today at hallow.com/Jordan for an exclusive 3-month trial—that's hallow.com/Jordan.
Mike, you said something very interesting in relation to Mark's comments too. You talked about us being undefended. So let me expand that a little bit. It isn’t obvious to me anymore exactly where the prime military threat is. What that would mean from a staffing perspective is that you'd want to have the smartest and most alert possible people in your defense team continually re-evaluating the shifting landscape to figure out where the threats are.
And obviously, cyber security is a walloping element of that, and that is really a whole new kind of warfare. I would say as well that the emergence of these cheap drones has also radically changed the situation because they’re unbelievably inexpensive. That’s a real problem when you send hordes of them against unbelievably expensive military equipment.
So what would you say? We've already agreed to some degree that the terminology for the situation that faces the Canadian military is something approximating a crisis. You laid out four reasons why.
It’s a perfect storm. I mean, it's everything together. When you're talking about threats, of course, there are great people in the military and in our civilian institutions that are looking at what the threats are out there with cyber security. There’s AI now that's to the fore as well, quantum computing and everything.
There’s a need for digitization of our military, which is happening now under the guise of the NOR upgrade. But what’s the so what? So the so what is that you need a range of capability, and the range of capability that's going to be able to react to all these different threats.
Now, can we have the same kind of range of capability that the U.S. does? No, we can't. But we can be a small, capable military that, first of all, job one is protecting Canadians. That goes from all the threats. The north, for example, we have a border with Russia, frankly. I mean, it's right there.
So we need a range of capability to protect our country, and then after that, do we want to participate and be good international citizens and participate in our alliances? NATO, NORAD, of course, the U.N. eventually. I mean, you have to look at that.
That’s another piece, so a military that’s able to do everything can happen, but it has to—it's obviously not going to be... That was our strength though, I think. I mean, I think the Americans, when push comes to shove—well, obviously we'll never be on par with them as far as our military capabilities—but you drop an American soldier into anywhere in the world, and there are a lot of opinions that come up about the American soldier.
They're seen as, you know, parties. And I love them; I'm very pro-American. But a lot of times, there's a reason why they don't want to talk to an American. You know, you put a Canadian in there, whether we have a blue beret or not, you put a Canadian in there, and people say, "Oh, Canadians, you know, they get along with everybody." So come and sit at the table.
We were able to, I think, get into open doors and bridge that the Americans were not as able to, as we Canadians can use a softer touch. That's right.
And I think, diplomatically even, we are less offensive. Everybody would agree with that, that Canadians seem less offensive. So everybody's willing to talk to us. How wonderful is that? If there’s only one seat left at the table and they’ll let— they'll choose a Canadian because we don’t have any natural enemies, so to speak.
We don’t; you know, we’ve always proven to be good people in general and, you know, and freedom and liberty and all of those things. So we don't have a colonial history. You know?
Yeah, and I mean, this is just anecdotal, but when I was in the Middle East, we were always trying to be very, very nonpartisan. So if we did something on the Israeli side, we had to be sure to do it on the Syrian side, and this got to be very hard to keep track of.
I remember saying at one point, "Wouldn't it be nice if someday we could actually do this and have, you know, the Canadians, and the Syrians, and the Israelis, and the Austrians, whoever else, were with us, and without—” and in the blink of an eye, this very seasoned, you know, IDF soldier turned to me and said, “That could only ever happen in a Canadian mess.”
So, you know, and it was kind of that feeling that was our reputation. Past tense. What’s changed in fundamentally, I think, is not the caliber of the individual Canadian soldier, military leader, however we want to describe it. What has changed is the more global perception of what Canada represents or doesn't represent.
There was always this sense that not only was the individual or group of individuals incredibly competent and capable, but that the nation they represented actually stood for something, was on the right path, whatever that was at the time, and that they were going to get something done. There was going to be some useful contribution to whatever the issue was of the day that was trying to be resolved.
That is, I would say, no longer the case. Or if it is, it is so rare and isolated that...
Why? What’s changed?
Well, I think we've lost our way in terms of who we are, what we stand for—what we see as our role internationally. We have biased our political rhetoric so far towards the notion of social values that those ideas have lost sight of what is in our national interest.
We're trying—yes, well, we're not even sure that having a national interest is something that's worth pursuing anymore, right? I mean, our Prime Minister defined us as not having a national interest. He’s obviously very internationally oriented, so it isn’t even obvious that our leadership at the top level considers the nation state an institution that’s worth preserving.
Well, if we're a post-national state, frankly, you don't need to have citizenship. You don't need to really have a passport that recognizes you as Canadian. You don't need national institutions. You don't necessarily participate.
I mean you look at our country—what potential we have. The potential we have, first of all, let's talk about even just our two languages. The fact that we have a Canadian French and English kind of, you know, those two official languages means that our soldiers go off, and our sailors—men and women—go off to missions, a lot of them are able to speak both, and so they're able to diplomatically. Just think of what that does.
Most nations that you participate with—our American friends, you know, can’t do that. We can sidle up to the French, to the Belgians, to NATO nations, even there in Africa for French Polynesia. There you go.
So look at the strength!
So you're making a case that Canada has a particular positive role to play independently in the world, and of course that Canada does have a history of that—a very effective history of that independent of the specific defense requirements of Canada. Part of that is maintaining and promoting global peace, but also part of putting Canada out there as a credible nation-state that should be taken seriously as a player that has an opinion and is able to actually participate—not only participate, but intervene when required.
It’s very difficult. And let's go back to an earlier question that you posed to us in context, and I’m paraphrasing: Why is this important to Canadians from a threat perspective?
I’m not going to sit here and list a whole bunch of boogeymen, perceived or the Chinese Communist Party. So yes, that’s a real one—definitely—but I think it’s important for your viewers to understand that this is not a monolithic, binary conversation.
This is a continuum of concerns. I’m on the public record of saying: do I believe that somebody is going to attack Canada or invade Canada in a traditional military sense? I think the probability of that is extremely low.
However, do I believe that other powers are going to use military capability to influence something halfway around the world or even in our own backyard that is in our national interest? 100% absolutely, all the time. This naïveté concerns me because we have traditionally seen the conversation about military capability in Canada through the lens of, you know, we live in a fireproof house with no flammable materials immediately around us, right?
Or whatever the saying is. But the reality is no—it's not about our house; it's about our lifestyle. We enjoy, maybe not as much as we have in the last several decades, but we still enjoy an incredible level of privilege in our lifestyles.
That is dependent on a whole series of international systems, and those international systems are all under threat. They’re under threat from a military perspective, they’re under threat from a political perspective, they’re under threat from an economic, and they’re under threat from a sociological perspective.
The more that we erode our ability to protect those systems, the more vulnerable we become—not to an invasion, but to an ideological invasion as opposed to a physical attack against the nation.
This is why this is such an important conversation, and it is timely, as Mike said, because we really are seeing arguably a generational situation where, you know, we’re extremely vulnerable.
We’re not paying attention—we’re not keeping track of what’s happening in the big bad world. And we’re so inwardly focused and understandably focused on our own domestic problems that we’re losing sight of what's happening.
We’re also focused on weird domestic problems.
Barbara, let's bring you in on this because this really started to come to my attention last year, let's say, and it's been mounting. It came to my attention because I came across a couple of articles in the Canadian military journal, and they were hypothetically academic articles. I read them, and so the problem—you, Mark, you listed a variety of problems with the Canadian military, and none of the problems you listed are the problems that the new chief of defense staff is planning to, what would you say, address. The fundamental problem that she seems to be wanting to address is sexual misconduct in the military.
Okay, now, so here's the problem I have with that from a diagnostic perspective. The first issue is I'm sure there are instances of sexual misconduct in the Canadian military, but I'm not sure at all that there are more of those in the Canadian military than there are in the typical university, for example.
In fact, my suspicions are that there are substantively less. The reason I think that is because I know perfectly well that the Canadian military tilts towards the recruitment of highly conscientious people, and they're less likely to do those sorts of things. So I’m sure there’s plenty of it, because we’re putting young men and young women together in very stressful circumstances, and they’re going to misbehave, and that'll also be true of some of the people who aren't, you know, mere recruits.
But that's not the issue. The issue is, is it more prevalent in the Canadian military, and is that the crisis? And then the next issue is, let's say there is a problem—then it isn't clear to me that there is, but let's say there is. Well, what's the solution?
The other thing I ran across in reviewing these papers is that the solution is the same damn DEI solution that's being applied to everything.
So I don't see this as a diagnosis of what's wrong with the Canadian military; what I see it as is an extension of the fundamentally leftist, radical, postmodern, neo-Marxist presuppositions that are destabilizing all our institutions being focused on, you know, removing the patriarchy from the military, which I can't imagine a more wooly-headed or ill-advised diagnosis and solution than that.
Especially given all these other practical problems that you’ve described, so let’s delve into that a little bit. I don't know where to start with that.
So I could just start by saying I think that with General Kon—that was the job she’s coming from. That was created, the Chief Culture and Personal Conduct that was being revamped, and that command was created to address, I think, the sexual misconduct things that were coming out of that.
So it is my hope that she disbands that as her first job as the CDS.
And I will happily go on record as saying that.
So you think there’s any chance of that?
That I don’t know.
Just to stop you for a minute—your initial premise was wrong, I think, when you said she’s going in there to promote that as CDS, as Chief of Defense Staff. I’m sure she knows, as well as all of us, that her job is to be the Chief of Defense Staff, to command the Armed Forces, to make them operational.
That had been her job, that she came from. You’re absolutely correct; that was created.
So this radical progressive agenda has been imposed right on every facet of Canadian life, and you know academics embraced it as, you know, academic like a lot did. But to impose it on the Canadian Forces? I shake my head.
If there is one place you want to have a warrior culture, wouldn't it be in your Canadian Forces? Wouldn't it be in your military? Seriously? Anyway, dealing with the sexual misconduct, you know, when it first came on, and I’m going to say without hesitation, there are predators in every organization, and predators should be rooted out, prosecuted, and given the boot—absolutely.
Is every man that wore a uniform—or even the majority? I never encountered it. As I said, I joined in the early 80s; women were allowed in the military police for just a couple of years. I was often the only woman in the truck, you know, in the tent, on the truck, whatever, and it didn't happen to me. Were there jerks? Absolutely. And there were women jerks that I worked with, but it just didn’t happen.
And so what bothers me the most is when I hear this is not that it happened, but first of all, they say that it happened, and that nobody did anything about it, and they had nowhere to turn. That I have a real hard time with.
Because I can tell you that if a bunch of times when an inappropriate remark was made to me, I don’t know about my looks, my uniform, or whatever, as I took that remark in and I thought about it before I had a chance to respond, the guy next to me said, “Hey buddy, that's not cool,” you know? And that happened all the time.
That didn’t happen just with Canadians; that happened with our allies. I was very lucky to work with a lot of our allies, and it just wasn’t, if you have no experience with the military and you read, you know, the legacy media and you see it, like, you know, you wouldn’t want your child anywhere near that organization because it's this, you know, misogynistic …
Yeah, you see that now. We all have friends who, you know, either their kids or, as they get older, maybe grandkids are considering the military, and you get this question: “It's in our circle. Is it safe?”
And it’s gut-wrenching to hear the question. You can intellectualize the question, and then you have to, as Barb is saying, that's also got to be radically demoralizing, especially for the good people who aren't involved in this sort of thing.
So we look at what’s happened. So, going to root them out, what have we got?
We have got three senior officers that I'm thinking of off the top of my head—gentlemen who were—were they found guilty? No they weren't, but their careers, you know, of Art McDonald, Dany Four and Steve Waan are over. And their family circumstances and what happened, some historic weird event when everybody was drunk on a boat and there are no witnesses. But these men, they’re done.
I think that’s—I think it’s well, drunk on a boat is also relevant, you know.
I studied antisocial behavior in relationship to alcoholism for like 15 years. One fact that you can lay on the table instantly is that without drunk people, there would be virtually no sexual assault.
So if you actually serious about sexual assault on university campuses or in the military, the first thing you would focus on isn’t culture, and it isn’t personality, it probably isn’t even the predators, it’s probably alcohol. So we address this like a long time ago.
Like, you know, I’ve been out for a long time, but I remember we had, it was called SHARP—sexual harassment and racism prevention. These courses were in the early 80s.
It's not like we haven’t done anything about it. We’ve been working with the times since then, and alcohol was a big part of the military culture in those days. That’s changed.
That started changing even with the younger, you know, when fitness became a thing. And stopped being like... but I can remember going to the mess and you had to drink whatever, and that changed so we have moved with the times.
But, you know, it doesn't mean these problems don’t exist.
Of course, but as you said, and to Barb's point, how much of an emphasis and amplification do we want to put on the existence of those problems?
Well, we might want to first of all demonstrate that they’re real. And the way you do that is by comparative analysis, and I don't see any evidence of that.
So there—the problem of sexual misconduct is real; the problem of alcohol-fueled sexual misconduct is real. Is that particularly typical of the Armed Forces in Canada? I doubt it. You need overwhelming proof before you made that your primary concern.
Now, on the alcohol side too, I have a question about that. You know, I was thinking about that a lot this week because what alcohol does is it narrows your focus to the present and it makes you opaque to threats, essentially.
So it’s quite fun in that regard because it allows you to be enthusiastic without any concern for the future. Now, the problem with that is you tend to act like a jackass.
Having said that, I don't exactly understand how much steam you do have to blow off in order to be able to tolerate the life that you're leading— that high stress, anything is possible at a moment's notice life.
And so I don’t know how much off-duty discipline, let’s say, it’s reasonable and realistic to insist upon.
Now, you know, I’ve already said I know what alcohol contributes to these sorts of situations, but by the same token, I’m kind of curious about what you think about that; you’ve been around men in those situations for a very long time.
I’ll say again—I mean, you’re right. And whether it’s in the officer’s mess or the private mess or the office Christmas party, that kind of stuff—I know a lot of the drinking went on. But I honestly, I never felt threatened, and I haven't personally seen any of that.
They were jerks, and there were women jerks that I worked with, but it just didn’t happen.
And so what bothers me the most is when I hear this is not that it happened.
But first of all, they say that it happened and that nobody did anything about it, and they had nowhere to turn. That I have a real hard time with, because I can tell you that if a bunch of times when an inappropriate remark was made to me—I don't know about my looks, my uniform, or whatever.
As I took that remark in, I thought about it before I had a chance to respond. The guy next to me said, “Hey buddy, that's not cool.” And that happened all the time.
That didn’t happen just with Canadians; that happened with our allies. I was very lucky to work with a lot of our allies. And it just wasn’t, if you have no experience with the military and you read, you know, the legacy media and you see it, like, you know, you wouldn’t want your child anywhere near that organization because it's this, you know, misogynistic...
Yeah, you see that now. We all have friends who, you know, either their kids or as they get older, maybe grandkids are considering the military, and you get this question: "It's in our circle. Would you... really? You know, is it safe?"
And it’s gut-wrenching to hear the question. You can intellectualize the question, and then you have to, as Barb is saying, that's also got to be radically demoralizing, especially for the good people who aren't involved in this sort of thing.
So we look at what’s happened. So going to root them out, and what have we got?
We've got three senior officers that I'm that are thinking off the top of my head: gentlemen who are—were they found guilty? No they weren’t, but the the careers in, you know, of art McDonald, Dany fan, Steve Whaan are over.
And their family and their family circumstances and what happened, some some historic weird event when everybody was drunk on a boat and nobody and there's no witnesses. But these men they’re done.
I think that’s—I think well, drunk on a boat is also relevant, you know.
I studied antisocial behavior in relationship to alcoholism for like 15 years. One fact that you can lay on the table instantly is that if there was no drunk people, there would be virtually no sexual assault.
So if you actually serious about sexual assault on University campuses or in the military, the first thing you would focus in isn’t culture, and it isn’t personality, it probably isn’t even the predators, it's probably alcohol.
So we address this like a long time ago. Like, you know, I’ve been out for a long time, but I remember we had, it was called SHARP—sexual harassment and racism prevention. These courses were in the early 80s.
So it's not like this was, oh look at we haven't done anything about it. We've been working with the time since then, and changing our culture. Alcohol was a big part of the military culture in those days, and that's changed.
That started changing even with the younger, you know, when fitness became a thing. But I can remember going to the mess and you had to drink whatever, and that changed.
So we have moved with the times, but I, you know, it doesn't mean it doesn't mean these problems don't exist.
Well, of course. But as you—but as you said, and, you know, to Barb's point, it is—is there a big culture change required?
I'm with Barbara. That's a long-winded answer.
So lets see, I think no. I think, you know, you need to make sure that people understand that, you know, that you have to, you know, respect others in in all kind of ways and everything and you root out those Predators, but...
And you’re not alone. That was the big thing for me when I see on TV when something happened and a victim says, "This happened to me, there was nowhere to turn to." And I have a real hard time with that because the military okay, it's huge; it's a family; you’ve met people throughout your whole— even if you've been in two or three years, you've got people you were on this course with or trained with, and so your chain of command is not welcoming to your complaint.
A failure of leadership; that, Barb, to your point, when you see these things, they are fundamentally failures in leadership.
Are you tired of feeling sluggish, run down, or just not your best self? Take control of your health and vitality today with Balance of Nature. With Balance of Nature, there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day.
Balance of Nature takes fruits and vegetables, freeze-dries them, turns them into a powder, and then puts them into a capsule. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar. The only thing in Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are fruits and veggies right now.
You can order with promo code Jordan to get 35% off your first order, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. Experience Balance of Nature for yourself today. Go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code Jordan for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order, plus a free bottle of fiber and spice.
So, you pointed out very early on that you hadn't experienced the sorts of things, okay, but I'm wondering too, like there's a cultural element to that—a sociological element, let's say—but there's also a personal element.
Like, I'll give you an example of this: Daughters of alcoholics are much more statistically likely to marry alcoholics.
Now we don't know why that is. We don’t know if they find men who are drinking because they’re accustomed to that; they pick those men, or we don't know if they covertly reinforce their husbands for drinking to the point where they become alcoholic.
But it’s such a widespread phenomenon that if you’re doing genetic analysis of the transmission of alcoholism, you have to take into account this issue of assortative mating, it’s called.
Okay, so now, the issue is, was there a manner in which you conducted yourself personally that made you less likely to be the target of such unwanted attention? That might have to do with alcohol consumption.
And then also, is it reasonable to assume that your experience is emblematic of the experience of females in the military, or were you for whatever reason protected personally or more fortunate?
So first of all, women that joined the military, I think tend to be—well certainly in my time—they tended to be—like not everybody is going to want to join the military. So I think that maybe they’re a little bit more outspoken.
I don’t know. I would say that like it didn’t happen to me, but I didn't see it happening around me.
And I was close to a lot of women in the military, and nobody came—like even at the end of my career when I was in NDHQ—nobody would—I didn’t hear about people saying this happened to me, you know, what are we going to do about it?
I think that the majority of women it didn't happen to, and I think that the ones that did yes, absolutely they should, they should, you know, seek justice. But I also think that to say there was nowhere to go; I mean you had your peers, you had the padres. We have padres that doors open all the time.
You had medical staff. You had somebody that you worked with on a course. You had there were so many avenues that, yeah, the physical training guys and girls, like there were so many places that—
Yeah, I find it astonishing when I hear, “This happened to me, and it happened to me over and I had nowhere to turn to.” I really have a hard time with that.
I really.
So now when you entered the military, what response what response did you get from the men?
Well, okay, so we don’t—and we put, okay, so nowadays, you wouldn’t have like our lockers in the military police—like it wasn’t a changing locker—but we kept our gun in there, and like, you know, our ticket books and all that sort of stuff, so you were never there undressed.
But so we were all together: men and women. And there wasn't one locker that didn’t have Miss January or whatever, you know, in the thing.
So nowadays, that’s just not cool.
And so I responded to that by going and getting member Burt Reynolds in Cosmopolitan, and I put him up in my locker.
We never had a problem with that again. You know, like it just—you know the GU I’m not looking at that every day.
So, well, and then that was it, and then—and it took a while. But I think that I didn’t—I don’t think it was hostile; I think it was more they didn’t know how to act.
I had a flat tire once in my police car in Edmonton; you know how cold it is there? I had a flat tire, and nope, I know how to change the tire. So I’m changing the tire.
I do see another military police car go by. Finally, I change the tire. I come in the usual ribbing, you know, just like the guys would get.
But this one military police corporal, he's waiting at the end; he says, "Barb," he said, “Listen,” he said, “I drove past you today.” I said, “Yeah, I saw you.”
And he said, “I didn’t know what to do.”
Right.
He said, “If it had been Mike, I would have stopped to help him, but I thought—”
You were going to say, "You think I can’t do this?"
Didn’t I? I didn’t know what to do, and I said, "Next time, stop-taking the effing car," kind of thing, and we were cool after that, right?
And that was the kind of thing that I was seeing that they didn't really know how to deal with it.
And this idea that we're men and women are interchangeable—I have a hard time with that too.
Okay, so I want to really...
Have a hard time with that?
Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. So I might as well get myself in trouble right off the bat.
I spent a lot of time in academia, and I could see it tilting in the manner that it has tilted—the same manner that, in principle, the military is now predetermined to tilt on the cultural side.
And I’ve been trying to sort out exactly why that is. Now I’ve seen a lot of infantilization of students—a lot; like, way too much. And infantilization of faculty for that matter.
So, and then I wonder, like, if you introduce women en masse into an administrative institution, to what degree does that infantilize the situation?
And like, I don't know the answer to that. Neither does anyone else because we haven’t introduced women en masse into administrative institutions before about the last 60 years.
So we have no idea exactly what’s going to happen.
And so there are going to be female social pathologies, just like there are male social pathologies.
Infantilization seems to me to be a very high probability outcome.
So now, and that’s definitely not something that you want in the military.
It's bad enough in academic institutions.
And you just also pointed out that you don't believe that men and women are interchangeable.
Now I have a gut reaction to women in frontline combat, now for a variety of reasons.
I think the primary reason is the consequences for women if they get captured as prisoners of war; that just doesn’t seem to me to be—that's not an acceptable situation as far as I can see.
I could be convinced otherwise, but you've been in the military a very long time, and you believe that there are intractable differences, let's say, between men and women.
Absolutely. And I, I obviously like your gentleman’s opinion on this too. Women are half the workforce, and they're half the intellectual power.
Being able to capitalize on what women have to offer is a major deal. We know that more educated women have more educated children; that's not true for men, by the way.
So it’s female educational attainment that predicts children's educational attainment; not male.
And we know that countries that educate women and that make their inclusion in the workforce a priority are much more likely to thrive economically.
So we know all that, but we don't know exactly how to integrate men and women, for example, into the military because that's a tough nut to crack.
So what has your experience taught you about that? What role can women play?
Well, or better even possibly? I think that so women, when I joined, I think we were coming up on 10%, and since then this 25% women has been bandied about forever.
And we maxed out at I think 15-16%.
Where we are now and we're not getting any more than that.
So it's like engineering in that regard.
So what do I think? I think that women, there’s a role for women but to say that you can you know interchange, you can take the guy out of the battalion or off the ship and just replace him with a woman, that’s not always true.
And I believe that, and I think it comes down, for me, it comes down to meritocracy in the specific work trade element, trade that you have.
So military police, here we go again.
So we had living quarters on base; so there are children, there’s, you know, women, wives, whatever, and things happen.
So we still had the airborne school. So when there was a bar fight for example, there were a lot of them—I am quite certain that if we are honest with each other, you are rather going to have one of you as a partner going into a bar fight than me; and you know what? Me too than I would rather not have another woman as a partner.
However, we also had things like a sexual assault or an abusive relationship or a child who was who was assaulted.
Then in that instance, I'm pretty sure that you guys might rather have me come to make the first contact to talk to the the woman who's been beaten up or the child who's been abused.
And so there’s room for both, and this idea...
What about on foreign relations and diplomatic front?
Are there roles that women play in the military that are...?
Yeah, and unfortunately though we go there as assuming that everybody's as wonderful and free as we are.
So, you know, I went to Syria, I was negotiating the million dollar contracts, and they wouldn't talk to me because I had a uniform on. And I was, but I was a woman, and it was, you know, so I had to go get my little driver, my 18-year-old Newfoundland driver, and he had to come in, and he said, “Ma’am, I don’t know if I should be signing the—” Just signed them!
You know? They refused to deal with us. Right, right.
So you’re still dealing, so that’s a disadvantage.
What about on the advantage side, in foreign relations, on the battlefield...?
I would say in foreign relations, I would say that we were a novelty still to a lot of different—like the Poles, the Polish Battalion, we were a bit of a novelty.
Even in the Austrians?
The Austrians; and so they would—and men, traditionally, and I’m going to say this, I’m going to make a blanket comment—that the majority of men are still—they're kind of the gentlemen, like they're going to want to open, pull out the chair, you not sit down.
And so, I mean, if you were smart, you use that to your advantage.
I know I did.
It was, you know, and then I think that women, they calm things down a bit too.
Like if there’s an argument going on and there’s, you know, the Austrians are fighting—we had the Austrians and the Poles were always fighting—then when the women came in to sit down, the men sort of toned it down because they were gentlemen inherently.
And so that was an advantage for women.
When you look at a problem or you have an issue and whether it's a you know strategic operational tactical issue or whatever, you want to get as many opinions as possible.
You want to consult if you have time; let’s say if you’re trying to take a hill over, you sometimes don’t have time. But if you’re considering an issue, a problem, a challenge, it’s always going to be good to have different ways of viewing that issue and getting different opinions on how to solve that issue.
Having women in the forces is a strength. I mean there’s no doubt about it.
The issue comes to what you’re talking about, combat roles, you know, on a ship, on in a submarine, fighter aircraft. I mean I think it’s very difficult.
But in my view, if a woman wants to do it, who the heck am I to say she can't if she meets the standards?
That's just great. But she has to meet the standard.
Now what I do, the second-order effect of that though is, so what do you do when people say, “Well, if the standards discriminate against women, then the standards are sexist?”
Because that would certainly be the case for upper body strength, for example, generally speaking.
They are jobs where you need the upper body strength to be in the armored corps—to lift a, you know, 100-pound bullet round forward. So you need the strength to be able to do it.
I'm sure in the Navy, there’s lots of those kinds of jobs.
But, but what I was going to say is that the second-order effect is on the leadership now.
The young sergeant and the young lieutenant now has to command, you know, his section of 10 people, some of which are women, and it’s now they or she that is going to command that has to have a different kind of approach.
You can’t be the old sergeant of the old days or pushups, and that’s it, you know, and dirtbag, and all. It's a different story.
So those are challenges that now—I never had to; you know, I got out 15 years ago, so I never actually was faced with that.
But it’s a different challenge. Today, you see, I see this and I—at the risk of oversimplifying it. It’s kind of like a Venn diagram in my head.
So you’ve got what I would describe as the technical skills of whatever the trade, the occupation.
Then there are the physical requirements, which might be as much what we would call in our business environmental.
So they’re different when you’re in a tank or you're in a—it's different than being on a ship.
But there are physical requirements that are there, and then there's this I would argue ill-defined sense of the social part of it.
I’m just going to put social in quotes because I'm not educated in that regard, but it's all this other stuff.
And it’s where all the other stuff gets weird because people either don’t know how to deal with it, and you can have all the training you want, but there are realities to these social dimensions.
They're not just gender-specific, but there are social aspects to how militaries function.
And some people are very skilled at those may be not as physical, very technical-skilled, but have social skills.
I don’t know; it’s a very—
I go back to none of these things are, in my view, none of these things are as black and white as—
Well, they’re very complex issues.
Well, so for example, you mentioned that the Canadian military has topped out at about 15% females, and that that’s become—that’s quite intractable.
Okay, so exactly the same thing is the case among engineers in the Scandinavian countries.
They’ve gone farther than any other countries on the planet to equalize gender opportunities, but there are intractable differences on the engineering side and on the nursing side.
Okay, so now you might ask, “Why that is?” Now men and women are pretty much the same in terms of raw cognitive ability.
The male curve might be a little flatter. There might be more extreme male geniuses and males who have cognitive problems. There’s some debate about that.
Men and women are about equal in conscientiousness, which is the next best predictor, say, for administrative, managerial, and military jobs.
But men and women differ radically in their interests.
It’s the biggest difference between men and women, and men are much more likely than women to be interested in things and women much more than men to be interested in people.
And that's a major determinant of occupational choice, and it really stands out in the difference between engineers, thing-oriented, and nurses, people-oriented.
And so, given the nature of the military, the engineering-like nature of the military, the probability that without undo force we’re going to get to 50% women strikes me as zero.
Now, the idea that the ideologues have that—that’s a cultural issue is nonsense because the other thing that’s been demonstrated in Scandinavia—this is so cool.
Imagine you rank ordered nations by how egalitarian their social policies are, okay?
Now you looked at them in terms of differences between male and female in occupational choice.
Okay, the biggest differences are in the most egalitarian countries.
So if you free women and men up so that there aren't systemic barriers to their movement into an occupation, the occupational differences magnify. They don’t decrease, right?
And that’s, I think, unshakable finding, right?
So there's no amount of cultural gerrymandering that’s going to bring women up to 50% in the military; it's a foolish goal, and it's based on a misapprehension of how human beings function.
The ideologues think we're all socially constructed, and that's nonsense. If you flatten the playing field, men and women maximizing their differences, so—and that’s what you’d expect for people who are pursuing their destiny freely and in accordance with their own interests.
And it does seem to be interests; we don’t exactly know what interests is, you know, from a scientific perspective.
Why women would tilt towards people, you know, except broad nurturing? The nurturing, right?
We don’t know how that manifests itself, day-to-day choices.
Exactly, which I find a bit ironic in some respects because if you were—from an insider's perspective—if you were to characterize the military, don't care for people much.
We would describe ourselves as a people-centric organization.
Yeah, which is fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
There’s a lot of stuff, a lot of things, but a lot of injuries and a lot of fraternal, right?
And so, you know, I just—I was quite struck by what you said.
Yeah, well, I think there’s a difference between, you know, tells me we’re doing something fundamentally wrong.
No, well, I think there’s... there’s fraternal hierarchy and there’s community of care, and I don't think those are the same thing.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
So men, like men can organize themselves, but when men organize themselves, they organize themselves into hierarchies, right?
And so that’s not a community of care—exactly. The best leaders, I think, obviously will have care for their people.
Yeah, I mean, and that whole nurturing thing I think is not just a part of the women, but you're right, perhaps, you know, what do you call it?
It comes in with men; it comes in mentoring.
Right, it comes in mentoring. I think the best leaders who care for their people and, you know, want to, you know, see them do well.
And I always described, you know, sometimes being in charge being with your team.
I can describe it as love, actually. You know, and I loved my people that I commanded.
And that I had in my group, and, you know, sometimes people are kind of, you know, love, yeah.
Well, it's a kind of love; you want to hug them, you want to, you know, keep.
So I talked to Jocko Willink, who’s a Navy SEAL, and we talked three or four times, and Jocko, he's about like three feet thick. He's like a man's man, that's for sure.
And Jocko wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three. You know, he’s blowing things up when he was three, and he told me quite frankly that, you know, he was a pretty rough adolescent, and he could have taken a criminal pathway but he went to the military.
One of the things that he found very rapidly was that opportunity to mentor was the best thing he’d ever found in his whole life.
And that ethos of care among men does seem to make itself manifest in that mentoring, and I think that's—I hope my people do well.
It’s different than, “I want to protect my people,” right? Because you want to— you do want to protect.
But it's not the same emphasis, right? There’s an encouragement emphasis in that that’s, I think, more characteristic also of the role men play in a family.
Because men are, for example, men specialize in rough-and-tumble play with their kids.
It's rougher and it’s more encouraging; it’s less Sheltering and nurturing.
Yeah, the mission is important too, though, right? Like when you look after your people or doing your number one priority has to be the mission—whatever your mission is—and so sometimes, you know, you're going to have to send somebody home because they're not—medically, great guy, you want to look after him or whatever—but the mission comes first, and those are decisions.
Then that nurturing goes out the window, whatever you—the hierarchy, it's the mission, right?
It’s the most important, and that’s a rough one.
That’s a rough—and that goes back to something you said a while ago with respect to—again, I’m paraphrasing—there's a tension between the desire to do all these progressive things and the fundamental purpose of the institution.
The institution is mission-focused; if it's not mission-focused, then why do you have it, right?
The militaries exist to fight.
Okay, right, there you—if you define it to do something else, or to be intimidating enough to make fighting unnecessary, well, yeah, exactly, that they’re a deterrent.
But, and so this notion—and you said it earlier, Barb, you know, it’s like, well, you can’t have both.
You know, the warrior culture is in and of itself, and we have this on record and we have very prominent Canadians who have written reports saying that this is the heart of the problem.
Hang on!
Well, time out—mission is the heart of the problem? That’s a problem!
It may be—there may be a whole bunch of issues around how things are being done—not I'm open to that conversation—but the notion that this is at its primordial level a fundamental problem then you’re not talking about a military and this goes to some or a country you want...
No, but I really think you’ve hit the nail on the head here.
You’ve talked—here’s the problem, is that we have now put more emphasis on all those DEI principles in the military, and I think they’ve been—by the way, they’ve been—and you know, it was really her idea, but I’m using it—that it’s been forced on the Canadian Forces by the government, this progressive ideology, and radical progressive ideology that this government and, you know, I’m not here to talk politically, but that's what I think has happened.
And so the forces are having to react to that, and unfortunately that has taken priority over military effectiveness, military operational capability.
And even though a lot of our leaders are trying to stay focused on that, people like, you know, our commander of the Canadian Joint Operations command, he's focused on operational capability, and he’s having to react to all this DEI business, teamwork.
I mean the military, it’s a team. And so, and yet now all of a sudden this—the emphasis is on the individual, individual, you know, and you don’t even look—like, and I—
And I think, what is wrong with looking like—the uniform should be uniform!
Like, you don't—the guy for the Montreal Canadiens, I’m going to wear my whe uniform tonight, I'm going to wear my home uniform. No!
You’re all going to wear the same uniform because we're on the same team, and so we’ve gone away from that, and now you’re taking, you know, meritocracy out so that we can fill these imaginary quotas of what is it—3 or 3.2% of the population; we need to have a representative this.
Well, I don't know about you, but 30 million dollar jet, I want the best person to fly it. I don't want because he fits this quota or she, or they, I guess whatever it is, they fit this quota, and how—and how then are you going to feel when you are the best person but you don’t get chosen because you don’t fit the DEI, so?
Demoralized!
Yeah, that's—you don’t fit the DEI, you don’t fit a certain quota. You don’t fit, and okay, for as long as we've been around, 71% of the Canadian military are white males.
They are our warrior cultures; they are the guys who, you know, rough neck, whatever you want to call it—the farmer’s sons, the fisherman’s sons, the guys—and they join the military.
So how—and we spend not a penny recruiting to these guys?
It’s worse than that, by the way. It’s worse than that.
We know that the best predictor on the personality side for military prowess is conscientiousness, okay?
Conscientious people are meritocratic-based, right?
So if you’re trying to get conscientious people into the military—which you need to do if you’re going to have a military—then the best way to dissuade them is to set up an anti-meritocratic operation because they can’t stand that.
They’re the guys that are going to want to go into the military and incrementally improve so they can advance forward through the ranks in a dutiful, patriotic, orderly, and industrious manner—that's conscientiousness.
Yeah, and so... and that uniformity—it’s the same with business suits.
The idea was 'cause a business suit is a modified military uniform.
The idea was to signal that you're putting aside your own individual idiosyncrasies for your fellow platoon members, let’s say, and the mission, right?
And so it’s not like you’re trivializing; you’re not, but your concerns are not the concerns of the platoon or the mission, and you wear the uniform to signify that.
And if you can't make that sacrifice, if you're unwilling—then well, go do your own thing.
It's not like we have a draft.
Well, and you know, you can demonstrate your individuality when you’re in the military, but do it outside those times when you’re wearing the uniform.
You know, if you want to wear an earring when you're on leave, well, go enjoy yourself and all that.
That's got nothing to do with sexual orientation or any of this business.
I’m talking uniforms specifically.
And so all those things, forcing the DEI, the emphasis on individuality over team—that is having a huge impact on morale in the military.
Well, how do you know that?
How recruitment would be one issue? We’ve seen actually the Canadian chaplain general has actually gone out and spoken, you know, all his padres have gone out, and he’s come back and he’s, you know, I think it’s about a year ago that that he said morale is shot.
I’m getting information from that in itself is a significant data point.
Well, right!
Believe this, this has been typically a very private organization that is focused on spiritual wellbeing, morale, all of these extremely important but subjective aspects of the institution to go public and say, when he writes a report to the Chief of Defense Staff, it’s a big fraking deal.
On top of that, I'm getting—I and you probably do as well—from former or serving officers and soldiers who write to me saying, “Hey listen, you know, morale is, is, is horrible. There are organizations now run by veterans, young veterans who tell the serving who can’t speak out publicly, but they want to gather the information.
And the information I’m getting right now is that morale is shot. One of the reasons is because they see our senior leaders, serving senior leaders, not fighting back against this process that the government is forcing on them.
Takes out their faith in the leaders!
Takes out their faith in the leadership.
They’re saying, holy crap, you know, and okay you’re going to have the odd one who likes to have his hair long, fine.
But, you know when I joined, I had my hair down to my shoulders.
I had my, you know, haircut.
I got a buzz cut and everything, plus they’re not...
They’re not seeing public support; they’re not seeing overt signals from the political leadership that what they do actually matters.
Because the political leadership is focused on those other metrics.
Yeah, the importance of service.
Okay, so when the Prime Minister and Minister Blair brought out the defense policy update, you read what the Prime Minister said. Did he, at any time in those—in that speech, talk about the importance of service?
The honor of serving your country?
That it’s a great place to actually, you know, do something for yourself, but also for others and the fundamental purpose of the Armed Forces?
Again, those are all conscientiousness-related virtues.
Well, so here's something interesting. On the political side, so what tilts you towards a progressive radicalism is high openness, creativity, and low conscientiousness.
What tilts you towards a concern—
Or there are no rules, basically do whatever you want.
Well, the idea there would be that your best—that’s the—think about it as an ecological niche.
So for those people, the ecological niche is all that territory that hasn’t been ordered or the space where rules could be changed or bent, what the space of novelty.
And like that’s a great space to occupy if you happen to be creative, but you’re not a rule-follower. You tend not to be particularly patriotic; you’re not dutiful. You’re not conscientious; you’re not orderly.
There's no loyalty, there's no—not with openness specifically.
No, that comes with conscientiousness, and you know the fact that you didn’t see any testimony, let’s say, to those virtues in that speech is an indication of the temperament of the person and the political party that offered those because that isn’t what they see as valuable.
And that’s hard on conscientious—the—this is not you know the Liberal Party; this is the government of Canada.
Okay, so I mean agnostically, you know, this is this is our boss; this is the guy who runs the country.
So, and if he doesn’t think service is important, if he doesn’t think that service, honorable service in the military is important, well, you know... because they’re faced from there.
Oh, yeah, definitely!
Because the rank and file are struggling with all of these issues that we’ve been discussing, plus the realities that they’re being asked to be away from their families.
Their equipment is rusting crap, and they could always buy new equipment themselves.
You're right.
They don’t feel that the institutional leadership—organizational leadership—is focused on the right things.
And that exists in every organization when you’re at the bottom and you're looking up, you know, the tree full of monkeys; what are you looking at?
Yeah, yeah, right.
But the notion being that all of these things are contributing to a malaise.
Okay, so just before you go, so now coming back to General Karna being appointed, she has to leave this stuff behind.
Now, if she wants to start making an impact immediately on the troops, and that she's going to have to now focus on, you know, maybe what she—we have not been focused on, you know, the institutional.
She’s now the head of the institutional leadership in the armed forces behind the culture changes.
Yeah, exactly!
So she has a huge challenge in front of her, you know, and it's going to be interesting to see.
The challenge is: will she be given the mandate, the authority, and the resources that are necessary?
To, use a nautical term, to right the ship?
Right.
Because if not, then we have squander—we will have squandered an incredible opportunity, which is to take a great leader who is a warrior, who has demonstrated her professional competence, and happens to be wearing the bridal of first female to do the job, and we potentially squander it because the institution for other reasons will be no better off at the end of her watch than it was at the beginning.
Well, so it sounds like it sounds like the three of you have some faith in her fundamental abilities.
Well, we know her to some degree. She’s a classmate of Barb’s from Military College up.
So what I—so one of the things that I liked about that, I admired about Jenny in the early days, is back in the day, for some reason it seemed if you were a woman in the military and you wanted to succeed in this man’s world, well, you better start looking like one and talking like one.
There were these women, and they left behind whatever feminine traits or qualities they had.
It's like the minute you—
You don't hide that, you’re not going to go anywhere.
And then Jenny came along, and she wanted to be a combat engineer or a flamenco dancer. That was her two things, right?
And she, even as when she was a full colonel, she’s done both.
Yes.
So has a full colonel on, you know, we had the American Idol or CMR Idol, the take off for the kids, and she did her dancing.
She's a mother of four, you know? And she doesn't, you know, she doesn’t want to look like—yeah, she doesn’t hide her femininity.
So I like that about the full package there.
So she is—so how do you account for the fact that she got tangled up in this DEI, this, you know, was that like inevitable?
Yeah, they created a command, so they decided—the government forced this, and I’ll say it was forced upon us.
And that, you know, oh, it’s horrible! The military, there’s it’s misogynistic, it’s warrior patriarch, blah blah blah, so we have to change this.
So they created a command, and I think, wasn’t the budget $500 million over five—like, you know, what we could have done with that money?
And so she was—yeah, so she was the chief of that command, and they had, so—
So I look at what happened. Okay, so they—we tried DEI.
How's that working out for us?
Not great! We’re way down; we’re still way down 16,000 in personnel.
16,000 out of how many? We’re short 16,000 probably about 100,000 if you take the regular and the reserves together.
So you’re 15% below where you should be, and 15%, by the way, in wartime, 15%, your unit is no longer combat capable.
You have to be pulled back from the thing.
So you could actually say that the armed forces are non-combat capable too because of, there’s a lot of math behind that as well.
Because that's on paper, and then you add on the layer on top of this, and a lot of organizations have similar issues with respect to... even though you might be at 85%, of that remaining 85%, a bunch of them are unavailable for a variety of reasons, from medical to administrative.
Well, you’re probably looking at a number of several thousand.
I see numbers as high as 8,000 out of the remaining.
So another 10% of what's left—
So you’re looking at a 20% shortfall at the moment—not just that—but the people who are missing are the center core.
So you’ve got your warrant, your sergeant, your lieutenant, your captain.
Well, experience took 20 years to get there, so even if you recruit 16,000 people tomorrow, they’re not going to be able to—it’s going to take them time to get there, you know? For technicians—fighter pilots have been down for years and years.
We can’t even train them in Canada anymore!
So we don’t have the training.
So going back to the culture change. It was a culture that changed.
Get rid of the—the way we think, the way we behave—that whole warrior mentality.
So that’s where the attrition went, I think.
She says she's done; I’m not doing this.
She says she’s out!
And I think that’s—I think, well, Drunk on a Boat is also relevant, you know.
So I studied antis