By Michael Nickerson
Here’s a pop quiz. Imagine you are being briefed by a senior officer. It might concern an important operation, a training exercise, or perhaps a critical shortage of sherry in the officer’s mess. Regardless, during said briefing do you a) gaze at your toes, b) look out the window behind you and consider the lovely fall colours that have begun to appear, c) finish that crossword you started in the latrine only minutes before, or d) stare straight ahead and pay bloody good attention to what’s being said? Your career might depend on this, so think carefully before answering.
Now the answer should be rather obvious, particularly when it comes to sherry shortages, but looking the other way seems a tad more common in our great nation’s military than one might expect. In fact, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has been afflicted with nothing-to-see-here syndrome for quite some time. For decades leadership turned a blind eye to issues of mental illness and PTSD, conditions rationalized away as mere personality quirks that a good 10km run would fix in a jiffy. And one suspects there are still some trying to convince themselves that Operation HONOUR has more to do with patriotic parade planning than the sexual harassment and assault it’s there to stamp out.
So let us discuss the issue of racism in the ranks, and see how many have a sudden urge to look up and count the cobwebs on the ceiling. And before you get yourself in a lather thinking that this humble scribe is about to paint the whole of Canada’s military with one big brush as a bastion for neo-Nazis and Klansmen, pour yourself a sherry (assuming there is some around) and relax. Much as with the issue of sexual misconduct, this is about the exceptions, not the rule.
But to turn a blind eye to those exceptions is in itself a dereliction of duty, and one that has gone on for far too long. Only with the recent killing of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests has leadership publicly acknowledged in a letter to forces members the “systemic racism within the defence team.” That any CAF members of colour, First Nations, and other minorities have had to feel not just unwelcome, but unsafe and fearful within a military and ministry that represents a multi-cultural country such as Canada is, quite frankly, a disgrace.
But what is a further disgrace is how such behaviour, when reported, gets swept under the rug with perpetrators and those responsible for them receiving mere slaps on the wrists, be it with mild reprimands or sensitivity training, rather than dismissal. Is it any wonder that racists with affiliations to neo-Nazi organizations feel comfortable sharing their hate publicly on social media, or proudly wear patches and symbols of the same?
Up to now a common rebuttal has been that the level of racism and hate is no different than one finds in general Canadian society. That may be true, but it’s a rather low bar for a proud organization to set for itself. And more to the point, members of the CAF are not the average Canadian. They are trained, as Gen. Rick Hillier once so proudly proclaimed, to kill people: proficient in the use of weapons, explosives and hand-to-hand combat. It’s the sort of training that comes with immense responsibility, and certainly not trivial skills to be wielded by hateful, angry neo-Nazis and far right anti-government nut cases with pointless axes to
grind.
I ask you this: what would those who fought and died fighting those lovely folks behind the holocaust in World War Two think of a situation today where soldiers wearing the same uniform as they once did now proudly identify with that enemy’s sick ideology? I’m going to take a guess and say that they would be disgusted to see even one allowed to wear that uniform. So eyes front soldier! Give that some thought the next time you want to look the other way.
