Canadian Military and Cops — Rife with Racism and Sexism
https://socialistaction.org/2021/04/08/canadian-military-and-cops-rife-with-racism-and-sexism/
April 8, 2021
Hardly a week passes without another scandal that tears the lid off
rampant sexism and racism in the Canadian military and police forces.
The latest episode involves allegations of sexual misconduct by two
former chiefs of staff. General Jonathan Vance is accused of
inappropriate behaviour involving a woman he outranked. Admiral Art
McDonald stepped aside as top commander only five weeks after taking
over from Vance.
McDonald is now under investigation over allegations that CBC News say
concern his conduct in 2010 toward a female junior officer.
This is nothing new. In 2015, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice
Marie Deschamps produced a scathing report that concluded sexual
misconduct is “endemic” in the armed forces and that leadership has long
tolerated abuse.
Deschamps recommended that Ottawa “Create an independent center for
accountability for sexual assault and harassment,” independent of the
armed forces, that would receive allegations of misconduct and
coordinate action against it.
The report gathered dust, while top military leaders, including Vance
and McDonald, ran top-down campaigns such as “Operation Honour”,
supposedly to counter abuse.
It gets worse. According to Global News, Lt.-Cmdr. Raymond Trottier, who
reportedly flagged a claim of misconduct against McDonald, received two
threatening phone calls that warned him against co-operating with the
House of Commons Defense Committee’s investigation, and that his
military career would be over if he did.
Global reported that the calls came from blocked numbers, one from a
person claiming to be a military officer and the other from someone who
identified themselves as “a senior member of the Canadian government.”
The Conservative Party cited this as “more evidence that Justin Trudeau
and his Liberal government have gone to great lengths to coverup
allegations of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces.”
The opposition parties, including the labour-based New Democrats, and
the proLiberal Toronto Star, call for an independent body to root out
abuse. Independent of what? Independent of the capitalist state and the
corporate elite, or just their military arm? Socialists fully support
the demand for justice by women and all victims of oppression under the
present system. That includes BIPOC folks and LGBTQI people killed by
soldiers and cops, at home and abroad. Remember what Canadian forces and
police did in Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya and Haiti.
Remember how the RCMP failed to investigate hundreds of cases of Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls on B.C.’s notorious Highway of
Tears. Or how the Mounties invaded unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and
arrested Indigenous pipeline opponents. Or how the federal cops watched
as racists in Nova Scotia assaulted Mi’kmaq fishers and burned their
lobster catch and storage huts.
In November 2020, another retired Supreme Court judge, Michel
Bastarache, handed federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair a
devastating report about the state of affairs within the RCMP.
“One of the key findings of this report”, Bastarache noted, “is that the
culture of the RCMP is toxic and tolerates misogynistic and homophobic
attitudes among its leaders and members.”
Should anyone be surprised that the state recruits members in its own
colonial, bigoted and authoritarian image?
And don’t forget how Toronto police watched from inside her apartment,
as 29-year-old Regis Korchinski-Paquet, an Indigenous, Black woman,
plunged to her death from a 24th floor High Park balcony. Just west of
Toronto, Peel police killed a number of people of colour in 2020, some
experiencing mental health issues. Sadly, in cities and towns across
Canada there are many more examples of this horrific pattern of misconduct.
The struggle continues…. against a problem that is clearly systemic in
nature. Socialists recognize that the military and the police may not
soon be abolished. But demands for justice, demands for restitution, and
calls for defunding the police and the military should be advanced, and
should be linked inseparably to a vision of revolutionary working class
rule where sexism and racism no longer have a material basis in social
inequality. —B.W..
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Carl Sagan “It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance
between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all
hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great
openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some
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world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now
and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on
the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being
skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and
either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and
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