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Photo by Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press

I mention sexual misconduct because Wednesday came the release of a Statistics Canada survey that finds little progress in the Canadian Forces’ war on the scourge.

This is not to say the military should not be seriously addressing sexual assault, which is different (it involves violence or the threat of violence) from the catch-all “misconduct,” which includes a broad range of behaviour, such as inappropriate comments and “getting too close,” as the StatsCan survey notes.

It was in the spring of 2015 that former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Marie Deschamps released her report on the breadth of sexual misconduct in the Forces.

Confidentiality and anonymity were the report’s imprimatur. Its language was florid: There was a “sexualized culture” with the forces that was so pervasive, Deschamps said, that it was “conducive to more serious incidents of sexual harassment and assault” and overtly hostile to women.

In her introduction, Deschamps said “The problem of sexual misconduct in society at large cannot be overstated.”

This is not to say the military should not be seriously addressing sexual assault

(Curiously, it was very much what Vance appeared to be trying to say of the Kandahar memorial on Facebook: “The importance of this hall … cannot be understated.” Surely he too meant “overstated”? That said, in my view, Deschamps overstated the problem, as Vance understated the memorial’s importance.)

In any case, the Forces reacted to the Deschamps report as though her 10 recommendations, like the commandments to Moses, had come directly from God.

As the fourth “progress report addressing sexual misconduct” noted in February of this year, under Vance, the Forces moved from an organizational approach to the problem to the “operational imperative.”

This was hugely significant, the report says, “because it attached to the endeavour the same priority of war-fighting, peace-enforcement, emergency and humanitarian operations the (Forces) had executed with little pause over the past two-plus decades.”

Thus was born on Aug. 14, 2015, Operation Honour, its goal to eliminate sexual misconduct by connecting with members “in a language and with a focus they understood instinctively and responded to reflexively.”