The head of the Canadian Armed Forces has warned Canada will inevitably be challenged by growing international upheaval as the effects of climate change and global political struggles intensify.

“The country will be tested,” General Jonathan Vance told a special summit on global leadership in Ottawa Thursday.

“Climate change will drive conflict,” the chief of defence staff told a summit session, in response to moderator questions that centred mainly on strengthening women’s participation in peace processes and conflict resolution.

Vance’s predictions were drawn out by a question from moderator Ketty Nivyabandi, now an advocate and researcher with the Nobel Women’s Initiative who arrived in Canada after fleeing her home country, Burundi, where she faced government backlash after leading peaceful protests.

Nivyabandi referred to growing conflict around the globe, and population displacement that is at an “all-time historical high.”

“I would love to hear from you how you, and when I say you I mean the Canadian Armed Forces, how you are adapting, how you are shifting, the way you work and are adapting to this, and where you see the Canadian Armed Forces going in the future, rising to this very challenging concept of peace, by fighting less, that is my hope, that we get to a place where we fight less,” said Nivyabandi. “I know it’s a broad question, but you’re the general, you can do it.”

Vance replied with his own humorous note.

“Nobody in this room hopes for peace more than me; I’m the biggest peacenik in Ottawa, because when we fight my people get hurt. I can assure you that the idea of fighting less appeals to me,” he said. “The challenge of course is I don’t get to decide.”

“The rise of great power states, it’s an issue,” Vance said.

“It’s not just a matter of simple complication; we are in active, daily crisis conditions with great powers who are trying to re-establish things, in terms of the world order, in terms of the fairness of the world order, such that it feels unfair to us,” Vance said during a stream of forthright answers in a plenary appearance with Canada’s first ambassador for women, Jacqueline O’Neill.

O’Neill was named to the newly created post by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last June.

“At some point, in the future, governments will make decisions and some of those decisions will involve standing up for Canadians in a way that will involve conflict. Or we will be sent to places where the government decides that we will stand up for a failed, frail, or failing state, because it is suffering conflict,” said Vance.

“Either way, there’s lots of conflict in the future, we know it; conflict drivers are present and the conflict will run the gamut from great-power, high-end kinetic fighting through to the insidious encroachment of climate events on populations that force the change of agricultural habits or centuries of tradition that will cause conflict. All of that will happen; we know it,” Vance said.

“And will impact women, drastically,” said Nivyabandi.

“It will impact men and women,” Vance replied.

“It will impact entire populations of all age groups and ultimately detract from the course of their lives, that would (otherwise) be happy and content and family-oriented and successful, to survival and living in conflict situations, and it can happen to us if we’re not careful,” he said. “I don’t mean to scare people, but it can.”

Nivyabandi also questioned Vance about progress in Canadian Forces attempts to reduce sexual harassment and abuse in Canada’s forces that led to a successful $900-million court settlement for victims.

Vance said the Canadian strategy to end it has drawn attraction in other armed forces.

“Operational effectiveness is what we’re about,” he said of the strategy.

“You can’t be operationally effective, and how we are operationally effective is through good teams and you can’t have good teams if the team members don’t trust each other or if there is some insidious barrier to effectively working together.”

“Whether it is sexual misconduct, racism, white supremacy, you’ve got to be a team. There has to be some homogeneity.”

“The view of the armed forces, in the minds of some, particularly those who would influence somebody to join the armed forces, is that if you’re going to join the armed forces, you’ll either get raped or PTSD or both, and that’s your lot in life in the armed forces and you’ll get passed away by the government,” he said. “Not true, it’s not true, but it’s true for some,” said Vance.

“Operational excellence and performance is what we are focusing on,” he explained.

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“So who out there has a blueprint for a culture-change plan for an armed forces? Nobody.”

“The biggest challenge for me is we’re alone and we’re in the lead. Honestly, there’s nobody out there doing what we’re doing. We’ve got allies copying us. New Zealand took Operation Honour and imported it, changed the dates, changed the names and with some minor changes brought it into their armed forces.”

“We know what we’re doing is criticize-able, it’s frail in some respects, we’ve never done it before but I think the biggest contribution I’ve made is to ensure that we are a culture of learning as we go through. We will continue to learn, we’ll put the right structures in place, we think, and we’ll continue to learn,” Vance said.

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