Gen. Jennie Carignan has officially taken command of the Canadian Armed Forces as chief of the defence staff, making her the first woman ever to be promoted to the role.
Carignan was also promoted to the rank of general during Thursday’s change of command ceremony at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
She replaced Gen. Wayne Eyre, who is retiring after 40 years in uniform.
“It’s momentous because it’s going to give young women a hope for their own dreams to come true,” said Sandra Perron, Canada’s first female infantry officer and a retired major.
Carignan has long been considered a trailblazer in the forces. She became the first Canadian woman to command a combat arms unit in 2008.
A combat engineer by profession, Carignan has been front and centre for some extraordinary global events during her three-decade career.
She commanded the NATO training mission in Iraq in 2020, led the Task Force Kandahar Engineer Regiment in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 and served in Bosnia in 2002, clearing explosive ordnance from farmers’ fields.
Until recently, Carignan was in charge of transforming the military’s culture in response to a sexual misconduct crisis that saw multiple senior leaders removed from some of the most prestigious military positions.
Her appointment comes as Canada marks 35 years since women were first allowed to serve in most military occupations.
The percentage of military members who reported being sexually assaulted by another member of the military more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, says a new report from Statistics Canada. Canadian Armed Forces Chief of Professional Conduct and Culture Lt.-Gen Jennie Carignan addresses the concerns on Power & Politics.
Carignan takes over at a very difficult time for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), which is struggling to reverse a massive shortfall in personnel.
“The military is in a state of crisis today,” said Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute who studies military culture and personnel. “Right now, we have aging equipment and a lack of personnel. As we’re bringing in more and more equipment, the personnel recruitment and retention is not keeping pace.”
Earlier this year, CBC News reported that only 58 per cent of the CAF would be able to respond if called upon in a crisis by NATO allies right now — and almost half of the military’s equipment is considered “unavailable and unserviceable.”
In March, Defence Minister Bill Blair said the CAF is facing a “death spiral” because three years of data show the people leaving military service outnumber the ones joining up. He called for innovative solutions to turn the situation around.
A military with money to spend
The latest data shows the CAF heard from more than 70,000 people interested in joining in 2023-2024 but the military was only able to get 4,301 of them into uniform due to a backlog in the screening process.
While Carignan is inheriting all sorts of administrative and procurement problems, she’s also in an “enviable” position, said Dave Perry, president and CEO of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
Perry said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the first PM in his lifetime to promise to meet NATO’s benchmark for alliance members’ military spending — two per cent of national GDP. After mounting criticism from NATO allies, Trudeau announced last week that Canada wants to hit that target by 2032, but offered few details.
Following mounting criticism, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Canada will ramp up investments in defence to meet NATO’s military investment target of two per cent of GDP. Trudeau made this announcement at the close of NATO’s annual summit in Washington.
“The government has earmarked hundreds of billions of dollars for reinvestment in our armed forces and the vast bulk of that remains still to actually be spent,” said Perry.
“So Gen. Carignan’s inheriting a very enviable situation. And I think most of her predecessors would have been extraordinarily jealous to have the great problem of how you spend a couple hundred billion dollars on the Canadian Armed Forces.”
He said there’s a “massive opportunity” here for the Canadian Armed forces to “really reorient the future” of the military.
Duval-Lantoine said it’s also important for the public to restrain its expectations of Carignan — because those expectations can often be “too high” when it comes to women in powerful positions.
“We expect that because they know about the dysfunction of an organization and even have experienced misogyny and sexism in the organization, that they’re going to fix the problem very quickly,” she said. “And that’s putting too high of an expectation, because one person cannot fix a problem that is the result of the behaviour of 90,000 people and the structure of the organization that’s very embedded.
“The blowback if Gen. Carignan doesn’t fix the readiness problem in the military could be much more intense than what we would see with a male CDS.”
Carignan went to study at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean in 1986, six years after it began admitting women.
During her three years as the military’s chief of professional conduct and culture, she travelled across the country holding town halls with military members as part of her efforts to address long-standing cultural issues.
Gov. Gen. Mary Simon presided over the change of command ceremony.