Canada’s Military ombudsman sees no issue with vaccine mandate with 10 complaints

The Canadian Armed Forces since December has required that all troops receive two shots of a recognized COVID-19 vaccine or face disciplinary proceedings.

Canada’s military ombudsman says his office has received fewer than a dozen complaints from service members about the Armed Forces’ vaccine requirement, and that he has not found any issues with how it is being enforced.

The Canadian Armed Forces since December has required that all troops receive two shots of a recognized COVID-19 vaccine or face disciplinary proceedings, including forced removal from the military.

While the vast majority of service members have bared their arms for shots, more than 1,100 have not. Several hundred of those have since hung up their uniforms, either voluntarily or involuntarily, with more on their way out.

Despite those numbers and the stakes involved, Canadian Armed Forces ombudsman Gregory Lick says only 10 of the more than 1,800 individual complaints received by his office over the past year related to the vaccine requirement.

Of those, he added, none were found to have constituted undue unfairness to the affected Armed Forces member.

“That’s not a tremendous amount,” he said in an interview. “Particularly when we’ve looked at the individual complaints and found that they were treated fairly well. ? There doesn’t seem to be a systemic issue in the application of the policy.”

Created in 1998 in the aftermath of the Somalia scandal, the military ombudsman’s mandate is to assess whether government and military policies affecting Canadian troops are fairly and equitably applied.

While the ombudsman has previously investigated systemic issues, with a study on access to mental health services for reservists underway, Lick indicated he has no plans to conduct a similar review of the vaccine requirement.