Ottawa seeking ‘impartial’ board members to review military colleges
Global News
Five external recruits will include people with expertise in adult education, young adult development and cultural evolution and organizational change, a military job posting says.
The majority of the board tasked with reviewing Canada’s military colleges will be people who have not attended one of the schools and have not publicly expressed a strong opinion on their future, according to a recruitment posting.
A job posting on the Department of National Defence’s LinkedIn page states that the seven-member board will include five people who are not members of the public service or National Defence and two members “from the defence team.”
The five external recruits will include people with expertise in adult education, young adult development and cultural evolution and organizational change, the posting says.
The board was created in response to a report from former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour in May 2022.
As part of her review of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces, Arbour examined the culture at the two military colleges in Kingston, Ont., and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que.
“The governance structure at the military colleges is one of ongoing conflict and confusion between academic and military missions and visions,” Arbour wrote.
But her report also noted that in 2017, 62 per cent of senior leaders in the Armed Forces were graduates of one of the military colleges.
There was a strong sense that those officers “value their experience at military college and are not open to changing how it operates,” Arbour found.