Lieutenant General Jenny Carignan has been appointed the next chief of the defence staff, becoming the first woman to hold the position of commander in chief of the Canadian Armed Forces, CBC News and Radio-Canada report.
Senior sources said Mr Carignan would succeed Gen. Wayne Eyre as commander of the Canadian Armed Forces.
CBC News is keeping the name of the source confidential because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the publication.
Canada has had 21 full-time chief of national defence since the position was created in 1964, all of whom have been men.
Sources said Carignan was offered the post on Wednesday and accepted it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to formally announce the appointment next Tuesday, July 2, ahead of the NATO summit, which will be held from July 9 to 11. Formally, the Governor General appoints the Chief of Defence Staff on the advice of the federal cabinet.
A change of command ceremony in which Carignan will officially be promoted to chief is scheduled for July 18, CBC News first reported.
Newcomers are seen as pioneers
Carignan is currently the military’s chief of professional ethics and culture, a newly created role he began in April 2021, when he was tasked by the federal government with combating sexual misconduct within the Canadian Armed Forces and changing the culture of the force.
Carignan is considered a pioneer of Canadian women serving in combat roles.
Her career in the Canadian Armed Forces spans more than 30 years, and she enlisted at the Royal Military Academy of Canada in 1986, six years after the academy began admitting women.
Carignan became the first woman from the defense industry to be promoted to general in 2016 and has also held a number of senior positions, including chief of staff of the Army Operations Department at Army Headquarters.
Her overseas assignments include deployments to the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel and Bosnia-Herzegovina. She led a task force of engineers in Kandahar from 2009 to 2010, at the height of the Taliban insurgency in that volatile Afghanistan province.
Domestically, she led emergency response efforts when Canadian troops deployed to Quebec in 2019 to combat severe spring flooding, and later that same year was appointed commander of the NATO training mission in Iraq.
Eyre said in January that he would retire this summer after 40 years in the military. At the time, Downing Street congratulated him in a media statement and thanked him for his service.
Military faces recruiting and culture challenges
Carignan takes over the Canadian military at a difficult time.
The military is grappling with what an outside report by Louise Arbour, a former Supreme Court judge and one-time UN high commissioner for human rights, described as a “pernicious culture of sexual misconduct.” Nearly a dozen senior military officials have been accused of sexual misconduct or turning a blind eye to abhorrent behavior in recent years.
At the same time, the military is facing a recruitment “death spiral” as Defence Secretary Bill Blair has acknowledged.
Earlier this year, CBC News reported that currently only 58 per cent of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is available to respond to requests from NATO allies in a crisis, and nearly half of the military’s equipment is “unavailable and unusable.”
Meanwhile, Canada is under renewed pressure from allies and critics at home to come up with a concrete plan for meeting its defense-spending commitments as a NATO member state. Canada is the only one of NATO’s 32 member states that has not publicly committed to spending at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its military by the end of the century.
But in June, Finance Committee chair Anita Anand argued that it was pointless to pump huge amounts of money into the defence ministry until it had the capacity to spend the money given to it.
The Liberal government released its latest defence policy in the spring, pledging to increase defence spending by billions of dollars, but Canada’s military spending is expected to reach just 1.76 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade.
CBC News: The House9:14A Canadian general’s combat diary from Iraq
As head of NATO’s training mission in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Jenny Carignan has had a front row seat to some of the most extraordinary and dangerous moments on the international stage in 2020. What was it like for her trying to hold together NATO’s mission while facing possible war with Iran, possible expulsion from Iraq and a global pandemic? CBC’s Murray Brewster spoke with her about some key moments and shared a glimpse into her combat diary.