“Throughout my career I have seen first-hand the demands of military service, and the sometimes enormous impact it can have on members and their families”, Sajjan said in a statement. Reportedly, an “inappropriate” post was made by a soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces, which was later removed.
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A spokesperson for the Canadian Armed Forces would not reveal the content of the message, which was pulled from the social media site.
”Racist attitudes are not compatible with military ethos and with effective military service”. The person who allegedly wrote the offensive Facebook post is a non-commissioned officer from CFB Valcartier, near Quebec City. “Any conduct that reflects such attitudes will not be tolerated”, the Globe and Mail reported on Wednesday.
The new defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, served in the military himself in Afghanistan and Bosnia and was the first Sikh to command a Canadian army regiment. It quotes the officer saying, “We have had an incident in which a high-ranking member of the military posted negative comments on a Facebook page about our minister”. We already deal with conduct problems on a daily bases in our ranks and it’s our duty, and that of our leaders, to put an end to it immediately.
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Sajjan’s tours as a key Canadian asset and liaison with torture-tainted Afghan authorities dovetailed with an era when significant human rights concerns had been quietly raised by Canada’s foreign affairs representatives, including a 2005 Canadian report that noted Afghanistan’s “military, intelligence and police forces have been involved in arbitrary arrests, kidnapping, extortion, torture and extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects”. “But in terms of ‘badass?’ Uh, no. I have done a lot of interesting things in the Vancouver police and in the military, where I would say that I worked with a few very professional soldiers, police officers”.
