Key Takeaways
- Canada’s feminist foreign‑policy legacy stems from the 2017 Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) and a suite of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) initiatives, but these programs often conflate gender equality with women’s empowerment and ignore intersectional discrimination.
- While the Canadian Armed Forces have adopted Gender‑Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) and set diversity targets (e.g., 25 % women), progress remains largely symbolic and fails to dismantle entrenched hierarchies.
- Representation‑focused measures such as the Elsie Initiative lack evidence that simply adding women reduces sexual and gender‑based violence; instead, they can exacerbate vulnerabilities within unchanged power structures.
- Systemic barriers for racialized and Indigenous peoples persist, with little policy to ensure cultural safety or confront ongoing colonial violence, despite official acknowledgments of past harms.
- Canada’s security apparatus remains rooted in militarism, which prioritizes war‑fighting capacities over genuine gender‑sensitive reform, undermining the very goals its feminist policies proclaim.
- Meaningful change requires confronting militarist foundations, embedding intersectional accountability, and moving beyond token representation to structural reform in both foreign assistance and defence institutions.
Introduction and Policy Shift
At the 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared, “I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy,” a stark departure from the gender‑inclusive rhetoric of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Carney’s remark signalled a retreat from openly branding Canada’s external engagement as feminist, even as he sought to reassure observers that many of the underlying gender‑conscious measures would remain in place. This rhetorical shift invites a closer examination of what Canada has actually achieved over the past decade in gender‑responsive foreign and defence policy, and how durable those gains are when the governing coalition no longer embraces the feminist label.
Foundations of Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy
The cornerstone of Canada’s feminist approach is the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), first launched in 2017 and refreshed in 2021. FIAP directs international assistance toward poverty reduction, inclusive growth, governance, climate action, and peace and security, explicitly aiming to advance gender equality and empower women and girls. Complementing FIAP, Canada has implemented a series of National Action Plans on the United Nations Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda beginning in 2011. Additional instruments include gender chapters in trade agreements, gender‑responsive language in the 2019 Strong, Secure, and Engaged and 2024 Our North, Strong, and Free defence policies, the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations, and the 2019 appointment of a WPS ambassador. Together, these measures illustrate a broad institutional commitment to embed gender considerations across Canada’s foreign policy apparatus.
Scope and Limitations of Gender‑Focused Policies
Despite the expansive catalogue of initiatives, critics argue that Canada’s gender‑focused policies often blur the distinction between gender equality and women’s empowerment, thereby sidelining broader equity concerns. Intersectional forms of discrimination—such as those based on race, age, disability, sexuality, and class—are frequently overlooked, resulting in policies that benefit a narrow segment of women while neglecting others. Moreover, many gender‑targeted strategies are coupled with neoliberal growth agendas that prioritize market‑based solutions over transformative structural change. Consequently, over the past eight years these initiatives have not produced meaningful shifts in gendered power relations domestically or internationally; instead, they risk reinforcing existing hierarchies under the veneer of progress.
Gender Integration in the Canadian Armed Forces
Within the Department of National Defence (DND) and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), gender mainstreaming is pursued through Gender‑Based Analysis Plus (GBA+), which seeks to embed gender perspectives into policy formulation and operational planning. Recruitment and retention campaigns have been reshaped to attract more women, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups, supported by investments in family‑friendly measures such as military housing and childcare. The CAF has set concrete diversity targets, aspiring for women to constitute 25 % of personnel. Official narratives contend that greater inclusivity strengthens operational effectiveness, improves community engagement, and enhances crisis response capabilities.
Representation Versus Structural Change
In practice, the emphasis on hitting representation targets often eclipses the need for deeper institutional reform. Programs like the Elsie Initiative premised on the idea that increasing women’s participation in peacekeeping will curb sexual and gender‑based violence lack empirical support; research indicates that merely adding women to existing hierarchical military structures can create new vulnerabilities or intensify exploitation. While the DND and CAF have adopted zero‑tolerance policies for sexual misconduct, successive reports—including the 2015 Dechamps Review and the 2022 Arbour Independent External Comprehensive Review—show that meaningful cultural change and accountability for perpetrators remain elusive. Without confronting the underlying power dynamics that enable abuse, increased diversity risks placing marginalized service members in hostile environments rather than remedying them.
Ongoing Violence and Accountability Gaps
The persistence of sexual violence and misconduct within the CAF underscores the limits of policy that focuses on numbers over norms. Complaints continue to surface about senior officials overlooking or condoning gender‑ and sex‑based abuses, revealing a gap between stated zero‑tolerance stances and lived reality. The absence of robust mechanisms to investigate, sanction, and prevent repeat offenses means that structural drivers of violence—such as hyper‑masculine military culture and insufficient oversight—remain unaddressed. Consequently, even as the institution publicly champions gender equality, the internal climate for many women and minority members remains precarious.
Systemic Barriers for Racialized and Indigenous Peoples
Diversity quotas alone do not eradicate the entrenched barriers faced by racialized and Indigenous peoples within Canada’s security sector. While recruitment efforts aim to bring these groups into the fold, little policy exists to guarantee cultural safety, combat racism, or address the lingering impacts of colonialism once individuals are employed. Official acknowledgments of colonial harms are frequently relegated to historical narratives, ignoring ongoing realities such as the implication of the RCMP and CAF in the dispossession of Indigenous lands, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG2), and the surveillance of Indigenous land protectors. Without concrete measures to confront these intersecting forms of violence, diversity initiatives risk reproducing the very exclusions they purport to remedy.
The Militarism Dilemma
At the heart of Canada’s stalled gender‑equity agenda lies the militaristic foundation of its defence institutions. Built on doctrines that treat armed conflict as inevitable, the CAF and DND allocate substantial resources to war‑fighting capabilities while gender‑sensitive programs remain comparatively underfunded. Because militarism is historically intertwined with gender inequality, colonial violence, and systemic racism, layering progressive policies onto this structure without challenging its core tenets is unlikely to yield lasting change. In fact, as conflicts exacerbate gender‑based violence and human rights abuses, reliance on military solutions can intensify rather than alleviate the harms that feminist foreign policy seeks to mitigate.
Conclusion and Way Forward
Carney’s disavowal of the feminist label does not erase the policy architecture erected under Trudeau, but it does highlight a growing ambivalence toward gender‑inclusive foreign and defence agendas. To move beyond symbolic gestures, Canada must confront the militarist logic that undergirds its security institutions, embed intersectional accountability mechanisms, and ensure that gender‑equity initiatives are coupled with substantive cultural and structural reform. Only by aligning resources, oversight, and policy ambition with a genuine challenge to patriarchal, colonial, and militaristic norms can Canada hope to realize the transformative promise of its feminist foreign‑policy aspirations.