Canada once wore the blue helmet with pride. In the 1990s, our country was at the forefront of United Nations peacekeeping missions, sending thousands of troops abroad to stand between warring factions and help stabilize fragile states. At its peak in 1993, more than 3,300 Canadian military members served under the UN flag. Today, that number has shrunk to a mere 29 and just two of them are women in uniform.
This is not only a shocking decline; it is a direct contradiction of what Canada promised. In 2017, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau stood before the world and declared Canada would become a leader in promoting women in peacekeeping. It was part of a broader feminist foreign policy, and Ottawa even launched the Elsie Initiative, a multimillion-dollar fund designed to help increase women’s participation in global peace operations. For a time, it looked as though progress was being made during the mission in Mali, between 2018 and 2023, women made up a remarkable 25 per cent of Canadian peacekeepers.
But today, that momentum is gone. The latest UN statistics show not a single woman among the 18 Canadian Armed Forces officers currently deployed. Three of the six police officers are women, but the overall picture remains grim. The United Nations itself sets a modest target: 22 per cent of deployed military staff officers should be female. Canada, a country that once championed the cause, is now falling embarrassingly short.
This matters. When Canada fails to live up to its own commitments, it weakens its credibility on the world stage. As Walter Dorn, a respected professor of defence studies, put it: “This is embarrassing in the international community and will cause the UN to flag Canada because we’re not meeting the UN targets.” And he’s right. If Canada can’t practice what it preaches, why should anyone else take our calls for gender equality in global security seriously?
Of course, defenders of the government will point out that today’s security environment looks very different. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Canada has stationed nearly 2,000 troops in Latvia as part of NATO’s deterrence mission. In an era of rising great-power tensions and shrinking military resources, the argument goes, Ottawa simply doesn’t have the capacity to do both NATO and UN missions at scale. But that explanation doesn’t erase the fact that Canada made a public promise one that carried moral weight and has since allowed it to fade quietly into the background.
The truth is, peacekeeping itself has been sidelined in Canadian defence policy for decades. After Bosnia, Somalia, and later Afghanistan, senior military leaders leaned toward counter-insurgency and NATO operations, often dismissing peacekeeping as an outdated or lesser task. As a result, we now rank 74th among troop contributors to UN missions a stunning fall from grace for a country that once defined itself by its blue-helmet legacy.
Some may shrug at these numbers. But symbols matter. Women’s participation in peacekeeping is not window dressing research shows it improves mission success, builds trust with local populations, and helps prevent sexual exploitation and abuse. By failing to meet even modest benchmarks, Canada isn’t just breaking a promise; it’s undermining the very principles it claims to champion.
Canada cannot be both absent from the field and present at the podium. If we want to continue calling ourselves leaders in peacekeeping, we need to back words with action. That means investing in deployments, prioritizing women’s roles, and treating the UN not as an afterthought, but as a core pillar of our foreign policy.
Otherwise, the uncomfortable truth is this: Canada’s feminist foreign policy risks becoming nothing more than a branding exercise and the world will notice.
