In others, senior leaders still strongly recommended retaining officers even though they were guilty of premeditated acts of fraud. The study recommends a return to the basic values for an officer, namely selflessness. Professional ethics must become persuasive in all actions, it adds. Matte's concerns are further supported by a Department of National Defence personnel survey released last fall. The majority surveyed did not see their supervisor as someone to emulate.
Military officials contend the problems are in the past.
Mr. Eggleton says that the more than 300 new reforms introduced over the past two years, including training in ethics and leadership, will substantially decrease the number of cases of wrongdoing and associated problems. Alain Forand, among others, dismisses a leadership crisis as a creation of the news media and military analysts. Cultural anthropologist Donna Winslow, however, worries this thinking is an obstacle to fixing the obvious leadership problems. Her interviews with Canadian Forces personnel have indicated that officers believe themselves to be morally and ethically superior to the rest of the Canadian public. Ethical and moral fitness have to be continually tested and developed, especially using scenario-based training to help officers, adds Ms. Winslow, head of cultural anthropology at Amsterdam Free University in the Netherlands.