Sandra Perron

Major Sandra Marie Perron (born 29 December 1965) is a former Canadian Army officer. She was the first female infantry officer in the Canadian Army. Perron served in the infantry from 1991 to 1996, completing two tours of duty in Yugoslavia. While in the Army she was subjected to sexual harassment and "excessively rough" training.

Early life

Perron was born on 29 December 1965 in Portage la Prairie. Other officers supposedly "saw her as a threat" and recent graduates of the Royal Military College particularly disliked her. On 29 April 1992 Perron was taken 'prisoner' in a simulation of a military exercise. She was mock interrogated, beaten, tied to a tree, and left in the snow for two hours without boots as part of a training exercise. On a second tour, she commanded a TOW Under Armour platoon in 1995 in Croatia,

Perron left the Regular Army in 1996, because she was not accepted by other soldiers A report issued in January 1997 concluded that she experienced "subtle and overt" sexual harassment while in the army. Perron said that she was subject to "constant emotional and psychological harassment". Her experience is credited with forcing the army to revise its procedures in an attempt to stop sexual harassment. She rejoined the Cadet Instructor Cadre in 1996.

Later career

From 1996 to 2003 Perron was in the Cadet Instructors Cadre, a component of the Canadian Armed Forces and was promoted to Major. it won the nonfiction Quebec Writers' Federation Award and was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In 2020 Perron made care packages for the Canadian Armed Forces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2024, filmmaker Mélanie Charbonneau entered production on Out Standing, a film adaptation of Perron's memoir written by Charbonneau and Martine Pagé. The film premiered in the Discovery program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.