She served in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets (RCAC) from 1979 to 1984, rising to the rank of lieutenant and gaining the gold level of The Duke of Edinburgh's Award.
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.
[6] Perron left the Regular Army in 1996,[7] because she was not accepted by other soldiers[2] and was progressing very slowly,[5] having been given a job she considered "very junior".
[11] From 1996 to 2003 Perron was in the Cadet Instructors Cadre, a sub-component of the Canadian Armed Forces and was promoted to Major.
[1] On 16 November 1998, she was made the head of a nine-member advisory board to the Minister of National Defence on helping women and minorities 'blend' into the Canadian Armed Forces.
[7] The board produced a report concluding that "ignorance and intolerance plague Canada's Armed Forces" and described "the military's efforts to integrate women and visible minorities as a failure".
[1] The Globe and Mail called her memoir "revealing and moving",[12] it won the nonfiction Quebec Writers' Federation Award[13] and was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.