Yes.
Evidence of meeting #47 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was survey.
A video is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #47 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was survey.
A video is available from Parliament.
9:15 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
Yes, we were. They way it works is that the client provides us with the draft questions. The client in this case was the Office of the Chief Human Resource Officer. So they're really driving the content. That's their job. Our job is to make sure that the questions are clear and that the respondents to the survey can answer those questions.
We worked with OCHRO to focus-group the questions and make sure they were put into this e-questionnaire or the paper questionnaire that we administer. We're involved to that degree. We're not the ultimate determiner of the questions. We will tell a client if one of the questions is not going to work. As we field it, we will tell the client that we don't think we should be putting it on the questionnaire. It's OCHRO who is the owner of these questions and the one who supplied the questions to us initially.
9:15 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
Do you ever see a need to change the questions? What would make you or them think that a question is not really good, or that it should be changed to another way of asking it?
9:15 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
Actually, if it's a question that is proposed on a previous survey, we might look at the response to that question on previous surveys. If there was a high number of blank responses to the question, it's an indicator that the employees didn't understand that question enough to answer it. If they checked off “not applicable”, when the question could have been applicable to them, that's the first clue.
Then, too, we would engage in a focus group. It'd be in a room with about as many people as there are here today, and we would propose different versions of the question on a screen. This is one technique. The focus group might say, “I think I understand this question better than question two, so I suggest you go with that first question”. That's a brief description of how the focus-group process works and how we would help determine what is a good or bad question.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
So a lot of thought is put into the questions of the survey, I would say.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
It gives the employees a chance to express themselves and show their need and how they feel. I'm glad to hear you say that.
Has the public service employee survey ever covered crown corporations or any other federally regulated workplaces?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
That's a very good question, and I don't have a good answer for it. Has it “ever”?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
I don't know. I'm not an expert in the status of the organizations, whether or not they're a crown corporation. We surveyed some agencies and parts of the federal workplace that are not part of the core federal public service. I gave you the example of CRA, StatsCan's statistical operations. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for example, was not a part of this survey. The postal service was not a part of this survey. So those crown corporations were not in the scope of the survey.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
We see that much of the report deals with women and their work. Have you ever looked at sexual harassment in the workplace and not just the work itself? I mean the surroundings, things like that.
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
The public service employee survey focuses strictly on the experiences of employees in the workplace. It doesn't ask about anything else. It doesn't have any specific questions on sexual harassment. The harassment information that we collect is a broader concept of harassment than sexual harassment, and it's only for the federal public workplace. Any harassment experience that an employee might have at a restaurant or at home is not collected in this. It's only what they would experience in the workplace.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
What do the survey results tell us about fear of being punished or chastised, and opinions on how these issues are addressed by management?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
On the first part about fear of reprisal, there is a question related to that. It's not specific to harassment, but it is more generally about the recourse process.
I'm sorry, what was the second part?
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
There is a question on satisfaction—i.e., does the employee feel satisfied with the way that management is handling harassment? There is also a question on satisfaction about discrimination.
In both of those situations, 72% of employees felt strongly or somewhat agreed that their agency works hard to create a workplace that prevents harassment.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
9:20 a.m.
NDP
9:20 a.m.
St. Paul's, Lib.
Thank you.
Just to be clear, the military personnel from the Canadian Forces were included?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
No, they weren't. The civil service within DND was.
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
Yes, both the civil service of the RCMP and the other part of the RCMP were surveyed. That's because they decided that they wanted to do that.
9:20 a.m.
St. Paul's, Lib.
Of the 28% who didn't respond, were they evenly divided across all departments or were there certain departments that were less likely to respond?
9:20 a.m.
Director, Special Surveys, Statistics Canada
It certainly wasn't perfectly even. We were happier with some response rates in some departments than we were with others. We were trying to get everybody up to that 70%-plus mark. I don't have them in front of me.
We were tracking it as we were going through the survey and putting extra effort in the collection of this information, where we thought there might be an issue with low response.
9:20 a.m.
St. Paul's, Lib.
Could you provide this committee with the disaggregated data for which departments? It could be that some responded at 99% and some at 50%. I think that would be of great interest to this committee.
