Bill C-65 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code (harassment and violence), the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act and the Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1

Part 1 of this enactment amends the Canada Labour Code to strengthen the existing framework for the prevention of harassment and violence, including sexual harassment and sexual violence, in the work place.
Part 2 amends Part III of the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act with respect to the application of Part II of the Canada Labour Code to parliamentary employers and employees, without limiting in any way the powers, privileges and immunities of the Senate and the House of Commons and their members.
Part 3 amends a transitional provision in the Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1.

Canada Labour Code

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Madam Speaker, the training the House offers to members and their staff is very good. I encourage all members and their staff to participate in that training. It provides a good framework for the basis of a healthy and functioning office, one that will give good results and provide an environment that is safe and respectful to all individuals.

As for the adjudication of complaints, I appreciate very much the part in the legislation that allows for mediation. That is a very important part. When an individual has the freedom to engage a supervisor or an employee about a sexual harassment claim, I think that is good. However, we and our staff would be better served if there were an outside third party set up where someone could lodge a complaint. The complaint could be lodged confidentially with that third party. It could then be investigated confidentially and a response given as to whether it was a complaint suitable for mediation or it needed to be escalated through the ranks.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Madam Speaker, the member mentioned that he was concerned about overlapping jurisdiction and rules. I have been involved in the government since 1968. I did not want to go back that far, but that is when I first started. We have had study sessions on these matters starting in the mid-seventies through the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands. I have taken a number of different courses.

Bill C-65 has to be pulled together to make it work as one unified bill. I wonder if the member would like to speak to how we can pull it all together so there is one bill respecting different agencies within the government and within industry.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Madam Speaker, ideally, one single process would be the best way we could provide a solution for what Bill C-65 is hoping to address. Under employment standards, if parliamentarians and senators fell under that legislation, we would be well served. There would be a clearly defined process whereby an independent third party would properly investigate a complaint in confidence so that the person bringing it forward would not need to feel that his or her job was threatened, and the person being accused of inappropriate behaviour would have the protection confidentiality would provide until the investigation was complete and further action required. A central agency looking after that under employment standards would be the ideal place for it.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak this afternoon to a bill that seeks to amend the Canada Labour Code with regard to harassment and violence.

I thank my colleague from Provencher for making valid arguments and reiterating our party's position. We support the bill at second reading. I just came from the meeting of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, where we are getting ready to receive this important bill that we would like to improve.

This bill was introduced on November 7, 2017, by the government, but in light of recent events, we see that it is quite timely. In her speech today, the minister indicated that we can find a definition of harassment in the Canada Labour Code. However, we could learn from the experience and legislative expertise in Quebec on the matter.

What do we mean when we talk about psychological harassment? We must clearly define what we are talking about. According to the Commission des normes, de l'équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, it is vexatious behaviour. It is harmful or humiliating behaviour that is displayed repeatedly or during a single and serious incident by hostile or unwanted behaviour that undermines the dignity or integrity of the employee and which has repercussions on the workplace. It may range from ridiculing the person or their work, isolating them, preventing them from speaking, making offensive or defamatory comments or gestures about or toward them, unsettling, threatening, or assaulting them, or making them suffer reprisals. The person is discriminated against, ostracized, and isolated.

We will likely consider these elements during the committee study to ensure that psychological harassment and physical violence are properly defined in the bill.

Harassment obviously has many consequences. The person might feel victimized. Their integrity was undermined, their self-worth compromised. This has a serious impact on self-esteem, leading to a loss of motivation and potentially to physical or mental health repercussions. The person sometimes tries to stay away from a workplace where there is a risk of accident or disability, for example, or where they feel ostracized. There may be personal issues. This can even lead to job loss, firing or absenteeism due to illness, not to mention financial problems.

Harassment is a serious problem in the workplace, and we must work to eliminate it as quickly as possible, because it has negative consequences not only on the victim, but on the work environment and productivity as well.

The minister has tabled a bill that will require federally regulated companies to adopt a prevention policy and to investigate and report on all cases of harassment that are brought to their attention. They will also have to provide psychological support to employees affected by harassment.

Currently, there are no sanctions in place against the employees at fault. However, recommendations may apply to the companies. Today we discussed two components, namely employees in federally regulated workplaces and political staff. However, the initial steps are the same. Once a policy is in place, the employee can go to their employer to file a complaint. If the complaint is not resolved, there is an optional mediation process. After that, the file can be assigned to an investigator, referred to as a competent person. My colleague just mentioned the importance of properly defining who would be a competent person to handle complaints.

However, as we heard today, we want the process to protect the integrity of those who feel they were assaulted, those I believe are victims, because we care about them. That is why I asked the minister this morning to ensure that anyone who at any time believes that they have been the victim of assault to be able to report it to a third party that is not the employer. We will have to discuss that in committee. In the case of employees under federal jurisdiction, the third party would be the Department of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour. That is important because we do not want anyone who feels they are the victim of assault at the hands of their employer to reach out to Employment and Social Development Canada only to be told that they need to talk to their employer. That would be unfortunate. We want to protect victims, who are at the heart of the process, and ensure that the process does put obstacles in their way as they attempt to access the main resource, which is the Department of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, the third party with investigative power. That is for employees under federal jurisdiction.

The same process applies to employees of political staff. It involves becoming familiar with the policy, talking to the employer, and eventually seeking mediation or the help of an investigator or competent person. We are in a political environment, which is bound to be significant. I am pleased to see that the government is being open about the need to ensure we have an independent process in a partisan setting. We must ensure that political staff are not the victims of partisan games. Someone gave the example of an employee of a government MP who files a complaint. We must ensure that the process is independent. We are going to look at that in committee to determine the best way of going about things and to ensure that the labour minister does not end up in a conflict of interest. As members know, there are a number of commissioners who report to the House. They are independent and could play a useful role in this regard.

Those are some of the issues we would like to raise in committee. We have listed some of them. It is important to avoid any retaliation against the victims, including political staff, during the process. It is also important to properly define the notion of a competent person. This is the expert who will be appointed to investigate a given situation. Of course, we must also always take care to avoid conflicts of interest and uphold the principle of the presumption of innocence throughout the process.

All of this takes resources. The minister was pretty vague about the resources she intends to set up at Employment, Workforce Development and Labour that will be dedicated to working with businesses to raise awareness and support them in implementing harassment and violence prevention policies.

Those are our questions for the minister. This is an important and necessary step because nearly six out of ten employees in federal workplaces report having been victims of harassment. That means there is a problem and we have to take meaningful steps toward fixing it. This is a step in the right direction, and we will certainly encourage the government to draw inspiration from initiatives and expertise related to psychological harassment that are emerging across the country. As a Quebecker, I am proud to say that the Government of Quebec has been working on this issue for over a decade now. It has developed expertise that could be very useful to us as we lay the foundation following this initial step.

To sum up, this is a step in the right direction and a constructive approach that we want to implement with the government to advance this legislation, although some questions do remain that we hope to clarify at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

The minister mentioned one thing that I really appreciated, namely, the need for a cultural shift, and she can definitely count on our collaboration in that regard.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Madam Speaker, if we are looking at the incidences of sexual harassment and we take it here to the House of Commons as an example in attracting more women to politics and encouraging more women to stay in politics, how important is it that women, men, and people of minorities across the country hear that all people in the House are working together to find a solution regarding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Madam Speaker, we have to set the highest standard in society since we are looked at as models.

This tier of the issue, the harassment of staffers, has to be dealt with in a cautious and particular manner. That is why we feel we should prevent partisanship from being involved in that process.

As the member knows, regarding the conduct between parliamentarians, we already have defining rules for elected members.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Madam Speaker, one of the issues referred to more and more today is the victims and how we need to listen to them. As a Conservative, I know we are very proud of the Victims Bill of Rights that we passed. I know my colleague had something to do with that.

Particularly, I would like to mention the current Bill C-38. It spells out consecutive sentencing for human trafficking. This is a trend we see with the government. It talks a good game but when it comes to actually doing things, like standing up for victims, as we have seen with Bill C-38, the government seems to just avoid the issue altogether.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Madam Speaker, the member mentioned that we were the party that brought forward the victims Bill of Rights. What we want in the process and what we will be very keen on is to ensure we not double-victimizing people who may have been involved in a harassment situation. That is why we feel the independence of the third party involved in the investigation is a very important aspect.

One other issue I would like to point out is that today we have discussed parliamentary staffers and employees of the federal government, but the government also has a lot of civil servants. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of harassment mentioned by civil servants. We have a responsibility because they are the people working for the government.

We certainly have to clean our own house, which includes the civil service. As well, there are those who are working under the federal jurisdiction. This is certainly one aspect we will ask the minister about to ensure we take care of the harassment occurring within the civil service.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Madam Speaker, does my hon. colleague feel we should be moving beyond just Bill C-65, looking at the big picture of what is happening in Canada, and why people are moving in this way?

We have had harassment policies in the civil service since the seventies, yet it still seems to continue. Does the member feel we should be looking at a broader picture to see why this is happening?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Madam Speaker, when it comes to harassment, there must be zero tolerance. We can draw inspiration from the mechanisms put in place to go even further than current laws and ensure that an independent third party investigates harassment cases and makes binding decisions to protect the victims.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am going to be sharing my time with the member for Essex. I am honoured in this astonishing time to be speaking to the vitally important issue of sexual harassment and violence in our public dialogue and in our workplaces.

I am going to talk about the brave young women who are coming forward, the legacy of social justice women's rights activists on whose shoulders we stand. I am going to talk about the support of my party, the NDP, for Bill C-65. I am going to affirm that no party is immune to the revelations and bad behaviour that are being reported. I am going to talk about the cost of shutting women out of politics. I am going to talk a bit about some of the changes to the bill that would help us to make it even better protection for workers.

The imperative for us to take this action as parliamentarians is fuelled by the terrible stories that we are hearing. I have a quote from a former parliamentary staffer, Beisan Zubi. She said that being a parliamentary staffer on the Hill was “a crash course in sexism and sexual harassment”. She said, “But if I’m being honest, I would have also warned them to stay away, that Parliament Hill, in my experience, was a fundamentally unsafe place for young women.” How can that be said about the Commons, the place for the people? Lauren Dobson-Hughes said, “You take your cues from people around you who are in positions of power, and if they don't think that's weird, if that didn't even momentarily give them a second glance, then you think, 'Maybe the problem is me; maybe that's just normal.'” It is not normal.

More than anything, I want to state it is a privilege for us to be in this House and to be able to make permanent change at this historic time. I want to honour the brave women who, after decades of holding these stories back, are risking themselves and their reputations and are telling their stories and ringing the alarm on deeply embedded sexism and violence in our common discourse and in our workplaces, including this workplace here. I recognize the great cost to women for coming forward. I want to say to them that I am really sorry it happened to them and that we are going to honour their bravery by doing the right thing here in this House. We recognize that we have the highest responsibility to act on the respect and importance of the words that we have been given. This is the global #MeToo movement. This is Time's Up, and time is up.

We are determined to ensure workplaces in this country are safe from sexual harassment. We know all workers everywhere deserve and are entitled to a safe and secure environment. The work before us today is to make sure there is zero tolerance for harassment and violence in our workplaces, and that when it does happen, there must be a transparent process where the complainants are confident that they will be treated with respect and privacy, and those who are accused know there is a process that will be adjudicated, and the public will have an idea about what that process is.

The labour minister's proposal, Bill C-65, amends the Canada Labour Code to include sexual violence and harassment, and it attempts to do a similar thing within parliamentary workplaces where the concern about parliamentary privilege has even prevented the Canada Labour Code from having effect in our constituency offices across the country and here on the Hill. I am very grateful to the labour movement for identifying changes that we can put in place that would improve the bill and also to my colleagues, the member for Saskatoon West, our former labour critic, and the member for Jonquière, our current labour critic, because the work by them and their staff is building our case and we are going to make this legislation even better.

I want to give thanks to the men in the NDP caucus who I serve with, as well as the members of Islands Trust Council, where I served for 12 years. I personally have had a very good experience as an elected woman in politics, maybe because Islands Trust Council had an exactly gender balanced 26-person council. Maybe that had something to do with the change in tone. However, what we are talking about today is the experience of workers and not so much about parliamentarians.

I want to acknowledge that if we can get more women into Parliament, they will change the tone. “Add women, change politics” is something we hear a lot. They will change the tone and also enact policies. We have seen across the world that by removing barriers to women's participation in public life, systems and countries protect all vulnerable people better than we do right now. We have seen this in other parts of the world. Canada is, sadly, really behind the ball on this.

The status quo policies that we have had in this Parliament have meant that the number of women elected to office has stalled out. If we could bump that number up, it might be that we would have less sexual harassment. We heard that specifically, maybe nine months ago. Daughters of the Vote was a beautiful initiative on International Women's Day, but one sister, Arezoo Najibzadeh, powerfully and symbolically left her seat empty to represent the cost of violence against women that keeps women from participating in public life and prevents them from taking their seats. Hands were raised to that sister. Both the member for Hochelaga and I saluted her efforts on that day. She is a reminder to me that we need all the diversity of voices in this House to change the country and bring proper representation.

That is the cost of keeping political staffers in an unsafe place and causing women to say that Parliament Hill is not safe for them. This is the power of social media. It makes it possible for us to transmit these stories, and it is bringing down some pretty amazing political leaders right now. Again, we are in quite a time.

I want to also acknowledge my Aunt Kim Malcolmson, who I have talked about in the House before. She was a pay equity commissioner. She was very challenging for my old grandfather. She was a hard-core feminist, a CCF-Waffle Party-Tommy Douglas aficionado. She shaped me enormously. She is in palliative care. On Friday morning, my fabulous Uncle Paul Barber told her that Patrick Brown had been forced to resign his seat, and although it was very hard for her to speak, she demanded to know more details. On Saturday, I was able to visit her in the hospital and let her know that the New Democrats were going to return to Parliament by calling out the need to act to end violence against women and sexual harassment, and at the end of the week we were going to be celebrating the two-year anniversary of the successful motion from me and the member for Jonquière in the House to legislate pay equity. I was able to let Kim know that we were coming into Parliament fighting. That was on Saturday, and yesterday she passed away.

I like to think, because she was a woman who knew she was going to Heaven, that she is looking down on this amazing time that we are living in and seeing that the work that has been done is carrying on and that the young women leaders in this country, with their deep bravery and astonishing ability to tell stories, are changing the way we will go forward with this legislation.

The labour movement is urging changes and New Democrats will be urging changes in committee. We are glad that with the new House leader of the NDP, we were able to accelerate the passage of this bill. We will debate its details and get changes as fast as we can so that we can make politics a safe place for all members of our country.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, this is a bill that I think all parties in the House support.

I want to probe the member's thoughts a bit on getting more women involved in politics. All of us agree that it is important to get more women elected in politics and sometimes the mechanism for that involves party leaders wanting to intervene more in local nominations, but there is push-back in terms of questions about the independence of local nominations. There is, I guess, a tension between different important values in terms of getting more representation but also the importance of the local process.

I would genuinely like to hear the member's thoughts on what the best mechanism would be for ensuring that outcome, from her perspective.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am really proud that 43% of the New Democrat candidates nominated for the federal election slate in 2015 were women, and we elected a 40% female caucus. I have a lot of strong women around me today. That is borne out again and again. If political parties offer women, voters say yes to women. I believe the Conservative Party nominated 17% women and about 16% to 17% of its caucus is female, while for the Liberals it was 30% and 30%.

My colleague, the member of Parliament for Burnaby South, proposed a private member's bill that would have given incentives for political parties to nominate more gender-balanced slates. Unfortunately, a feminist Liberal government voted that down, which was very disappointing.

We are now looking to the Liberals to see what they will bring to this Parliament that might also give political parties incentives. In the meantime, they could do what the NDP does: Riding associations are not allowed to go to a nomination vote until they show that they have exhausted all equity candidate nomination possibilities.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her intensely personal speech. Her story about her godmother or her aunt who was so devoted to these issues until her last breath was really quite moving.

I can assure you that we are all happy to see that all parties and nearly everyone here welcomes this bill and realizes the critical need for it.

A few points have been addressed more than once today, including, for example, the fact that the bill does not define what needs to be regulated. The courage it takes to report this behaviour was brought up many times.

Does my colleague believe that if we came up with a clear definition of these actions, we could create better awareness campaigns that would point specifically to the exact kind of “off-colour” behaviours that we want to stop?

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member asked a fair question. I am reminded of the words of Carleton University's Jennifer Robson, who said that harassment policies on paper do not work if workers do not have all the information and, most of all, the trust. That is up to us.

However, the member is quite right that getting as much detail as we can in here right now would make implementation and understanding much easier to get at, both from the side of the employer and from the side of the worker. We have heard concerns, for example, that the bill may not protect the privacy of the people coming forward, as much as it might, when the competent person selected as their mediator is a co-worker. It is not clear what the actual penalties for the employers would be, whether that is a federally regulated industry or, in this case, a member of Parliament. Also, it is not clear how anonymity and privacy would be protected.

There are many details we will be taking in good faith to committee, and we will try to make this as specific as possible. That is what our brothers and sisters in the labour movement have called for.