Human Resources Committee on Feb. 12th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

MP Harder, go ahead, please.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

On this round, it's Rosemarie.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you for being here today.

My first question for you is this. When an investigation is launched, what's the current time frame to complete it, roughly?

[Brenda Baxter]

It all depends on the nature of the investigation and the issue that's being looked at. I can't give you a time frame for any type of investigation right now.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Leading up to my next question, when the minister was here, we were discussing that a significant number of complaints are anticipated under this new legislation.

I guess you can't really give me an estimated time, if we're going to have investigations.... If it goes so far that there need to be investigations, do we have any idea what kind of backlog this would cause in the system? Is the department prepared, or what is it going to do? I know going through a complaint process and then the investigation, if that happens, is a rigorous process to begin with, and one that would be drawn out for the victim/survivor, right?

[Brenda Baxter]

I have two points here. First, I would say that when we do our consultations with respect to the regulatory development, one thing we may be looking at is whether there have to be some parameters put around the time frames of an investigation.

Second, there are two parts to the investigation. There's the internal portion that was identified by my colleague, the workplace investigation. It involves a competent third person who does an investigation, produces a report, and makes recommendations for the workplace. There are also complaints that could come to the labour program with respect to the process not working. There are two types of work to support the effective functioning of this piece of legislation.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

That's perfect, thank you.

Also, at the beginning it was mentioned that supports for employees and employers will be provided for preventing harassment in the workplace.

Do we have any idea what that's going to look like for employers versus employees, and how employees would be made aware of their rights and how to bring things forward?

[Barbara Moran]

I think there will be a range of educational types of material. There will also be awareness campaigns and that type of thing—what is harassment, what is violence, what are your rights, what are your responsibilities? That can take a whole range of different forms, from social media to Twitter to putting stuff on the web. We have inspectors across the country who are going into the workplaces, as well, who can help with that.

I think a key part of the process, the first part of the process, is that employers are going to be required to have a policy in place that they've developed in consultation with the workplace committee, so that is the very first step. If you have a really good, strong, robust policy for prevention, that's going to go a long way to avoiding complaints and, frankly, to changing the culture in the workplace.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

That leads to my next question.

We've heard mention of policies in the workplace. How is that going to be monitored? How is that going to regulated, so to speak? If we each have our own policy, is there going to be a specific standard, and how is that going to be relayed to us to implement?

[Barbara Moran]

Through the regulations, we're going to spell out what a policy needs to include.

I think it's important to note that every workplace is different. Whether it's a member of Parliament or one of our private sector employers, they're going to be different, so we'll have to find that balance in the regulations and not be so prescriptive in what's required in the policy that they're not able to adjust depending on their workplace circumstance.

For example, a trucking company would have a policy that would be different from a member of Parliament's policy.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

My last question is in regard to the “competent person'” we've been discussing.

Are there going to be specific qualifications for this person, or can it just be Joe off the street who we both know is going to do this? Do they have to have some type of education or some type of courses or training to be put in this position?

[Barbara Moran]

Yes, they will have some sort of qualifications. Through the regulations, we're going to spell out what we would deem to be a competent person. Through our consultations on the regulations, we'll figure out what those qualifications would be, be they educational, experience, or whatever.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

MP Dabrusin, please, you're next.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

When we're looking at where we want to go, part of good groundwork—for me, anyway, when I'm looking at it—is knowing where we are now with the existing situation. I was hoping that maybe you could walk us through a little. Where is the legislation right now?

I was looking through an ESDC document here that talks about how they are two separate regimes. Can you walk through those regimes quickly so that we have an idea of where the gaps are now? Where do we jump over from here to where we're going with the legislation?

[Barbara Moran]

Sure. Right now violence and sexual harassment are dealt with separately in the code. Sexual harassment is dealt with under part III of the code, which is labour standards. What's different about labour standards is that the requirements associated with what the employer is required to do are different from what's in part II.

The other thing is it applies to different workplaces as well. A key difference between part II of the labour program, which is where the harassment and violence provisions will be put, and part III, as I said, is that part III does not apply to the federal public service. Currently neither part II nor part III applies to parliamentarians. What this legislation also proposes to do is bring all of part II, the occupational health and safety provisions, to parliamentarians, so that section will not be limited to the harassment and violence provisions but will also include occupational health and safety.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

The full part II would be covered—

[Barbara Moran]

Yes, it will be the full part II.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

All right. The change that's happening mainly goes to breadth, as far as to who is covered between the two, and then the two are subsumed within one piece of legislation, as opposed to being within two regimes.

[Barbara Moran]

That's correct. We took the violence provisions that are already in part II and built on them to make them more robust, and we'll be continuing to do that through the regulatory process. For example, the requirement for an employer to identify a competent person to undertake an investigation, the qualifications of the competent person, and all those details are again building on what's already there and making it more robust.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Right.

A bit earlier we had a lot of questions about what happens if you disagree with a decision that a complaint is frivolous or vexatious and about the appeals process. Can you set that out?

[Barbara Moran]

At any point in the appeals process, an individual can complain that the process hasn't been followed, and they can complain with the labour program. If it comes to the labour program and it's determined to be frivolous, vexatious, or in bad faith—and for that the bar is quite high—or if the issue has been adequately dealt with in another forum, then the labour program can say they're not going to investigate it. If that occurs, then there is an opportunity for judicial review of that decision. That's a decision of the labour program.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I was curious the data that is collected. You touched a bit earlier on the data that is available to you right now. Do you have any disaggregated data about different forms of harassment and who is impacted? It came up through the consultation. There was discussion how it is gendered, for example. Is that data available to you?

[Barbara Moran]

One of the things we are doing through the legislation is trying to get more data, to be honest with you. One of the pieces will be requiring more reporting on occurrences of harassment and violence in the workplace, so that will help us on data.

In terms of the data we currently have, certain things like incidents of violence are reported to the labour program. In addition, we look at various surveys that give us a sense of what's out there. As part of the consultations we did an online survey, for example, that has provided us with data. We have a federal jurisdiction survey of employers that we were able to use to get a sense of the issue.

As well, more and more surveys seem to be made public, not necessarily limited to the federal jurisdiction, that provide us with a good sense of the extent to which harassment is a problem in Canadian workplaces.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

How does this legislation help you with getting better data?

[Barbara Moran]

This will be spelled out in the regulations. Reporting by employers is going to be required when issues of harassment or violence are brought to their attention. It's going to give us data on what gets brought forward to an employer.