Good afternoon, and thank you to the honourable members for inviting me to testify on this urgent subject.
My name is Hilary Beaumont, and I'm a staff reporter with Vice News, an on-line news outlet. I have a journalism degree from the University of King's College and I recently completed the Banff Centre's investigative journalism workshop. One of my areas of focus is sexual harassment and assault in the digital age.
Recently, I published an investigation into workplace harassment on Parliament Hill, hoping to shed light on the issue and to influence debate on Bill C-65. Over the past three months, I interviewed more than 40 women who worked on Parliament Hill, everyone from current and former MPs, to lobbyists, journalists, staff, and interns.
It quickly became clear that female employees are the most vulnerable to harassment. Many of them shared negative experiences, ranging from sexist comments to groping and sexual assault. Some said they had been fired, or passed over for jobs, after they had tried to report abuse. Current employees said that they have no idea how to report harassment if it happens to them. My investigation found that weak anti-harassment policies, alongside a baked-in hyperpartisan and male-dominated culture, are failing survivors, particularly female employees.
Bill C-65 will do a number of important things. It will bring Hill employees under Canada's Labour Code, giving them another route to report. It will require investigations of known incidents of harassment and will add a third party to receive complaints. It will not replace the Hill's current feeble policies, and it will not erase cultural reasons that prevent women from reporting abuse, including party loyalty, small office environments, and the imbalance of power between employees and superiors. That's why I believe Bill C-65 is an important step forward.
Briefly, here are my recommendations as you study this bill. Please note that these recommendations are specific to the parliamentary workplace.
First, harassment complaints must be removed from politics as much as possible. The December 2014 House of Commons policy is the main policy that employees access to report harassment. Now that employees of all parties, including the NDP, can access this policy, it needs to be improved.
One major issue is that employees must first report harassment to the MP who employs them. I spoke to one former employee who said she experienced psychological harassment from a male co-worker who was her equal. She went to HR, but she was told that she had to report it to the MP she worked for. She was too intimidated to report to him, because she was still on probation and would have been easily identifiable in a small-office environment. Her alleged harasser referred to their office as a “boy's club”, and she would have been reporting to a male MP about male behaviour. She was fired shortly after she contacted HR. She believes the MP found out about her contact with HR through a co-worker whom she confided in, but she was given no reason for her dismissal.
Bill C-65 will not replace this policy, but it can strengthen it. The bill requires every workplace to have a third party to receive complaints. According to the survivors whom I spoke to, this person must be outside of politics completely in order for them to feel safe reporting. The first point of contact cannot be the MP.
Second, to that point, under the bill it should be possible for employees to report directly to the labour ministry without first having to complain through an existing workplace policy. As I said, this would help take politics out of the equation.
Third, there are employees on the Hill right now who do not know their rights or the policies that cover them. Training on the resulting anti-harassment policies must be mandatory for all employees and employers. In these sessions, they should go through the policy in detail so that employees understand how it works and what the consequences are if you're a perpetrator.
Fourth, all policies on the Hill have different definitions of harassment. The bill should adopt a single definition of harassment and it should require that this definition be present in all workplace policies. This definition should be broad, and it should include all forms of harassment, and not be limited to sexual harassment.
My reporting also found that in 2014 a group of staffers within the NDP came together in a closed-door meeting, and wrote a letter to prevent an alleged harasser from returning to Parliament Hill. Accordingly, if possible, anti-harassment policies should allow survivors the option to report their experiences in groups of peers, so they feel heard and not isolated.
All anti-harassment policies on the Hill should have annual public reporting requirements on the number of complaints received, and how they were dealt with. Only the December 2014 House of Commons mechanism has this requirement currently.
Finally, the regulations alongside the bill must have teeth. There must be clear, legal consequences for not acting to prevent or stop harassment.
With such a high bar to report abuse, the parliamentary workplace is an example of a catch-22 scenario. Because existing policy does not account for cultural issues, women know it's not safe to speak up, and because they don't speak up, the culture of harassment continues.
I hope that once it passes, this legislation will begin to break the cycle.
Thank you.