With regard to HR policies, it's not just that there was massive turnover at the employee level. Within a two-year period, every single HR director, which was almost four, either was fired or went on stress leave. Even when complaints were being made, every single one of the employees who were then tasked with dealing with them, if they actually took it seriously, would be pushed out or fired. Every single one of them was put under an NDA that specifically had language that prevented them from even going to the federal government to complain about the issues that were ongoing.
As it relates to the organization as a whole, the culture of fear is there, and it's existed for a long time. Even when people have the strength and courage to take those issues to someone, every single time it's been hammered down because of people like Leah Lawrence, Zoë Kolbuc and the whole organization at the top senior level management.
With regard to the funding issues, all the issues that were found by RCGT were noted by employees on multiple occasions. There are emails we can provide where we and others also had issues that were sent to executives and even to the CEO.
An example of that would be the Verschuren Centre application. That is related to the ecosystem fund. The ecosystem fund, which has been found by RCGT to not be in any way eligible, was approved by the board without any consultation with ISED. When it was approved by the board itself, the first project, second project and third project were all related to board members and had conflicts. The second one specifically was the Verschuren Centre application. Employees complained multiple times, even by email to executives, that this was an obvious conflict of interest, yet not a single one of those issues was heard by executives. We were continually ignored up until it went to the board and other board members finally admitted this was an obvious conflict of interest.
Even after it was rejected, the executives then forced employees to personally go to other federal or provincial funding organizations and use SDTC's reputation to see whether they would be willing to give the Verschuren Centre funding.
Even when something doesn't get approved, there's still employee pressure from the executive team to make sure some of these things happen.