Thank you, Minister.
What I would add is that under the existing statute, the current approach probably gives rise to a lot of criticism about the culture, because in the case of harassment, the Treasury Board does have pretty clear policies respecting early recognition of harassment and engagement at the earliest opportunity to try to resolve the conflict.
Then you have a culture of police concerned about accusations of harassment, and confusion arises about how to handle the suggestion that there is misconduct in the workplace. So you will have code of conduct investigations launched while harassment initiatives are under way. They conflict with one another and cause a good deal of confusion for our managers and our supervisors, who, under this new approach, are going to be asked to manage that conduct at the first opportunity.
What we're doing is streamlining and getting rid of the need to have this bifurcated approach to these instances.
The act also calls for an early conflict resolution mechanism that will have to be applied and deployed by me, so that we deal with behaviours in the workplace as behaviours in the workplace.
Many of the incidents in the public consciousness right now shouldn't be understood as sexual harassment or harassment issues. Many of them are in fact accusations of criminality.
We want to get to a workplace that is respectful, and to one where, when conflicts arise in the workplace, our managers are able to manage and deal with them in the first instance.
I think it will go a long way towards not only streamlining our response but also helping fix the culture of managing the workplace.