Thank you. I'll try not to duplicate that, and I'll try to focus on the two areas that you had expressed interest in: harassment and workplace safety.
To emphasize that and to go back to the committee's observation in respect of shoes, there are ample and clear statutory requirements for management to have these committees and to attend these committees, which I do with the other unions right now, and had done with the former labour-management regime, the SRR. That's where our new policy on shoes came from. We spent a lot of time giving members freedom, and it came from representations in that committee, where they wanted the freedom to have different kinds of shoes. Those are the kinds of issues discussed there.
I digress a little bit.
Getting back to harassment, let me just put the frame around that: of all of our harassment complaints, 55% have male complainants, and the lion's share of our harassment relates to abuse of authority and interpersonal conflict in the workplace.
Male complainants file 55% of our harassment complaints, so obviously 45% have female complainants, but of that 45%, 16% are female versus female. That's not particularly instructive, but I think it's important to have some sort of context around the demographics of our harassment situation.
For us, harassment now has been linked with conduct, and I think that's the case in all police forces, and in fact many organizations across Canada. Conduct and harassment are excluded across the police universe, except in respect of how it's framed in some sort of expression of non-support for harassment in some collective agreements. The actual mechanics and the actual way in which harassment is being managed is subject to Bill C-42, which has joined our conduct regime with harassment.
What's important to understand, in the RCMP particularly, is that we had operated formerly under the Treasury Board's guidelines for harassment, and that had created two regimes. Bill C-42 was seen to be an effective and efficient means of joining the conduct regime in the RCMP with harassment.
Noting that harassment is, as all members of the committee have observed, a very important consideration, harassment in the RCMP has been given a sort of direct path to externality, an external review in the form of our external review committee. There is a path for complainants to go there, and there are specific provisions within our conduct regime to handle harassment in a way that is starting to give results and that we hope to improve upon.
Again, with harassment and even with conduct, there are committees that we will have to participate in. People from the bargaining agent will sit at that table and participate in the refinement, both in terms of specific cases and also in systemic issues that are raised to that committee and acted upon, with the authorities we already have.
There's nothing inconsistent with the profession in terms of conduct being excluded from bargaining, but it's also statutorily overseen and requires many of these opportunities for engagement with records, with accountabilities that fall directly to management and to some extent to the bargaining agent.
There is very robust backstopping to many of these issues that are being excluded.