Thank you, Chair.
On behalf of the committee and certainly my colleagues, I want to thank you, Justice Bastarache, for your work and for the assessors' work in this incredibly troubling exercise you've gone through, and for the report.
I want to touch on a couple of things in the time that I have, sir. I want to quote you from some of the grievances that have been laid out:
I have significant doubt that the 2014 amendments to the RCMP Act (see Chapter 4) will address the issues that the other Assessors and I have seen. The procedures are still very much based on an internal mechanism, with decision-making responsibility delegated to a relatively low level, with little independent oversight.
A second quote is:
...most women said they would never use the grievance or harassment complaint system as they simply had no faith in its efficacy or fairness.
You list three main issues that were repeatedly mentioned by the claimants: the lack of fairness, a fear of reprisal, and failures to implement any punishments.
You wrote that “complaints are more detrimental to the victim than the harasser”, and that filing a complaint would have individuals labelled as troublemakers and complainers.
In many cases, the complainants were targeted with criminal charges and in some cases as well “the higher the number of [harassment] complaints against a [supervisory] member, the bigger the promotion he will get.”
Obviously, we have a problem.
Could you walk us through, in a couple of seconds, exactly.... If I'm a member of the RCMP and if I have a complaint against another member of the RCMP—supervisory or otherwise—what's the mechanism I go through to make that complaint known?