Probably the easiest way to describe it—and I'll give a rough sketch—is that if an incident occurs and it is not addressed immediately, it is allowed to fester, the person who is the target of the inappropriate behaviour looks around for an opportunity to bring this to someone to have something done about it.
Under the Treasury Board policy, the expectation is that you'll be able to enter into an early resolution process. Efforts will be made to try to bring the parties together, if appropriate. There are different dispute resolution processes to address balances, power balances and issues like that. But the expectation is that you will be able to conduct an entire process focused on the harassing behaviour and come to a determination of whether harassment has occurred, and determine what steps need to be taken to rebuild the workplace relations to address the relationship between the parties, if it's recoverable at all.
There's a lot of good work that can be done along the harassment continuum within the Treasury Board policy, including at the end of it, if it is found that...where a manager within the core public administration is in a position to say, “I see what has happened here and I will now issue discipline, if I feel it's appropriate.”
In the RCMP world we can only go so far with that. We can attempt to engage in early resolution if it's a harassment complaint. However, as soon as it appears—and that's the test under the act, “appears”—to the person in command or in the chain of command of the respondent in a complaint that there is a violation of the code of conduct, then they initiate an investigation. They could rely on the harassment investigation that was done under the Treasury Board policy, but the challenge there is that the statements may not have been taken in such a way to allow it to feed into an adversarial process, a very court-like process. That is ultimately one of the outcomes of our conduct system, our discipline system. Once it's into the discipline world, it's no longer dealing with relationships. It's no longer trying to address the issues that are in the workplace. It's no longer focused on how we can assist the complainant, how we can deal with the inappropriate behaviour of the respondent. It becomes very much a matter of what evidence I need to gather in order to prove there was a violation or a contravention of the code of conduct.
As soon as we get into that, again, it's very court-based. There are certain rights that a member who is subject to the discipline system can access. There are certain limitations on what can be done within the code of conduct process. You can't engage in early resolution, for example, once that's engaged.
The other piece is that under the Treasury Board policy there is a requirement to provide the complainant with access to a draft report in order to make sure that in their eyes everything has been done that needs to be done. But if it's done under the code of conduct, we don't have that right, because the process is designed, as I said, to prove or disprove a contravention of the code of conduct.
Therefore, these two processes do not line up and come out at the same place. The harassment process starts, but at some point it stops, and then part IV picks it up and runs with it. As soon as that is done, you're not looking at the same issue any more. You're not looking at harassment; you're looking at the code of conduct.
The other challenge is that the outcomes are very different. The ability of the complainant to play a role in influencing that outcome is minimized, outside of being a witness. They are two very different processes with two very different intentions.
