Status of Women Committee on Feb. 26th, 2013

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

You have seven minutes.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Paulson, thank you for being here today.

This is such a very important subject, and that's why we're here. I have a number of things I want to touch on, sir.

First of all, on the resourcing, I want to commend you for the comment you made previously about how this isn't a resourcing issue, and that it's important enough that you would reallocate resources to these issues.

The $15-million reduction is news to me too, because my understanding is that we're giving $5 million to the complaints commission and $9.8 million to you, sir, to use effectively. I also understand that this morning in the public safety committee, the NDP were very concerned about that investment of funds. You can't have the resources if you don't put them on the table, and we are trying, with Bill C-42, to put them on the table for you.

I'm grateful that you are modernizing and embracing a more comprehensive governance oversight strategy. As you very rightly point out, these are 50% of your clients. Very briefly, how is this $9 million going to be deployed? Will it be on training? Just briefly, you've already implemented in B.C. some training and investigators' training. Give a few examples of how this $9.8 million is going to be used proactively and preventatively.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

The $9.8 million goes to the implementation of Bill C-42. The lion's share of that money will go to training and preparation of our NCOs.

One of the themes of this new legislative scheme is to allow for conduct management at the lowest possible level at the earliest possible time. In order to achieve that, we need to have our corporals and sergeants, who have somehow stepped back a little bit from their responsibility to look after the people they are in charge of, trained up on how to faithfully implement the new approach to conduct management.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Is this mandatory now?

[Commr Bob Paulson]

Well, not until the act comes into force, but it will be, yes.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

It will, with Bill C-42.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

We are preparing. In fact, we have a huge working group that's preparing a number of things to manage the new relationship, for example, with the CPC as it becomes the civilian review and complaints body. That's going to be able to walk into the organization and do policy-based reviews on things that interest Canadians, you, or them.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

You've already made an assessment of the effectiveness of the training you're about to put in, and 94% of your employees have taken some.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

That's a little bit separate. That's mandatory harassment training we get everybody trained on, what the rules are, what the prevention is, what the identification systems are, what the reporting streams are. There's 94% compliance with that harassment training.

Our training in the Bill C-42 regime will be much more broad across the force and somewhat revolutionary in bringing the discipline and conduct management down to the front line.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

And that's how it's effective.

As you said, 51% of the population is female. The point was made earlier by a colleague that there's a concern about women. I recognize the statistics that were prepared in the commission's study, that some 44% of the complainants are female and some 49% are male. That speaks to the importance of not just having a female filter on this. Could you speak to that briefly?

[Commr Bob Paulson]

That's exactly right. Sexual harassment has its own connotation of being completely unsatisfactory. Harassment more broadly, as we've been talking about it, that being bullying and misuse of authority, affects everybody equally. I think it goes to how we interact with each other, the respectful workplace approach that we're deploying across the country right now to modify our workplace such that people are working together as a team, irrespective of gender.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

You'll be using the investments from Bill C-42 to ensure that respectful workplace environment throughout.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

Yes, and early intervention systems in offices to resolve workplace conflict before it becomes a formal complaint and heads off....

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

One of your colleagues—I forget her exact title—Sharon Woodburn, came and spoke to us. She mentioned that she was confident in the system. From the work that you're doing in training investigators on harassment, training harassment advisers, training people on how to conduct themselves in a respectful workplace, do you have projections? Obviously, you want everybody to feel comfortable and to trust the system. Is that part of the work of Bill C-42?

[Commr Bob Paulson]

Yes, I think that Bill C-42 will allow me to develop some flexibility in reacting to the workforce today and into the future. Our action plan, which I've spoken of in my opening comments, also sets some very real targets for us. For example, we're shooting to reduce our harassment complaint intake across the board. We need to track those things, we need to understand them, and we need to demonstrate success there.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Could you just speak to the governance changes, broadly, that you're instituting? We have a minute.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

The governance changes in the force, or in respect of...?

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

With respect to how it's going to strengthen the ability to have a respectful workplace, for both men and women in the RCMP.

[Commr Bob Paulson]

The way I've approached it is to have my COs, each one of them, for each division—which corresponds to a province or territory, with the exception of A division—deploy a respectful workplace strategy that is monitored by us at headquarters. The strategies feature the engagement of employees, the creation of employee advisory groups, mechanisms for raising issues that employees are experiencing, and governing the workplace and how they interact, and explaining to them how we're tracking harassment complaints, how we're tracking discipline issues, and so on.

[The Chair, NDP, Marie-Claude Morin]

I have to interrupt you, Ms. Bateman. Your time is up.

We go now to Ms. Sgro, who has seven minutes.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you very much.

Commissioner, thank you very much for coming again. I hope you will have the same courage to answer some of our questions that you had when you were initially here, the last time. We very much appreciated that. I have to say that you have a huge challenge in front of you.

We saw a full page in the National Post this week on whether we should get rid of the RCMP. There were a whole lot of comments in there. The RCMP represents, for all of us as Canadians, something that we're immensely proud of. That's been tremendously tarnished, not only by the sexual harassment, but also by a lot of the harassment complaints and so on that have come out. The government responded following your last meeting by introducing Bill C-42. There's some money in the budget to help you in all that.

How are you going to convince a young woman in Alberta who's a member of your police service who's being harassed by her supervisor, who's also her detachment commander, that she's safe to go ahead and lodge this complaint? How are you going to build the trust, not only of Canadians, but of all of the men and women in the service out there who are under-reporting. We know that goes on, because people do not report these things until they reach a point where they can't handle them anymore. Where is she going to go when it's her own detachment commander who's the one doing the harassing in a small, rural Alberta area?

[Commr Bob Paulson]

I have two answers. One is that she's going to have a number of avenues available to her, from picking up the phone to making a confidential report into the centre of the organization so that it goes around that officer in charge.

But more importantly, I want to address your question about having our members, our employees, having the confidence to raise these issues. I know intuitively that there is a reluctance to complain against authority. I get that. But we have, and we continue to build, a number of strategies from employee consultative groups, to anonymous means of complaining, to having an increased level of oversight and supervision and leadership on that detachment commander. I don't want to have a condition where anybody feels that if they're being bothered, harassed, or put out, they're incapable of coming forward, or the organization is incapable of taking their complaints.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

It's about an atmosphere. You can have all the policies you want. It's about an atmosphere where things are either acceptable or not. Clearly, a lot of unacceptable practices have been allowed to continue because, you know, men are men and women are women and things just happen. The question becomes, as we move forward, that right after this issue broke out you appointed a female officer in senior command and she subsequently retired right after—she retired last April—and her job was to look into these issues. Now, that's been almost a whole year, and nobody has been put back into the position of looking specifically into these issues.

It doesn't send out a good message to people in the rank and file that you're serious about this. How do you answer that question?

[Commr Bob Paulson]

Well, I'm disappointed, Ms. Sgro, that you would suggest that Line Carbonneau retired right after.... Line Carbonneau stood up. She volunteered to take this on and to begin to lay the groundwork for all the things we're doing now. She is a first-rate officer, a great colleague, and she's done some important work. As for suggestion that she retired right after, I had to persuade her to stick around. I'm grateful to Line Carbonneau and I'm grateful for the things she helped us lead.

I don't accept that people look at Line Carbonneau's departure as anything less than the culmination of a very successful career of one of the first women to join the RCMP. You have to remember that we're just coming to the end of one cycle of careers—if lifetimes can be measured in careers—for women in the force, and Line succeeded tremendously.

So we're building—

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

But she hasn't been replaced.