Thank you very much, Madam Chairperson.
Good afternoon to all the committee members.
It's my pleasure to appear before you today. Thank you for the opportunity to provide you with information about how the Ontario Provincial Police is committed to fostering and sustaining an inclusive, respectful, diverse, equitable, and accessible workplace for all employees.
First, let me set my remarks in context by outlining a few relevant details about the OPP in my time with the service.
I joined the OPP in 1978, when the police profession was still very much an old boys' club with lots of macho, tough-guy attitude.
Women were first recruited to become officers in 1974, but there were few on the job in the OPP when I arrived as a rookie constable four years later.
In the first few years the OPP would not post women officers to many of the remote locations we police in the province, considering it an undue hardship for female officers. I'm not sure if that was an advantage or a disadvantage for our early women officers, but I can tell you that we now post them to remote locations and many find that experience very interesting.
I think it is fair to say that many of the leaders and officers within the OPP at that time were not as supportive of female officers as they should have been. Those first few female officers were definitely pioneers, and sometimes they had to be better and tougher than the male recruits because they were so closely scrutinized. A number of OPP members did not want them to succeed.
Thankfully, the OPP and the police profession and society as a whole have come a long way since then in our attitudes toward women occupying what were then traditionally male roles.
On December 31, 2012, the OPP had 6,243 uniformed members, 191 of them being commissioned officers. A commissioned officer is any uniformed member who holds the rank of inspector or higher, up to and including commissioner.
As of the same date, 20.4% of the OPP's uniformed members were women, and 14.7% of the OPP's commissioned officers were women at the end of 2012. Allow me to put that into context provincially and nationally.
According to Statistics Canada's “Police Resources in Canada”, women constituted 18.4% of all police officers in Ontario in 2010, slightly lower than the OPP percentage. The proportion of female police officers across Canada in the same year was 19.6%, again slightly lower than the OPP percentage. In the same report, the province of Quebec reported the highest proportion of female police officers at 23.7%, while Manitoba reported the lowest at 14.8%.
This places the OPP in the upper mid-range for the national average and slightly above the provincial average for the percentage of women officers in the ranks.
Does the OPP have enough female officers today? Are women properly represented in the OPP in senior ranks? The answer is definitely no to both questions. An interesting note is that the situation is reversed for our civilian employees, where 62.7% are women and 37.3% are men.
I am pleased to note that 40 of our civilian managers in the OPP are women and 18 are men, so the figures properly reflect the overall gender representation for civilians in the OPP.
The OPP also tries to have its workforce reflect the communities it serves, so we want to remove any barriers that might discourage women from choosing policing as a profession.
One of those barriers was removed in 1982 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that height and weight restrictions for employees had to be directly related to the capacity to do the work, not imposed as an overall standard.
Another operational barrier or concern was addressed in 1991, when we changed our standard operating procedures to acknowledge that pregnant employees who could not fulfill their regular duties because of their condition could be assigned to alternate duties that they could be reasonably expected to perform. That was a significant decision for us.
There are, of course, some unavoidable aspects of police work that could be viewed as barriers facing women and others interested in joining the police profession. Most officers work shifts their entire career. We see a lot tragedy that can be difficult to handle psychologically. The profession requires an advanced level of lifelong fitness. An officer must face a lot of abuse without overreacting.
While it is true that policing was traditionally a male-dominated profession, it is over a generation ago that women were first recruited into our ranks.
It's a fact that only a handful of our currently serving male officers were even members of the organization prior to having female members working alongside them.
The OPP is continuing to work hard to recruit women and remove any barriers to promoting qualified women to its senior ranks through a variety of effective programs.
It is notable that of the eleven recruiters in our career development bureau, nine are women. We know we have to continue this work and these initiatives until women are much better represented in OPP ranks.
Policing is not for everyone, but one of the ways we can reach our recruiting goals is by making the OPP a very welcoming and supportive place for women, which brings me to the very important subject of sexual harassment in the workplace.
The OPP defines sexual harassment as a course of comments or conduct based on sex or gender that is unwelcome or should be reasonably known to be unwelcome.
Discrimination is when a female employee alleges she was treated unfairly because she is a woman. Of course, a male employee can also complain that he was treated unfairly because of his gender, but that is a very rare complaint in the OPP. I will provide more detail on that later.
To understand our approach, I need to tell you a few things about the OPP and the legislation and regulations that guide us. The OPP is part of the Ontario public service, and as such it is governed by the Ontario public service workplace discrimination and harassment prevention policy, WDHP. Sexual harassment, sexual solicitation, and related reprisals are violations under this policy.
The WDHP policy establishes a framework for the prevention of workplace discrimination and harassment as well as an effective response to issues and complaints. The WDHP policy also provides direction to the OPP on compliance with statutory requirements for human rights and health and safety in the workplace, as established in the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Occupational Health and Safety Act. In addition, uniformed members of the OPP are governed by the provisions of a code of conduct under the Ontario Police Services Act. I have provided copies of these policies to your committee clerk.
Among other things, the OPP's career development bureau is responsible for implementing, overseeing, and investigating complaints for WDHP policy within the OPP. Worthy of note is that the career development bureau is commanded by a female chief superintendent who is responsible for all of the OPP's human resources activities, including: recruiting and hiring of all staff; promotional processes; staffing and workforce planning; grievance processes; labour relations; and all training, internally and externally.
That bureau is assisted in their WDHP work by a respectful workplace committee. The mandate of the committee is to serve as executive champions of organizational efforts to address and improve all elements of respect in the workplace. They meet regularly to review and make recommendations regarding the management of complex WDHP cases. They identify trends and emerging issues that are systemic in nature and/or have an organizational impact. They provide consultation and advice on WDHP program development and enhancements, such as the development of criteria for cases requiring investigation, and they support the shift of the workplace culture from one of conflict avoidance to one of prevention and conflict resolution.
The human resources section of our career development bureau has also developed a service delivery model for the OPP, which includes, among other things, mandatory and ongoing education and training on WDHP for all personnel, and a WDHP standard operating procedure that sets out the roles and responsibilities for all employees and managers and provides instructions on reporting and responding. OPP members can contact a confidential and neutral source of information—either our WDHP employee contacts or the employee program assistance provider—if they wish to discuss concerns without necessarily triggering a process that they do not want to pursue.
All OPP managers are required to consult with human resources as soon as they become aware of a WDHP issue, whether or not a complaint is filed, and managers are expected to initiate cases for situations that need intervention, even when no one has complained.
We've established an internal network of trained OPP managers, known as the WDHP liaisons, to assist with resolution and investigation, with the support and guidance of human resources. In the past three years,this group has grown from the original six members to 35 members. We practise restoration of workplaces and/or working relationships impacted by complaints or resolution processes.
Our career development bureau tracks and reports on all our WDHP cases so we can determine the extent of problems and take systemic action where required. I certainly wouldn't claim that the OPP is perfect and cannot improve upon its prevention and response to sexual harassment in the workplace, but I do believe the policies and actions I've described provide us with a proper structure and a way to deal positively with all forms of harassment.
In 2012 we had 118 WDHP complaints in the OPP. The largest single reason cited for the complaints was sex or gender, at 20%, or 24, of the complaints. I should make it clear here that the majority of these cases, 13 in total, cited gender as the reason for discrimination rather than sexual harassment. Of the 118 complaints in 2012, 11 alleged sexual harassment. Ten of those 11 were substantiated and actions were taken to correct the problem. Of the 13 cases that alleged discrimination based on gender, four were substantiated and action was taken. In 2012, 96% of our WDHP complaints based on gender, for a total of 23 out of 24, were made by female employees.
As I said earlier, one of the ways in which we make the OPP a welcoming place for female employees is through education and raising awareness of what is and what is not acceptable in the workplace. We inform managers of the responsibility to not condone or tolerate harassment of any kind.
Our goal is to completely eliminate all forms of harassment, but we must be practical and realistic. Given human nature, our scope of operations, which includes more than 9,000 employees, and a workplace spread out over a province bigger than most countries, it is likely that some form of harassment will occur occasionally.
In conclusion, we ask ourselves the following questions: Does the employer make it clear that sexual harassment will not be tolerated? Does the employer educate its employees on how to recognize harassment and what to do about it? Is there a fair and transparent complaint process with no tolerance for reprisals? Are employees who come forward with a complaint supported throughout the process? Does the employer practise workplace restoration so everyone involved directly and peripherally can safely return to a productive career? I'm proud to say the answer is yes to all of those questions. I'm also very proud of the fine men and women in the OPP and of the professional way in which they conduct themselves at all times.
Thank you for your attention. I'm pleased to answer any questions regarding how we try to prevent, investigate, and correct instances of sexual harassment in the workplace.
