Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting us to participate in your meeting.
I also want to thank the representatives from the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund for the important information they presented on the impact of sexual harassment, especially on women. I will not repeat their presentation. Actually, I want to add to what they have said.
I will now switch to English, but I am happy to answer any questions in either French or English.
What I would like to do today is to talk to you a little bit about the Law Society of Upper Canada, what we do and what the equity initiatives department does. I would like to talk to you about a guide that we have developed on preventing harassment, discrimination, and violence in the workplace, and more importantly, talk to you about the model that the Legal Education Action Fund mentioned or referred to, which is our discrimination and harassment counsel, because it's a fairly innovative model. Although it has been in place since 1999, it has actually been quite effective.
The Law Society of Upper Canada is the regulator of the legal profession of both lawyers and paralegals. We have 44,400 lawyers in Ontario and about 5,000 paralegals. The equity initiatives department was set up in 1997, or shortly thereafter, to try to promote equity and diversity in the legal profession. Part of the work we do is to develop model policies for the legal workforce and provide research for the legal workforce, so they can in turn promote equity and diversity.
In January 2012, as part of our mandate, we adopted a guide on preventing harassment, discrimination, and workplace violence. The guide basically provides templates or model policies for the legal profession. Law firms can use the guide and the template policies to adopt their own. We know that they have done so. The guide also provides procedures that could be set up in law firms to address harassment and discrimination.
Now we note that the Treasury Board has adopted a policy and procedures to address sexual harassment, and that is an extremely good first step. Our guide talks about other practices that could be implemented to try to address and prevent harassment in the workplace. For example, we think that the policies should apply not only to all employees but also to behaviour that is directed to employees by customers or clients. Because the responsibility of employers is to ensure that the workplace is respectful, it is important to also deal with behaviour that comes from the outside.
We also emphasize the fact that all supervisors, or anybody with supervisory authority, has a responsibility to address harassment or sexual harassment in the workplace, whether it be informally or formally. We also believe that there should be informal and formal processes in place to address sexual harassment, and those would include, as far as the formal processes go, having access to internal or external investigators or mediators.
We also believe that complainants should be reminded of external avenues of recourse, including the Canadian Human Rights Commission. I know that LEAF has mentioned the difficulties related to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. We do not disagree with LEAF, but we nevertheless think that complainants should be entitled to proceed with their complaints in multiple avenues. An employer's responsibility to address sexual harassment is not lessened by the fact that an employee would go elsewhere to try to address the issue.
It's also good practice to communicate the policies to all employees, but also to make sure that everybody receives an education program on harassment and discrimination.
I want to talk about our discrimination and harassment counsel program. It was set up in 1999, but it has been an extremely effective program for the legal profession. We believe that what is extremely effective with procedures related to sexual harassment is to ensure that complainants have multiple avenues of recourse. Internally you may have advisers who were appointed to provide confidential advice to employees.
In the case of the discrimination and harassment counsel program, it was set up as an independent program to provide advice to members of the public, lawyers, or paralegals who believe they have been subjected to harassment or discrimination by a lawyer or a paralegal.
The program really acts as an ombudsperson type of program. So the DHC, as we refer to the discrimination and harassment counsel, confidentially assists anybody who may have experienced discrimination or harassment by a lawyer or a paralegal. The services are offered free of charge to anybody in Ontario who may have suffered harassment or discrimination by a lawyer or a paralegal.
The program is actually funded by the law society. Its cost is about $150,000 a year, and it operates separately and independently from the law society. So it is really a program that operates at arm's-length, and we do believe that if this weren't the case, the program would not be as effective.
The current DHC is Cynthia Petersen, and she is a very senior lawyer in Ontario, extremely well respected, and well versed in the area of equality and sexual harassment. She is also bilingual and provides services in French and English. We also have two alternate DHCs, Lynn Bevan and David Bennett, who offer the services when Cynthia is unavailable. They work part-time. They basically work from their offices and they invoice the law society on a monthly basis.
What do they do? Usually the discrimination and harassment counsel will identify issues. If someone approaches them, they'll identify issues. They'll clarify the issues with the person who has approached them, and they will provide options, either by filing a complaint with the law society under the rules of professional conduct, or going to the Human Rights Tribunal in the case of Ontario.
The DHC does not investigate complaints. However, the DHC has a mandate or the power to either mediate or resolve issues informally. We find that is one of the roles of the DHC that is particularly successful. A number of issues are dealt with confidentially by the DHC in an informal way. The DHC also provides education programs and assists law firms in developing their own procedures and policies, if required.
In closing, I will provide you with some statistical information we have from the discrimination and harassment counsel. She reports every six months to the law society. She basically reports data and the types of cases she receives. In 2012 she produced a nine-year report of data that ranged between January 2003 and December 2011. During that time she had received about 515 complaints against lawyers, three complaints against articling students, and since 2008—which is when the law society began regulating paralegals—she has received about six complaints against paralegals.
Of these complaints what is interesting is that about half, or more than half, have been made by women. So we know that this service is particularly important to women. About half of the complaints are about sex discrimination, and of the complaints about sex discrimination about half are about sexual harassment.
Sex discrimination is actually the most common complaint that the DHC program receives, and of those complaints about 87% of the sexual harassment or sexual discrimination complaints that she receives are made by women. A number of the complaints that are not made by women—