Status of Women committee  On your last question, I think what the PSES actually gives us is the context. Without the information from the public services employee survey, you really don't know how happy or unhappy employees are within any given department. So it sets the context.

Status of Women committee  Some departments using this data might choose to do that. StatsCan doesn't.

Status of Women committee  We just provide the results of the survey itself. I guess that leads to your second question, the one about harassment that's perceived from the public, and what you do with that information. What each department does with it is up to each department to respond to, but a not untypical process is to take these numbers and then to have sort of a shop floor discussion with your employees.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  It wasn't StatsCan.

Status of Women committee  We were quite worried that we would—

Status of Women committee  Yes. We had to make sure that we were the leader in the response rate, as did Treasury Board Secretariat. Other than that anecdote, I can't remember.

Status of Women committee  It's a very good question. You know, this is what statisticians do: we try to figure out what is the best way to measure a concept. Harassment is not an easy concept to try to measure. Our focus-group testing suggested that the approach that we took was one that could be responded to by respondents.

Status of Women committee  You certainly would. I can't say to what degree you would get a different answer. Any time you change the wording in any way and move it from a question on bullying to a question on harassment, you would see some people who interpret bullying as something different from harassment.

Status of Women committee  No. Other than the information we collected at ACOA and what we did in the past, in 2005, at the Public Service Commission, we have no information on the type of harassment that has taken place, whether it be sexual harassment, age-related, or any other sort of harassment. We didn't collect that.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely.

Status of Women committee  That's a very good question, and I don't have a good answer for it. Has it “ever”?

Status of Women committee  No, they weren't. The civil service within DND was.

Status of Women committee  I don't know. I'm not an expert in the status of the organizations, whether or not they're a crown corporation. We surveyed some agencies and parts of the federal workplace that are not part of the core federal public service. I gave you the example of CRA, StatsCan's statistical operations.

Status of Women committee  The public service employee survey focuses strictly on the experiences of employees in the workplace. It doesn't ask about anything else. It doesn't have any specific questions on sexual harassment. The harassment information that we collect is a broader concept of harassment than sexual harassment, and it's only for the federal public workplace.