Status of Women committee  They still have full access to the protection of the policy.

Status of Women committee  You can launch a grievance even if you're not unionized.

Status of Women committee  It's connected to a number of pieces of legislation, like the Financial Administration Act, which details many of the responsibilities of deputy ministers. It relates to the ethics code, for example—

Status of Women committee  Yes, we developed them in the Treasury Board. But when you develop a policy for the government, an internal administrative policy, it has relationships to other legislative and policy instruments.

Status of Women committee  We are required to keep a safe workplace for employees, yes, so it's under the labour code.

Status of Women committee  We encourage people to use all the tools that are available. Again, from where we are, it's hard to see what every incident looks like. We do want to make sure that deputies have a range of tools available so that they and departments can deal with this in a holistic way. One adv

Status of Women committee  I'll start, and I'll ask Martine to join in. As you'll recall, we originally proposed that we have one route, and the unions advised us in consultations that they would like to keep the grievance route. This is a fairly clearly defined process that we've set up within the policy

Status of Women committee  Do you mean in the Treasury Board Secretariat itself?

Status of Women committee  I really think it starts at the top in departments, and that's why deputy ministers are named in the policies. There are a few other elements I should introduce. We introduced, on April 2, a new code of values and ethics for the public service. One of the elements is respect fo

Status of Women committee  The federal government is the largest employer in the country, so we're quite huge. In the past there were attempts by the Treasury Board Secretariat and other central agencies to do fairly detailed monitoring of what departments did. It was largely unsuccessful because it's very

Status of Women committee  Many of them run very large organizations. The direction that we provided to them was very widely distributed, and managers and departments were encouraged to be aware of it. Heads of HR and lead practitioners for anti-harassment and values and ethics were also notified so that t

Status of Women committee  We've graduated this approach so that people can deal with it quickly, and we encourage departments to deal with it quickly because harassment that's not dealt with is very damaging. There are a number of off-ramps that allow people to resolve matters quickly, so they're not lock

Status of Women committee  I think it's absolutely correct that you can't do this through rules. What we tried to do with this policy and the new directive is back off the prescriptive rules as much as possible and encourage and require departments to actually build that culture of respect. Culture is a

Status of Women committee  On monitoring what's happening in the workplace, I'll note that the public service employee survey was taken as the final proposals were being submitted to the government in preparation for Budget 2012. We were in the middle of that process at the time. The overall results of the

Status of Women committee  Sure. I think we can answer that question on two levels. I'll answer the first one in terms of how it related to the development of the policies, and I'll ask my colleague, Martine, to talk about the details of the policy, because there is a requirement for deputies to include ba