Status of Women committee  I'll ask Martine to speak to the details. The idea is to protect the individual first and then sort out the details of the issue through a normal process. The important thing is to protect the individual who is being harassed immediately.

Status of Women committee  I think the timeframe on that will actually be difficult. Surveying the public service is a large undertaking. We are currently on a three-year cycle to do that survey. However, I would also add that relative to the first part of your question, this policy and the values and et

Status of Women committee  That's what you should do.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I'd be happy to. In developing the new policy and directive, we consulted with a committee of bargaining agents. The bargaining agents are unions or legal representatives of employees. We worked through them in a committee for several months to create a prevention of haras

Status of Women committee  That would be departmental management, and the most senior departmental management, of course, are the deputy heads, so they would do it. I should mention also that discipline can take a number of forms, right up to and including dismissal.

Status of Women committee  That's correct.

Status of Women committee  No.

Status of Women committee  It's actually very difficult to keep these statistics because of the state of our HR systems at the moment. We had kept detailed statistics in the past. However, due to paperwork burden reduction in the past, this statistics collection had been eliminated. We did, in the context

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Yes. In the government we use a term called graduated discipline, which means that the disciplinary action has to be suitable to the actual nature of the issue itself. Again, it can go from a reprimand to a demotion to dismissal in the end, if the incident is serious enough.

Status of Women committee  It's what the data have given us so far. It depends on how you collect it, of course. I hesitate to comment on how we're doing, because in any case one issue is too many.

Status of Women committee  There are a number of advantages in the new policy. One is that the old policy was a bit rigid in terms of how it could be applied in different organizational contexts. You can imagine that a small policy department would have a different operational environment than would a larg

Status of Women committee  If you consider a white-collar environment like a policy department, you would expect the understanding of these issues to be a bit more sophisticated among the employees and managers, and you would expect a different kind of comportment there. In an organization where you're dea

Status of Women committee  From our perspective, culture is the key. We think that culture underlies respect for people. Lack of respect underlies harassment. If you change the culture and create a respectful work environment, then we'll see change. That's very much the theme we're pursuing in dealing with

Status of Women committee  I'll take the process point first, if that's agreeable to the committee. We went through a very long multi-month process with bargaining agents who were the legal representatives of the employees. We spent several months working with them and consulting on the policy. This was