We both like to extend all of you New Year’s Best Wishes for a healthy, happy, and productive 2024! We are excited and looking forward to what we believe will be busy year in respect of how this matter progresses.
We first want to open the year by thanking you for your support. Your comments, feedback and shares are tremendously important as they confirm Dana’s experiences and have helped us structure and define ATIP lines of inquiry to strengthen her case.
An example of this is the recent ATIP document that we received after hearing from a few of you. This document is an outline of the comments the Western Regions Assistant Commissioner made to a room full of staff at the November 6th, 2023, Annual Diversity, and Inclusion Symposium. It confirms Derek Moss’s view that the CCG’s harassment and zero tolerance workplace policies are broken, to such an extent, that they prevent him from being able to effectively deal with perpetrators associated with the peer-on-peer gender-based harassment and bullying. Click on the link to that document, which are notes of Derek Moss’s opening comments to Symposium participants. It is definitely worth a read 👀: ATIP #3
If this system doesn’t work for Moss, how can it possibly work for complainants and others in the organization. This ATIP lends corroboration to systemic aspect of Dana’s claim such being that she was not able to access any meaningful redress for the isolation, bullying and the toxic workplace environment she experienced. We would not have had knowledge about this without your continuing help and support. Kudos to you!
We also want to generally share some of our case specific resolutions with you for 2024! Within the CCG, we will continue to examine how Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) Harassment Workplace directives and guidelines are ignored, not being followed, or are being poorly implemented and executed, if at all within the CCG. We will look at how related Collective Agreement non-discrimination terms and harassment programs are being breached. Towards accomplishing that, in this website, we will be generally examining the roles within harassment policies, by various players in the CCG’s system. We intend to do this by exploring and discussing the following areas.
- The role of the CCG’s Human Resources Office in addressing the concerns raised by Moss, and likely other senior officials. What has Human Resources done over the years, in relation to implementing TBS’s vision for establishing and administering an effective set of harassment policies and zero tolerance processes within the CCG? What, if anything, has this office and its officials done to fix the plethora of issues associated with this set of policies within the CCG? If it lacks the internal expertise and resources to bring about effective substantive change, why hasn’t it contracted this matter out to an expert third party to develop a remediation plan? Or it is an office that believes in the Band-Aid approach, stuck on implementing minimal low-cost superficial token efforts which fail to address significant zero tolerance policy deficiencies.
- What have local and national Union CCG officials done to raise concerns of their colleagues in relation to peer-on-peer harassment and bullying allegations? What systems, processes and administrative supports do they have in place to ensure a balanced and neutral approach is adopted and taken, as amongst its membership, in these types of situations? Are they helpful or obstructionist? If conflicted, do Union officials at least have standardized process that they can adopt that avoids picking sides and helps them stay out of the way?
- Given the experiences of sister organizations such as the USA Coast Guard, the National Armed Forces of Canada and RCMP in relation to unaddressed instances of pervasive and long-standing systemic discrimination and gender-based harassment, why has the CCG not been proactive in addressing this problem internally? Given all that has gone on in the last few years, why hasn’t the Minister and senior management led meaningful initiatives with an expert third party specialist, its Human Resources office and Union officials to implement a plan to bring about meaningful change for its workforce? Put another way, why does someone like Dana – working through CHRC processes – have to “shame push” the organization for change from the outside in order to have the right thing done inside?
- And following the completion of the CHRC’s investigation, how do we engage the public at large in this matter? Given the systemic nature of some of this complaint, will this case be deemed a matter of public interest? At some point we will need to examine how to make the media aware of this matter. When do we do this? How do we present the information? Will this website and its content will be an important part of that endeavor?
In closing, 2024 looks to be an interesting year as we explore some of these issues with you. As always, please write with any suggestions, questions, or information you may have. We always look forward to hearing from you.