In this email letter, the OIC follows-up to the telephone meeting they had earlier that week. In this letter she explains that she takes the matter seriously and will be looking into the complaints. She copied and pasted some information from the workplace wellness intranet website as lip-service to address my complaints. Then, at the very end of the letter, she denies my request for secondment siting operational requirements and low staffing levels. This was devastating as I was certainly running out of options to maintain my employment with the Government of Canada. Also, I believe that many co-worker secondment requests were granted in the past, and more were granted in the future, including the OIC herself was working in acting positions. It seemed extremely unfair that I was being singled out and my secondment was denied when others clearly were not. It is my impression that the staffing levels remained mostly the same during my tenure.
Here is a copy of her follow-up letter to Dana: 2021-January-08 – Email follow-up to phone meeting from OIC-redacted
Lastly, Dana conducted another Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) request to find out what the OIC did, if anything to address Dana’s complaints. According to the information received from that request, the OIC did NO additional work to address the complaints. It did not seem like she took the matters seriously, there was no evidence that the people Dana complained about were even spoken to, and no evidence that she even spent any time investigating the accusations. According to the VAJ Zero Tolerance Policy, ‘harassment may result in corrective or disciplinary measures, up to and including termination of employment’. It is my understanding that according to this policy, the onus is on management to investigate and action these complaints. Dana felt that her complaints were not actioned at all, she was given options that would not work to alleviate the toxic work environment, Dana feels she was constructively dismissed from her position as an MCTS Officer.