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Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Anand recently advised Parliament that she has ordered the Canadian Armed Forces to plan significant operational changes, meant to ground the cultural transformation required to reduce the CAF’s high rate of sexual misconduct amongst service members.
In October 2021, my colleague Dana Campbell-Stevens wrote a blog in which she addressed how the law views an individual’s gut feeling about being a victim of discrimination. A recent case from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, Thomas v. Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority Inc., raises issues respecting the potential implications of an individual voicing such a gut feeling.
On July 4, 2021, the New York Times published a story about a leaked video capturing the host of ESPN’s “The Jump,” Rachel Nichols, a White woman, questioning the merit of her colleague, Maria Taylor, a Black woman…
Admittedly, writing about policy writing may not be the most exciting topic. It is, however, a really important one. A good policy is what sets up a whistleblower program for success. If done well, it can also give important information about what the whistleblower program entails to those who are thinking of reporting wrongdoing.
I have seen some policies that set out a specific hierarchy for reporting a complaint. The order sometimes starts off with addressing the matter directly with the person engaging in the unwelcome behaviour, followed by reporting it to a supervisor, that supervisor’s manager, Human Resources, and in cases where Human Resources is engaged in the alleged wrongdoing, a member of the executive team and/or an independent organization.
The first step in any new investigation is to review the workplace harassment policy. As both an investigator and someone who has written workplace harassment policies, I sometimes find myself sighing deeply as I conduct this review, knowing that some parts of the policy are going to make the investigation process harder – not only for me, but for the parties and the employer as well.
I was actually going to write this blog last fall but it seems even more timely now. I have done a number of investigations in the past year where some of the allegations and evidence concerned conversations on various instant messaging platforms: Slack, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp. While I seem to have developed a sub-specialty with investigations in the Tech sector, I confess that the first time a party spoke to me of Slack, I was somewhat clueless.
I find it amazing what we, as human beings, have had to do in the last week to adapt to the realities of living with COVID-19. I am so impressed, for example, by how some small businesses have been able to quickly change how they deliver their goods and services so that they can survive and how customers have embraced and supported this. I am equally impressed that office employees have rolled up their sleeves and found new ways to communicate with one another to “get the job done” and that offices with hundreds of workers are able to operate remotely.
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