Problems plague office of ethics chief: Memos
Sexual harassment, absenteeism, lack of trust alleged
OTTAWA • The office of the federal ethics commissioner was plagued by low morale, absenteeism and even allegations of sexual harassment, CanWest News Service has learned.
A leaked memo reveals Bernard Shapiro informed his staff in August, 2004, that serious problems were festering in the office as it moved to become an independent office of Parliament. Under the title “Harassment,” Mr. Shapiro writes that interviews with staff had revealed “a range of different behaviours” in this area, such as: “(i) disrespectful behaviour, that is behaviour that is peremptory or impolite, and (ii) in a very few instances, suggestions of sexual harassment, primarily of a verbal but, nevertheless, unwelcome nature.”
Mr. Shapiro said in an interview no formal complaints were made by any of the staff, a proper follow-up was conducted on these concerns and he asked that the human resource policies for the office address harassment.
He said the three managers running the office when he took over in May, 2004, were kept on, despite the critical interviews, after he met with them to discuss the problems and improving their performance. He said the suggestions of sexual harassment were strictly verbal ones and cited an inappropriate joke being overheard as an example.
“ Whatever the background difficulties, and I didn’t see them as huge, these are people who can be different, in a different context. You don’t just dump people on the hash heap of history because they didn’t prosper in a particular way,” Mr. Shapiro said.
Howard Wilson, the ethics commissioner before Mr. Shapiro, said he had never heard any complaints about sexual harassment and the small office of about 20 employees followed the proper procedures in addressing complaints, such as in one case a manager using forceful language.
Mr. Wilson said he believed morale was good when he left the office in May, 2004, despite Mr. Shapiro’s memo, which Mr. Wilson said he has not seen. Mr. Wilson has retired from public service.
But Mr. Shapiro acknowledged it appears the office was not a happy workplace when he took over last year.
In another section of the leaked memo, titled “ Trust in management,” Mr. Shapiro writes that there appeared to be four areas in which management had lost the trust of staff, including “ the extent to which confidentiality is maintained” and “ the clumsy and ineffectual handling of grievances and performance issues.”
In a memo to staff Mr. Shapiro sent out last week after holding similar interviews in the summer, he reports an improvement in the area of trust but says it is not universal.
“ There remains in the office a small number of staff members who believe that there is too much personal gossiping and that, as a result, something that they might say in confidence is, perhaps inadvertently, passed on to a third party,” the memo says.
He adds the “good news” is none of these comments related to professional matters.
Former employees contacted by the Ottawa Citizen said they were not impressed by Mr. Shapiro’s follow-up even though he identified several serious problems in the office. They pointed out the management staff in the office remained intact during the transition in the fall.
Mr. Shapiro said three new managers have been brought into the office and that a staff shortage and a large workload was causing tension, which has since been relieved with an expansion to more than 30 staff members today.
About a dozen employees in the office chose to leave the office last year, which Mr. Shapiro explained was due to their decision to remain in the federal public service with flexibility to jump to other departments.
The first problem Mr. Shapiro identifies in the September, 2004, memo was “a particularly high level of absenteeism,” saying he was concerned with completing the workload in the office and “with knowing what it is that we might do to deal with the issues that may be causing the absenteeism in the first instance.”