Harassment co-ordinator claims harassment
RCMP sergeant launches rights complaint over how she was treated after returning from injury
OTTAWA— RCMP Staff Sgt. Cheryl Gravelle has had a first-hand look at how Canada’s national police force deals with internal complainants.
As the RCMP’s harassment, human rights and alternative dispute resolution co-ordinator for the Atlantic region, she’s had to deal with many of them.
Now, to her dismay, Gravelle says she herself has been threatened with dismissal for filing complaints about her superiors. And as a Commons committee begins its study of Bill C-42, the Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act, Gravelle sounds a warning about the new powers Parliament is considering giving RCMP managers.
“I can only imagine what will happen when the individuals like those whom I have complained against will have absolute power to dismiss members like me for speaking out against a regime of unfair work practices and unethical conduct,” said Gravelle.
“I believe that senior commissioned officers will abuse these new Bill C-42 authorities to further prey on the most outspoken or vulnerable members of the RCMP to protect themselves and their career.”
Gravelle, a Mountie with 20 years’ service, injured her back on duty three years ago while trying to re- strain a violent, mentally disturbed man who had entered her Nova Scotia office’s fifth-floor lobby.
She says her attempts to return to work were complicated by recurring pain from the injury, bosses who dealt cavalierly with her, a push by the RCMP to review a huge caseload of workplace harassment complaints, and what she says were repeated efforts to bully her into silence when she protested first about the workload and later about what she saw as unfair treatment.
Now, Gravelle has lost faith in a force she once revered, and is risking her job to go public with the Star about her discrimination complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
A bilingual native of Beaconsfield, Que., Gravelle joined the Mounties in 1992, and worked in B.C.’s Lower Mainland for most of her career.
In October 2008, she was promoted to staff sergeant and transferred from Richmond to Halifax to the harassment co-ordinator’s job, a desk job off the front lines.
All was fine until she was injured in October 2009 while helping restrain the violent visitor to her office. As she grabbed the man’s legs, he kicked her hard. “He threw me like a rag doll,” she said, the force of her fall compressing a disc in her back. She was off duty for several months and underwent back surgery in February 2010. Gravelle returned to work fulltime in May, three months after the first surgery, but the pain continued. By September 2010 she had to take another sick leave. An MRI in the spring of 2011 confirmed she still had massive disc herniation and would need another operation. Yet Gravelle said she found little understanding at work. In what she called a “humiliating” blow, her supervising officers assigned her to be screened by an internal committee that sifts through troublesome files and determines whether Mounties are off duty due to medical problems or conflicts in the workplace. It was a committee that Gravelle, as harassment co-ordinator, was supposed to sit as a member of. In January this year, after laser therapy sessions eased some symptoms, she tried another gradual re- turn to work. But contrary to RCMP policy and occupational health and safety laws, says Gravelle, her return was neither gradual, nor monitored by health professionals, and the workload quickly piled up under Commissioner Bob Paulson’s drive to review outstanding harassment complaints. Half-days quickly became 40 hours a week or more. When Gravelle protested, her complaints were shrugged off with eye rolls and insensitive comments. By March 22, “stressed out, depressed and totally depleted,” she contacted her family doctor, and took a 14-day leave. Attempts to get help through the in-house staff relations representative were to little avail. Days later, a boss phoned her at home and demanded passwords to her computer and voicemail. She was ordered to undergo a health assessment to determine her medical fitness for duty and told that failure to obey the order would lead to discharge proceedings. In April, she filed an ethics complaint to the professional integrity officer, citing what she says were senior RCMP officers’ abuses of various processes. The same day, she went to her family doctor, who had just received a call from the RCMP’s health services officer Dr. Christine Zwicker suggesting Gravelle be transferred to an easier job. Chief Supt. Craig MacMillan, the RCMP’s professional integrity offi- cer tasked with handling complaints under the whistleblower act known as the Public Service Disclosure Protection Act, wrote to Gravelle in July to inform her that her complaint didn’t meet the “public interest threshold” to warrant further investigation. His email said that his office had acted in “good faith,” and urged her to look again at mediation.
Still, MacMillan acknowledged she raised legitimate questions about accommodation policies for officers injured on duty. He said he would recommend her allegations of “misconduct” be assessed “by the responsible line officer.” It was a move, she says, that “threw me to the wolves.”
Senior officers are trying to pare down the number of cases that smack of harassment and Gravelle says “the higher up the food chain you go in this organization, the more pressure they put on you to enter into mediation to get this thing off the plate so that it’s not recorded as harassment at all.”
In the end, Gravelle is at a loss to understand what’s happened.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought they would threaten to fire me,” she says. “If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”
The Star’s request to interview any of the officers involved, including MacMillan, was turned down.
The RCMP’s media relations office said the force works closely with the human rights commission to address issues raised by members.