[English]
Thank you to the committee for having me here today. My name is Geoff Bowlby. I'm the director of special surveys at Statistics Canada. I was the director responsible for the public service employee survey, and that's what we'll be talking about today.
The focus of my opening comments will be on the nature of the survey itself. There are a few numbers thrown in there, but the main purpose is to show you how we collected the information on harassment. I'll also show you a little information, that I'm not sure you were aware we had, on a similar concept of discrimination.
My opening statements come in the form of a presentation. I see you have copies of it. That's great. I have extra copies if some are needed.
What is the public service employee survey, or PSES? The PSES is a survey that provides the opportunity to give feedback on matters that directly affect employees. I'll talk a little bit later about the sorts of questions that were asked on the survey. It was conducted on behalf of the Office of Chief Human Resource Officer about a year ago, between August 29 and September 30.
The date of our release to departments was on January 26, 2012, so it was not that long ago that the information was made available to all departments. The results of the survey are used to measure employees' perception of the state of people management in their organization, to identify strengths and opportunities to guide organizational planning and learning, and to contribute to the assessment of the organization's performance.
Who was surveyed? A lot of people. It was a very large survey, one of the largest that StatsCan undertakes. All employees working in 90 federal departments and agencies were surveyed. It was a census of all of those employees. That means that every single employee in those 90 organizations and agencies were surveyed. The organizations were the ones for which the Treasury Board is the employer, or organizations where the Treasury Board is not the employer but the organization wished to participate anyway. I'll give you an example of one of those organizations in which the Treasury Board is not the employer but wished to participate in any case. Canadian Revenue Agency is a good example of that. Statistics Canada's statistical operations arm is also another example of that. Those are two large parts of the federal public service for which the Treasury Board is not the employer but where the PSES was administered.
It was broadly administered. It's easier to talk about who was excluded from the survey than it is to talk about who was included. Excluded were ministers' exempt staff, employees on leave without pay, and employees on maternity, paternity, or parental leave, because we were targeting people who were at work at the time of the survey. As well, employees from one department who were on secondment to another were not included.
What types of questions were asked? There were a lot of questions asked. There were 98 questions on the current version of the survey. The survey is repeated every three years, by the way. It started back in 1999, so this iteration had some content that was on previous versions of the survey. Of the 98 questions, 79 were the same as in the previous cycles. That's important because if we want to compare over time, it's really only those questions that were consistent from one survey to the next that we can accurately compare over time.
Before the survey was conducted, StatsCan in its role as administrator of the survey took the questions from OCHRO, the Office of Chief Human Resource Officer, and tested those questions in focus groups. We ran a number of focus groups all across the national capital region in both English and in French to ensure that the questions were respondable by the employees we were targeting.
This is a paper version of the questionnaire, but it was rarely administered as a paper questionnaire.
Actually, 95% of the roughly 300,000 people we sent the questionnaire to received it and responded to us by electronic means, so we had e-mail addresses of every employee in the participating departments and we invited employees to respond to an electronic questionnaire by asking them through their e-mail address.
As I said earlier, it's a census of all employees. This is important because in a census there's no such thing as sample error. You are used to hearing poll results, no doubt, where there is a plus or minus 1% 19 times out of 20. That's the sample error. In this case, because it's a census and not a poll or a sample, there is no such thing as sample error.
There are other forms of error that can be introduced. We call that non-sample error. These are the errors that respondents themselves might make. Or Statistics Canada, in the processing of the information, might make a mistake. But those non-response or non-sample errors were kept to a minimum by using that focus group testing process that I described earlier to make sure that there weren't many errors, that respondents understood the questions and could answer them. As well, Statistics Canada was using a tried and proven type of processing of the information to create the database from all these various questionnaires.
The response rate was also very high. Of the roughly 300,000 employees who received the questionnaire, 72%, or 211,000 employees, returned the questionnaire. A 72% response rate on a survey of this type is a very high response rate. It exceeded our target. It was higher than we've ever had in a public service employee survey in the past. It's a higher response rate than any other known government employee survey. The U.K. runs a survey; the United States government runs a survey, and neither of those come anywhere close to a response rate of 72%. So employees were very engaged in the process and responded at a very high rate.
That's an overview of the survey itself. I want to talk to you now about what were the questions related to harassment, what were not the questions related to harassment, and I want to talk to you as well about the questions related to discrimination, which I thought might be of use to the committee, given the similarity in concepts between harassment and discrimination.
I should have said earlier that the harassment and discrimination questions were part of a suite of questions, and if you have the presentation, I would go back to slide 4, where you can see the sorts of questions that were asked. The harassment and discrimination questions were near the end of the survey.
There were four questions related to harassment. Actually, the first is a statement. Because we are asking employees whether or not they perceived harassment, we needed to first define what harassment was for the employee.
The public service employee used the following definition of harassment. This is a definition that was provided to us by the client, by Treasury Board Secretariat:
Harassment is any improper conduct by an individual, that is directed at and offensive to another person or persons in the workplace, and that the individual knew or ought reasonably to have known would cause offence or harm. It comprises any objectionable act, comment or display that demeans, belittles, or causes personal humiliation or embarrassment, and any act of intimidation or threat. It includes harassment within the meaning of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
We asked the employees to read that definition before they answered any other questions. It would appear in an electronic questionnaire as a screen of its own. Then, after reading it, the employee would click a button that says “Next” to take them to the first question, which is the broadest question on the concept of harassment, and that is the employee's perception of harassment over the two previous years.
That is our step two. We ask employees to answer if they think they've been harassed: “After having read the definition of harassment, in the past two years, have you been the victim of harassment on the job?”
That is the question that's asked, and there are answer categories of never, once or twice, or more than twice. If you sum once or twice and more than twice, 29% of employees perceived harassment in the two previous years.
That's similar to what we recorded back in 2008 with the public service employee survey. It is the exact same number, in fact, 29%.
By the way, this is the first presentation of any data. You may know that if you go to the Treasury Board Secretariat website, you can see all this information. StatsCan administered the survey, gave the results over to the Treasury Board Secretariat, and they have posted it on their website.
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It's a very good question, and thank you for asking it. It's one of the things I wanted to address during the presentation.
The type of harassment is not asked in the 2011 PSES. It has not been asked in previous versions of the survey as well, although it was tested as possible content when we were preparing for the 2008 survey. This focus group testing that I described earlier is a process that we engage in at any time we run a survey.
That focus group testing showed that we could actually measure type of harassment. We proved then that we could do it.
The concern at the time was that any addition of any new questions could affect the time series, the comparability of the data from one year to the next. So the client at that time decided that they didn't want to risk that break in the series, in the history, with the addition of the type of harassment questions.
So the short answer is, yes, it could be done, and we would do it if it was asked of us by the client. But it hasn't been done for that reason: because we were concerned that the introduction of any questions could affect the other questions in that suite of questions on harassment.
There are two caveats to the fact that we did not ask it in the 2011 survey. We, in fact, did for one department, and that was the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ACOA. We had a capacity to add up to five questions for any department that had department-specific concerns they wanted us to ask on the survey, and 13 departments said they were interested in such services. ACOA focused their five questions on the issue of harassment and discrimination within that organization.
A similar approach was taken in 2005 when the Public Service Commission had its supplementary questions for their organizations that were tagged with the public service employees union.
It was interesting to note that some departments have seen this as an important area to focus on. Certainly in this committee there is no doubt that we view sexual harassment as a very serious issue. We're very challenged by the fact that there is no documentation of how much sexual harassment takes place.
One of the things we've heard from other witnesses is that looking at the question of culture and looking at hiring practices, the more hierarchical the organization, the more chances there are for harassment. It really brings us to the point of asking why this information isn't there, as well as information to assess the kind of culture that exists. We often talk about it being intangible, but with the consideration of how many women exist in decision-making positions or what takes place during hiring to enforce these kinds of messages, these are things that can be measured. When they're not, it becomes a challenge to be able to find a solution to a problem that obviously does exist.
Mr. Bowlby, I want to thank you very much for sharing this. One of the areas that interest me is also the question of, in times of workplace adjustment, the kinds of stresses that are put on employees, managers, offices, and departments and whether that creates more friction in the workplace. It's a question that is very critical, I think, to a lot of people. Also, is that a factor in people refraining from coming forward with allegations of harassment for fear of perhaps losing their job even faster or being marginalized at a very difficult time?
We're keen to see particular attention to the current situation where we have seen some real cuts to the public service and how that might affect women, women dealing with harassment.
If I can turn to the committee, I think that's a very important part of where we need to be going. I think we need a serious understanding of what is before us in terms of the cuts to the public service particularly, but also more generally, the impact of current budget decisions on the status of women in Canada.
With 48 hours' notice, I would like to verbally propose a motion:
That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the Committee invite the Minister for Status of Women Canada to appear, no later than Thursday, November 22, 2012, to discuss the 2012 Budget and the 2012-2013 Report on Plans and Priorities for Status of Women Canada; that the Minister’s opening statement not exceed ten (10) minutes; and that the Minister’s appearance be televised.
In presenting this, I would also like to present this on the record. My colleague , on March 14, 2012, asked the minister, “Can we expect to see you back soon, after the budget is tabled, at least for one session, in order to see what is in store for the Status of Women Canada's budget 2012-2013?”, to which the honourable minister responded, “Sure, I would be happy to come back. Of course the votes are not in any of our control. I wish we had more time today. I would be happy to come back.”
I believe we would be remiss to not have the minister speak to not just one omnibus bill budget bill but two, and the impact on the status of women in Canada. After all, what is this committee actually doing? Many of our committees do hear from ministers, and unfortunately ours has been one that has not heard from a minister in a very long time.
Thank you.
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Thank you so much for being here today. Your study is extremely interesting to me. I have a couple of questions.
First, did you compare our results with other countries in terms of their public civil servants and such surveys? Are we sort of on par and within the parameters of normality, or are we on one scale or the other of extremes? That's my first question.
Second, I note here that respondents said that they felt that members of the public were harassing them 31% of the time. I found that very interesting, and wondered if there was any kind of follow-up discussion or something for next year's survey. What does one do with that? I mean, it's a work environment. If you are providing service to members of the public, then obviously that has an impact. But it's not your colleagues or the actual public service itself harassing you.
The other thing I wanted to ask was what the context of the survey was. You've taken the survey. You've captured your responses. Some of us have worked in various work situations, whether they be with the federal service or not. In my case, I worked for the federal government and provincial governments, etc., in my past life. Whenever you work in a bureaucracy, or anywhere else, for that matter, there are some employees who can be disgruntled employees or just unhappy people. How do you put that in the context of the respondents? Has that been looked at? Do you correlate your figures, your data, and your responses with there maybe being 10% of public civil servants who are vexatious complainants or whatever? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
Thank you.
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Maybe in the interest of time I can be a bit more specific with my question.
For example, if my job is a complaints clerk, a front-line complaints clerk at some government office, then obviously I'm going to be feeling probably fairly harassed at the end of the day, because that is my job. Do you see what I mean? Those figures, and those statistics, then, are going to show up in your survey of course because these people feel harassed—31%, it says here. Maybe that will spill over, because it's a difficult job; don't get me wrong, we know it's a difficult job. There's probably a high turnover rate or whatever.
My point around putting it into context is that these are various good figures to have. Yes, you're right, it's good to have the survey and get that information. But without putting it into that kind of context and say, okay, you know, we can see why you would feel harassed in this job....
I'm understanding what you're saying, that, yes, you can get down to the unit level, absolutely, but are you saying then that the managers do or do not wrap programs around it, or provide counselling or support, etc.? Maybe some of those jobs are just difficult jobs, and what does one do with that?