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OTTAWA — The review of Rideau Hall that led governor general Julie Payette to resign found dozens of people who called the working conditions there hostile, negative, toxic or poisoned.
The government released the findings of the review, conducted by Quintet Consulting Corp., on Wednesday evening.
It's heavily redacted, primarily to protect participants' privacy, and whole pages of details are blacked out or removed.
But the report says representative descriptions told to Quintet about Rideau Hall included phrases such as "the definition of a poisoned work environment," "humiliation," "disrespect" and "condescension."
"Quintet concludes that there is a serious problem that requires PCO (Privy Council Office) immediate attention," says the report.
Payette resigned last Thursday, one week after the government received the report from Quintet. It was commissioned by the Privy Council Office to look into CBC reports that Payette and her secretary, Assunta Di Lorenzo, had presided over a toxic workplace. Di Lorenzo also resigned.
Quintet interviewed 92 current and former employees and "knowledgeable individuals" who had worked with Rideau Hall during Payette's tenure.
"Fewer than 10 participants ... reported only positive or neutral information about the work environment," the report says.
"However, the overwhelming majority of participants described experiences that would objectively be considered 'concerns and allegations,'" the report says.
Specifically, 43 participants "described the general work environment as hostile, negative or other words to that effect."
Twenty-six "specifically used the words 'toxic' or 'poisoned,'" eight "used the expressions climate/reign of fear/terror and 12 participants said they were 'walking on eggshells,'" the report says.
As well, 20 participants "reported having witnessed harassment in their workplace or referred to harassing behaviours in the workplace."
Still, Quintet says it received only one formal complaint about harassment, which was unrelated to the issue it was hired to investigate.
Payette has admitted to no specific wrongdoing. She said in a statement last week that she was resigning for the good of the institution.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2021.
Comments
As far as I'm concerned, Canada in general constitutes a poisoned work environment, in several distinct respects. (1) It contrives to ruin the lives of whistleblowers who report corporate wrongdoing, by preventing them from getting work in their respective trades and professions. (2) It contrives to feed unlimited money to poor-quality lawyers and stupid bureaucrats to exacerbate the stupid messes created by corporations who wrongfully dismiss people and/or who report corporate wrongdoing. (3) Successive governments, both federal and provincial, have failed or refused to do anything effective to deter this type of behaviour and punish the corporate wrongdoers responsible. (4) The general attitude towards the people affected is that they "...must have done something to deserve..." the treatment being meted out to them, with no enquiry into the facts involved. In other words, the rest of society just behaves in a bigoted, pompous, superficial, supercilious and unprofessional manner towards the people affected, based on wilful ignorance and long-standing but misinformed social prejudices. (5) There is virtually no acknowledgement of the true state of job markets in Canada, which is far worse that the so-called "official" unemployment rate suggests. (6) Meanwhile, those who are employed ("insiders") with a ready network of people to rely upon as referees for getting a better job (or for getting another job if they lose their current ones), continually pontificate how you "...have to know somebody..." to get a job. Then they pass this off as "good advice" - or some such - to people who are having/have had persistent trouble getting work, to the point where they don't "...know somebody..." in any meaningful sense. Such people are simply and secretly classed as "outsiders" by the "insiders" previously referred to and the latter groups' main objective is to keep "outsiders" out. In other words, they just form little workplace cliques and little social cliques whose members just practise mutual narcissism - in order to support one another in simply describing "outsiders" as people who deserve their fate "...because they are obviously no good...", or some such. This attitude is sometimes aided and abetted by mainstream news media reports referring to people SAID to "...have dropped out of the labour force...." or "...given up looking for work..." when such descriptions of the people affected are completely baseless - except for people who have genuinely retired because they wanted to retire and could afford to retire. (7) Access to retraining for people needing it to meet current job market needs is limited and nowhere near sufficient, for all the wrong reasons. (8) There are widespread problems in Canada on account of the popular workplace-based STUPIDITY TRAP involving "no experience, no job" and "no job, no experience". AND I HAVE SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION FOR EVERYTHING THAT I'VE JUST SAID, MAKE NO MISTAKE. And I and Vitesse Re-Skilling in Kanata, Ontario can propose solutions to all this - but from what I see going on, almost nobody wants to know.
ERRATUM . Where I said before "....and/or who report corporate wrongdoing...", I should have said "...and/or who COMMIT corporate wrongdoing...". My apologies for any confusion caused! I could say much more - but I think I've said quite enough for now! What's going on in Canada, involving "stacking the deck" against people in difficulty, amounts to sheer incompetence covered up by tradition and popular disinformation.
In addition, from my perspective the problems are made even worse by the mainstream news media secretly applying double standards and hypocrisy in their decisions about what to report - or what NOT to report - concerning corporate wrongdoing. We all know how they freely reported on the SNC-Lavalin Inc. scandal which involved the Prime Minister's office, and what led to it - namely, their bribery and improper payments in Libya and elsewhere. And we all know the outcome of the federal court case against them in December 2018 and the fine of $280 million that they were ordered to pay. But whenever I approached the mainstream news media about reporting on my wrongful dismissal case - and how in 1991 it led to the company having a whole floor of office furniture seized and sold for non-payment of the court judgement, followed by seizure of their Royal Bank bank account for the same reason - the news media have always refused to so much as ask the company and Guy Saint-Pierre one question about their conduct. And I've always made it clear to everybody that I have always had everything thoroughly documented. And obviously they and everybody else were hoping - AND ASSUMING - that they would never be exposed and held to account for this. I suggest that the National Observer, backed by its reputation for top quality investigative journalism, might be interested in pursuing this. I could write all the reports and supply all the supporting documents myself; then all the National Observer would need to do is conduct some fact checking on what I've supplied. To date, for all practical purposes, nobody could be bothered to do any fact checking - or even ask me a question.
Write a piece for the National Observer, Robert!
Thank you, Vivian!
I had in fact said previously (many months ago!) that I would provide a sample of my writing, but on a different subject area (Evan Vokes and pipeline safety, and Evan Vokes' wrongful dismissal by TransCanada Pipelines Inc. ). Note that the company has since re-named itself as TC Energy. See, for instance: https://www.tcenergy.com/about/ But since Evan Vokes' dismissal, on account of the cancellation of Energy East - followed just a few days ago by the cancellation of the Keystone XL extension - in my view, the subject of pipeline safety has been eclipsed in importance by the general problem of bad workplace manners in Canada and everything that it leads to. So the writing sample that I will submit will be different -and I'll be informing the people I was corresponding with accordingly.
In previous correspondence about this sort of thing with Linda Solomon Wood, Janel Johnson and Juliet O'Neill back in August 2019, I was told that I should submit a writing sample connected with my story to Fatima Syed. Is this still the case?