Picture the room: furniture rearranged, a chair reserved with a handwritten name tag, recorded applause playing from a speaker, flowers, two plastic flutes of sparkling wine. The host had changed into a shirt and tie for the occasion.
His subordinate had been a finalist for the Michelle C. Comeau award, the highest distinction available in the federal HR community, and he had nominated her for it himself. When she decided not to attend the real ceremony, he built his own version for her instead, in an empty boardroom, without her knowledge or consent.
The host was a human resources team leader at the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs. The Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board has now upheld his termination, finding he sexually harassed four subordinates over nearly two years and abused his authority in the process.
He worked in labour relations. Advising managers on conduct and policy was, literally, his job description.
Comprehensive misconduct
That irony does most of the column’s work for me, so I will not lean on it too hard. But what I will focus on is the sheer variety of the misconduct, because it is rarely this comprehensive.
There were comments about clothing, delivered with the confidence of a man who believed he was flattering people: a green sweater that gave one subordinate a “nice shape,” pants that made another’s backside look good, a pencil skirt he liked “too much.”
There was a performance evaluation that veered into calling an employee cute, charming and sexy, then asking how the compliment made her feel. There was a text describing a painting she’d bought in language about her lips and her neck.
There was, when she mentioned trouble sleeping, a suggestion that she try masturbating, accompanied by a hand gesture. There was a comment to a colleague, the day after receiving a written warning to stop making exactly these comments, about the legality of prostitution in Canada.
There was a gender-reveal party at which he asked a pregnant employee to send him a photo of genitals, hers or her spouse’s, depending on the sex of the baby. There was a locked filing cabinet he let himself into, twice: once to send a subordinate’s shoes out for repair without asking, once to leave a Barbie Ken doll and a movie gift card inside after she had filed her complaint against him.
The defence
His defence, when it wasn’t outright denial, was that this was who he was: sarcastic, a jokester, a boss who treated his team like family. He argued, at length, that he and his most frequent target were close friends, which would presumably have made the shoe repair and the toe-nibbling text messages and the surprise ceremony read differently.
The board wasn’t persuaded. Friendship, it noted, presupposes a reciprocal and balanced relationship, and this one was not that. He controlled her performance evaluations, her leave, her references. She answered his long, affectionate messages with short, polite ones, often punctuated with “ha ha ha,” which the board read correctly as discomfort dressed up as politeness.
Calling a subordinate your friend does not make the reporting relationship disappear. It just makes it harder for her to tell you no.
Contrition performed, not felt
The other detail worth noting is what ultimately sank him: not just the misconduct itself, extensive as it was, but his account of it afterward.
He apologized to his accusers, then floated an unsupported theory that one of them had orchestrated a plot to destroy his career.
He forgave them, in his closing testimony, for complaining about him.
He downplayed the frequency of what four separate women described in overlapping detail.
The board found his contrition performed rather than felt, and concluded there was no evidence he could be rehabilitated. Fifteen years of clean service and no formal discipline before this counted for remarkably little once that judgment was made.
Genuine accountability is not just a mitigating factor tribunals like to see. In cases like this, it is close to the only one that matters.
There is one more line in the decision, offered almost as an aside. The board noted that around the same time, a senior manager decorated a colleague’s office for his birthday with naked Barbie dolls arranged in suggestive poses, and staff wandered in and out for most of a morning to have a look before anyone objected.
It called this evidence of a broader problem with the department’s culture, and it is hard to argue otherwise.
An HR floor where that display draws laughs rather than a phone call to facilities is not a department poised to catch anything subtler.
