The Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS) is urging the British Columbia government to ban or sharply limit non-disclosure agreements in cases of gender-based violence, saying the contracts silence people who have been harmed and allow abuse to continue at work.
The call comes in a new report from the group’s Speak Out project. It found that sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence (GBV) remain a serious problem in B.C. workplaces, and that internal company policies often fail the people they are meant to protect. Most people who report GBV find the process makes their experience worse, the report says.
“A lot of therapy and, six years later, I can discuss it without crying and curling up in a ball,” said one woman, identified in the report as Nora, who reported sexual harassment by a senior director and was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement before any investigation began.
A persistent problem in workplaces
Gender-based violence remains common in Canadian workplaces, the report says, citing Statistics Canada figures from 2020:
- Women: 25 per cent experienced sexual misconduct at work in the previous year.
- Men: 17 per cent experienced sexual misconduct at work in the previous year.
- Trades and transport: 47 per cent of women in these jobs experienced inappropriate sexualized behaviour at work in the past year.
- LGBTQ2+ workers: one in five faced discrimination at work based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Half of all women have experienced some form of GBV at work in their lifetime, the report says, and more than one in 10 have experienced sexual assault at work.
The report says many non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) now reach beyond their original purpose of protecting business secrets. Some people do not realize they have signed one. The agreements can stop people from reporting to police, getting support or warning others about a perpetrator, CLAS says, and signing one tends to deepen and prolong the harm.
Recommendations for employers and government
CLAS says employers should make clear that GBV will not be tolerated and should design complaint policies with input from people who have experienced it. It says managers and human resources staff need training in trauma-informed responses, and that employers should refuse to use NDAs in cases of GBV.
“Everyone let me down — manager, union, WorkSafe,” said one worker the report calls Helen, who used her right to refuse unsafe work and stayed off the job for eight months after a man threatened her over a complaint she had not filed.
For government, the report calls for legislation that would void an NDA if a person was coerced into signing it and would protect the right to report GBV to police and to seek health, family and other support. It also asks WorkSafeBC, the provincial workplace safety regulator, to require employers to have policies that specifically address GBV.
How the report was prepared
The Speak Out project gathered input from across British Columbia. It drew on a survey of 339 people, 10 regional workshops with about 160 attendees, a survey of 54 lawyers, and interviews that produced four published case studies. One participant, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra musician Esther Hwang, chose to break her NDA and share her story publicly.
The project was funded through Women and Gender Equality Canada’s Women’s Program.
View the full report here: https://clasbc.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/gender-based-violence-in-the-workplace-and-the-misuse-of-ndas-final-report.pdf
