Bill No. 176 - Occupational Health and Safety Act. - Second Reading

PRIVATE MEMBERS' PUBLIC BILLS FOR SECOND READING

Bill No. 176 - Occupational Health and Safety Act.

THE SPEAKER « » : The honourable member for Dartmouth South.

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I am pleased to rise and speak to this bill. I guess I'll start by saying that it is very curious to me to see in this Chamber the resistance to this bill. This is a Chamber where just the last time we were here we talked at great length, led by the Leader of the Official Opposition, about workplace bullying and harassment. Yet we here in Nova Scotia are the only jurisdiction in Canada - the only jurisdiction in Canada - that has neither introduced nor publicly announced any intention of introducing legislation to include bullying and psychological injury as a cause of workplace harm under the occupational health and safety laws.

I sat here for the last half-hour and I've listened to my colleagues talk about bullying and about definitions of bullying, but steadfastly decline to acknowledge that this is something that should be included in our Occupational Health and Safety Act, and it is curious to me.

Our current bill does not just ignore the issue of workplace bullying, it explicitly omits that as a cause under the bill. We are not just saying we haven't thought about bullying. We are saying if you are experiencing harassment or bullying or psychological injury at work that you are out of luck. This is what we think is a very common-sense issue that we are trying to fix and, again, I will say that I am mystified by the fact that no other Party in this Chamber seems to share that view.

The Workplace Bullying Institute describes bullying as a perpetrator's need to control the targeted individuals with harmful consequences for the targeted person.

I agree with my colleague that we need to be clear about definitions, so here, Madam Speaker, is what bullying and harassing behaviour is not. It is not expressing differences of opinion; it is not offering constructive feedback, guidance, or advice about work-related behaviour; and it's not reasonable management of a worker by an employer. What we're talking about here is aggression. Aggression can be obvious, and it can be subtle. There is no checklist, but I suspect if I were permitted to ask for a show of hands of people in this Chamber who have experienced some kind of aggression focused on them at work that has made their workplace difficult or intolerable, I would see many hands because it exists in workplaces across the province, and we know this.

Some examples of what we are discussing as bullying, for clarity of definitions, would be spreading malicious rumours, gossip, or innuendo; excluding or isolating someone socially, and this is over a prolonged period of time such that their workplace becomes intolerable; intimidation; deliberate undermining; physically abusing or threatening abuse; removing areas of responsibility without cause; changing work guidelines; withholding information; giving the wrong information such that someone is unable to complete their job; making jokes that are obviously offensive and that put a person at risk of psychological harm; pestering; spying; stalking; yelling; using profanity; and constant criticism.

It's what we all do every day, Madam Speaker, in this House, but we have rules; we have rules that govern it. When we fall afoul of those rules in this House, we have a system that we can avail ourselves of - imperfect as it is - so we can try and resolve disputes. That system in the larger workforce is the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and yet workplace bullying, and harassment, is explicitly excluded from that Act.

Psychological harassment in the workplace is an occupational health and safety hazard. People experiencing workplace bullying often deal with serious consequences for both their mental and physical health. They have an increased sense of vulnerability, they often have an inability to sleep, they feel panic or anxiety, in some severe cases, post-traumatic stress, which leads to family discord, and it certainly leads to low morale and productivity.

I think that the member opposite spoke about balancing the needs of employees and employers. Madam Speaker, it is not to the advantage of any employer to have a dysfunctional workplace. We're not talking about employers per se as the perpetrators. We're talking about an overall system that people in the workplace can avail themselves of. In that workplace, that bullying, as I said, has consequences. Psychological harassment at work can and does undermine the health of an entire organization.

If you look at the large surveys of workplaces - we have seen them in our own Public Service, we have seen them in municipal public service - where those places that get a failing grade are in things like increased absenteeism, increased turnover, increased stress, increased use of employee assistance programs. Many of those things can be traced back to some kind of psychological harassment or bullying, people not being able to perform their job properly. It can lead to decreased productivity and motivation, decreased morale. Certainly, it does not reflect well on an organization to see that kind of flagging morale and challenges. It could be poor customer service in the service industry.

We know that workplace bullying is happening at an alarming rate. One of my colleagues mentioned that we need to look at the evidence. This issue came to us from people who had experienced this first-hand and also from Equity Watch, which works specifically on these issues. The Canadian Safety Council of Canada reports that in the workplace one in six people have been bullied, and one in five have witnessed a co-worker being bullied. A 2018 study from Statistics Canada found that almost one in five women had been harassed at work at some point during the year, while one in eight men reported similar experiences.

Verbal abuse was experienced most often, with 13 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men reporting it in the prior 12 months. Next most prevalent was humiliating behaviour, reported by 6 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men. I'm just going to repeat that, Madam Speaker - 13 per cent of women in the workplace and 10 per cent of men reported that they had experienced verbal abuse in the past 12 months.

The member opposite talked about how we educate our children - and I'll come back to that point - but the fact of the matter is we can't know what happens in everyone's homes and we can't know what circumstances everyone is battling with at their homes. What we can do is protect people from abuse and harassment in the places where they work. That's what this legislation is intended to do.

Women were found to suffer physical violence at twice the rate of men and were five times as likely to report sexual harassment or unwanted sexual attention. This last point echoes prior research. For women, being young, single, or unmarried was found to add to this vulnerability.

Researchers suggest that these characteristics may be proxies for less seniority at work and poor job quality, factors that may increase the likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace to the extent that they imply low organizational power.

Again, if I were permitted to canvass the women in this Chamber about the experiences they had, certainly starting out in their career, I don't think I'd be going so far as to say that at least some of us would agree that we experienced many of these things. We, as ambitious, professionally oriented women, we powered through, but is that what we expect young women in the workforce to do?

We know that in many professions, young women are over-represented at the bottom and they are under-represented at the top. I would suggest to you, Madam Speaker, that the lack of protections like these - real protections, protections with teeth - are one of the reasons why that happens. I know that in the profession I came from - law - that is absolutely true. I don't have the statistics but more than 50 per cent of the people graduating from law school are women. I suspect that that ratio holds true through the articling years, but partnerships are male - with some exceptions.

I think it's changing, but it looks nothing like the people who are graduating, and that is because there are many organizations and workplaces and professions that are still fundamentally hostile and adversarial in their makeup and there are not adequate protections for people who find themselves in those jobs.

To that point, the member opposite raised the idea of restorative approaches and being open to listening. Quite frankly, in situations where you have extreme power imbalances, where women are battling in patriarchal systems, when they are experiencing harassment and abuse - not just women, but I'm using women as an example here - it is a relatively established fact that those restorative approaches do not work.

They do not work because they work when two parties can come to the table on relatively equal footing. I'm a huge fan of restorative justice. I support the work that the province has done in restorative justice. I think it's really important, but it doesn't always work, Madam Speaker.

Back to the idea about how we teach our children, what kind of society we want to create. Of course, we want to teach our children to be sensitive and caring and compassionate and collaborative, and education plays a role. But do you know what else does? Law. Law plays a role. It plays a role in what we expect of people all the way through and, in particular, what we expect of adults.

I am quite an idealistic, utopian person, and I hope that we find a time when we all regard each other in a different way, when our communities are strengthened, and when we can all be kind, understanding, and clear with each other - but until that time, we have rules and we have laws. Children have rules in school, grown ups have rules in their workplaces, and those are the things that help us police our behaviour. Those are exactly the kind of things that we are proposing in this piece of legislation.

Workplace bullying has been recognized as a global problem. The International Labour Organization recently passed a convention recognizing that harassment and violence on the job is incompatible with decent work.

Canada is a signatory to this convention and our country's delegation was instrumental in drafting it. All member states have a responsibility to promote a general environment of zero tolerance when it comes to workplace harassment and bullying.

I hope, although I am somewhat skeptical after hearing the remarks of my colleagues, that all members of this House will agree with me and with the International Labour Organization that bullying and harassment at work are unacceptable. If we can agree on that, we need to ensure that our laws reflect our zero tolerance attitude on this issue.

Passing this bill would protect all workers in Nova Scotia from bullying in the workplace and would give them the right to refuse work in an unsafe environment. This point, Madam Speaker, is key to the point that people can avail themselves of the Human Rights Commission and other tribunals. That may be. It is slow, it is painful, it is tedious, and it is rarely satisfying at the end. But they may not refuse work in an unsafe environment. That is because the Occupational Health and Safety Act is specifically designed to govern what happens at work.

This bill would require employers to take concrete steps to prevent harassment and bullying; it would make looking the other way when an employee is being harassed illegal. This is the standard in every other jurisdiction in Canada, and it is high time we adopted it here.

THE SPEAKER « » : The honourable member for Halifax Needham.