Justin Trudeau said this week that allegations of rape and harassment at Canada’s spy agency are “unacceptable,” but the officers who say they were victimized hope the prime minister’s words don’t ring hollow.
One CSIS officer who says she was raped nine times by a senior colleague while on duty in British Columbia said it was “great” that the group had Trudeau’s attention, after The Canadian Press published an investigation into the whistleblowers’ claims on Thursday.
She pointed to a 2017 lawsuit by officers in Toronto who alleged discriminatory treatment and received a settlement by the government.
“‘Deeds not words.’ I think that this is especially appropriate for this situation,” said the woman, who is identified as Jane Doe in her own legal action against the government.
“While I think it is great that this story has caught the attention of the prime minister, part of me wonders why it took so long?”
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Jane Doe worked as a surveillance officer in the B.C. office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
She is among a group of four officers who said in an investigation published by The Canadian Press that the office was a toxic workplace, where senior officers acted abusively towards younger staff including sexual assault, bullying and harassment.
“I’d love to believe that things could change and even though my experience is warning me not to get my hopes up, I’d love to be proven wrong this time,” Jane Doe said.
“Someone needs to make a lasting change there, that is supported from the inside. If the 2017 lawsuit wasn’t a wake-up call, hopefully this can be.”
Jane Doe said she was repeatedly raped by a much older officer in surveillance vehicles while on missions. A second officer said she was sexually assaulted by the same man despite bosses being told he should not be paired with young women.
Trudeau called their allegations “devastating,” and said everyone should feel protected at work no matter how secretive their duties.
He said Thursday the “entire government” was following up “very directly” on the issues raised by the whistleblowers, who can’t be named because of a law against identifying covert officers.
Another officer who is a colleague and friend of Jane Doe said she hopes going public about their experiences can “force change” at CSIS.
She said she hoped others who were victimized now “feel like they can come forward with their stories and be heard.”
“We had zero support from the internal powers,” she said. “I speak for all of us when I say I’m very glad we have lit a match and been the whistleblowers on such a dark and disturbing place.”
The woman says she and her colleagues hope Trudeau’s words aren’t “lip service.”
The officers who say they were assaulted said they felt they couldn’t go to police, in part because they were constrained by the CSIS Act, which makes it illegal to identify covert employees, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
They say they were failed by the internal complaints mechanism at CSIS, and senior officers abused younger surveillance officers in B.C. with impunity.
Otto Phillips, a Toronto-based lawyer, said CSIS officers aren’t unionized and are covered by federal labour legislation that makes it hard to deal with workplace issues effectively.
He said the agency is in a “weird” position because of legislation that sets out internal grievance processes for staff, while disallowing them from filing court actions until the internal process is exhausted.
Jane Doe’s lawsuit in B.C. was dismissed by a judge who said she hadn’t exhausted the internal grievance mechanism. She said she plans to appeal.
“It strikes me that if (CSIS) were to unionize, many of these issues might go away because you’d actually have a proper counterbalance to management and in CSIS, that’s particularly important given how secretive the organization is,” Phillips said. “They basically control all the cards.”
Phillips, who is representing a CSIS employee in an unrelated legal action in the Federal Court of Appeal, said reform at CSIS won’t come easy.
“It’s going to take a lot of internal soul searching by management at CSIS to try to make the internal process work again and to ensure that the employees trust it,” he said.
“ (There needs to be) some internal movement within CSIS to recognize that their own process isn’t trusted and it’s flawed and it needs to be fixed.”
CSIS spokesman Eric Balsam said in an e-mailed statement before the investigation was published that the service “takes any allegation of inappropriate behaviour, including harassment, very seriously.”
But he said it would be inappropriate for CSIS to comment further on “specific legal matters.”
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