Within days, her new boss, a director general at HRSDC, began a pattern of bullying and harassment that ranged from profane shouting and door-slamming to uninvited physical contact. Within eight months, his behaviour had driven her out of the workplace, terrified and traumatized. She hasn’t been back since.
Today, Chamberlain’s 22-year public service career is in ruins. It’s doubtful it can ever be revived. If anything, her health has worsened. She suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and severe depression. Her voice often shakes and stutters, she fears public places and she drives miles out of her way to avoid Place du Portage which, since she lives in Gatineau, is a constant presence.
While her former boss triggered her symptoms, she blames the handling of her case by senior officials at HRSDC for deepening and entrenching the trauma.
“That’s my whole life they took,” she says, with an uncharacteristic flash of anger. “I never took anything from the system, and they took it all away from me.”
David Kilgour, a former MP and cabinet minister, is one of Chamberlain’s supporters. “I’ve never heard a case that turned my stomach as much as this one,” he says. “She’s an utterly charming person. It just breaks my heart to hear what she’s been through.”
This week, Chamberlain began presenting final arguments in a marathon Public Service Staff Relations Board hearing into her case that has spanned three years and 45 hearing days so far.
The hearing’s demands have caused Chamberlain, 47, further harm. Because she was an acting manager when the harassment occurred, she has no union representation and has had to argue her own case, a burden only about four per cent of PSLRB claimants face. That would be a daunting prospect for a healthy individual, but a crushing hardship for someone in her fragile state.
“Every time I go,” she sobs, “I’m devastated for two weeks before and devastated for two weeks after.”
The drawn-out PSLRB process has been as punitive as Chamberlain’s original abuse, says David Hutton, executive director of FAIR, an organization that advocates for whistleblowers.
“This is absolutely typical of what I hear about all the time,” he says. “If someone is targeted by their manager, it’s very, very hard in our system to get any kind of redress.”
Chamberlain “is now into exactly the same type of process that whistleblowers go through,” says Hutton. “The people that want to punish them have all the resources of the organization and use them without hesitation.”
Because Chamberlain’s case is before the labour relations board, HRSDC officials refused to comment, saying only that the department “is committed to providing a safe, healthy and enabling workplace environment and takes harassment matters seriously.”
Nothing in Chamberlain’s life prepared her for the ordeal she has been through. Born in Trinidad to parents of East Indian extraction, her family emigrated to Canada when she was seven, settling in Ottawa. She grew up near the Experimental Farm, attended Fisher Park High School and earned a honours degree in economic geography from Carleton University.
She was always bright and responsible — and so proud of her adopted country. At school, her teachers would ask her to sing O Canada and recite In Flanders Fields on Remembrance Day. After she married, she’d take her mother-in-law to Parliament Hill when she visited.
She landed a clerical job with the federal government at 22, and rose steadily through the ranks. She worked hard, often staying late. Despite working full time and raising two young children, she somehow found time to study at night and earned a master’s degree. Her husband, Tom, and daughters Noor, now 20, and Ally, 17, were supportive. Life was busy, but good.
In 2006, Chamberlain was appointed an acting director at HRSDC, an EX-1 job that carries a six-figure salary. For the first year, she worked in another branch. It was a tough job, but the work was important and she loved it. “I felt very protected,” she says. “Safe.”
That abruptly changed when she transferred to the skills and employment branch about a year later. The workload, she says, was punishing. But her mercurial boss’s temper and unwanted attentions were even worse.
He’d regularly barge into her office unannounced. Often he spoke so loudly that another worker in the office who complained was moved to a new desk farther away. Other times she says he stood right behind her chair, massaging her shoulders as he spoke or read emails she was typing.
“Whenever he rubbed my shoulders, it was always two hands on my shoulders and very, very close,” Chamberlain says. At first she was too shocked to say anything. But after a few months, she spoke up: “Please stand back. Please don’t touch me.”
The harassment took a terrible toll on her health. She lost 25 pounds, was screaming and crying in her sleep. By 2008, she was seeing black spots, unable to feel her legs, sometimes vomiting at work.
“I wasn’t living,” she says. “It’s hard to explain. I was afraid that I was actually dead.”
For the longest time, she was too frightened to say anything, not even to her husband. “I was so ashamed and afraid, I couldn’t vocalize it,” she says. Then there was the paralyzing shame of her boss’s sexual harassment. “It’s a violation you don’t really want to talk about.”
In April 2008, Chamberlain filed a complaint with Karen Jackson, the branch’s assistant deputy minister, asking to be immediately moved into a permanent EX position elsewhere, away from the directorate and her aggressor.
At first, Jackson urged her to engage in mediation with her boss, saying he needed to learn from the experience, a prospect Chamberlain couldn’t face. “You don’t mediate with an aggressor,” she says.
Jackson, now a senior associate deputy minister at HRSDC, then conducted an investigation, concluding that some of her boss’s behaviour, including his angry outbursts and intrusion into her personal space, violated Treasury Board’s policy on workplace harassment. Chamberlain’s manager “behaved improperly and he should have known that his behaviour would cause offence and harm,” Jackson wrote in her July 2008 investigation report.
Treasury Board policy defines harassment as improper conduct that is directed at and is offensive to another individual. It includes actions or comments that demean, belittle or cause personal humiliation or embarrassment, as well as acts of intimidation or threats. It also includes harassment based on prohibited grounds in the Canadian Human Rights Act, such as race, colour, age and sex.
According to Hutton, this sort of conduct is all too common. “We have an epidemic of harassment in the federal public service,” he says.
Reported harassment has been rising in Treasury Board’s biennial survey of public service employees. In the latest survey, done in 2011, 29 per cent of public servants reported they had experienced harassment on the job, up sharply from 22 per cent in 2005.
In many departments, 30 per cent or more of employees reported workplace harassment. In one, Correctional Services Canada, the number topped 40 per cent. HRSDC, at 27 per cent, was slightly below average.
“It’s a huge problem,” Hutton says. “The central agencies are doing absolutely nothing about it.”
Chamberlain abruptly stopped going to work in June 2008, unable to cope with her workplace any longer. By September of that year, her doctors had diagnosed her with PTSD. They recommended a return to work, but in a new location.
“The doctors always said reintegrate somewhere else and just move forward,” says Chamberlain. “That’s what I wanted to do.” Her employer offered to move her to a different floor in the same building, but balked at her demand to be moved to a different building or department while retaining her EX status.
For Chamberlain, returning to work at Place du Portage was inconceivable. Even the possibility she might encounter her former boss terrified her. “I can never go there again,” she says firmly.
In December 2008, Chamberlain filed a grievance, which was dismissed by her employer the following February. Louise Branch, a HRSDC assistant deputy minister, wrote that she was “satisfied that management acted reasonably by conducting a thorough and fair investigation, ensuring the proper process and followup were done.”
In March 2009, Chamberlain — by then battling suicidal thoughts — referred her denied grievance to the PSLRB for arbitration, adding four workplace safety complaints under the Canada Labour Code later that year.
In a decision in December 2010, PSLRB member George Filliter ruled that he did not have jurisdiction to hear the grievance, and could only consider labour code complaints dealing with alleged reprisals taken by HRSDC against Chamberlain since Jan. 23, 2009.
Meanwhile, HRSDC was pressing Chamberlain to sign a form stating that her injuries had been caused by a “third party” — a person other than the employer or an agent of the employer — to be eligible for workers’ compensation. Chamberlain refused to sign — properly so, according to Kilgour.
“That’s asking someone to sign a false statement,” he said. “As the justice department people should know, that’s a criminal offence.”
In February 2010, after using up all her sick leave and vacation time, HRSDC sent her a record of employment, effectively terminating her. Today, her only income is a monthly disability cheque from a private insurer that she is expected to repay.
Chamberlain’s doctors say there’s little doubt HRSDC’s response to her abuse exacerbated her health problems. Since leaving Place du Portage, Chamberlain “has faced deceptions, insensitivity, pressure and intimidations from HRSDC that have prolonged the symptoms of trauma and fear,” psychologist Dr. Judith Goldstein wrote in October 2009.
In a February 2010 letter, Goldstein wrote that it was “difficult to understand” why HRSDC had not helped Chamberlain move to a new position, as her doctors had repeatedly recommended. “I feel the implicit message has been that she should just accept the abuse without transfer or job safety.”
Around the same time, Chamberlain’s family doctor, Dr. Maureen Stewart, wrote that as a result of HRSDC’s failure to properly accommodate her, Chamberlain “has now regressed terribly, back to the traumatized state she was in when she first left work, and even worse.”
A return to full-time work was not possible at that time, Stewart wrote, adding that it may take several years and “countless hours of therapy for her to recapture her confidence and the capabilities that she once took so much for granted.”
Since those letters were written, Chamberlain’s health has continued to decline, as the demands of the interminable PSLRB hearing, which began with pre-hearings in January 2010, have taken their toll.
“The doctors say that it’s making me worse. It’s worsening the trauma effect, aggravating it and compounding it,” she says. Every time she has to appear, “my body is just shaking. I’m just waving in and out of dissociation.”
Sue Evans, a retired community chaplain who has become one of Chamberlain’s key support people, says the PSLRB hearing has been “incredibly painful” to watch. “I’m at the scene of a car accident.”
This week’s hearing was taken up with Chamberlain’s final arguments. The PSLRB’s Filliter repeatedly sought clarification as she presented a nine-page document listing alleged penalties and reprisals HRSDC has imposed on her since January 2009.
The hearing is now adjourned until April, when Chamberlain and government lawyer Caroline Engmann are expected to wrap up their arguments. Then it’s up to Filliter to render judgment.
While Chamberlain obviously hopes he finds in her favour, she says words like “win” and “victory” aren’t in her vocabulary. “I just want fair rectification now,” she says. “Maybe two or three years ago I wanted them to assign me somewhere else. But that didn’t happen. So now I just want fair rectification of the compensation.”
In the meantime, Zabia Chamberlain grieves for the life she has lost. “I really was a confident person. And I was really, really capable and organized. I used to give so much to my work,” she says wistfully.
“I could have been working three years ago. I know that I would have been contributing. Wouldn’t it have been cost-effective to just do that?”
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Don Butler
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