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Important

This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you.

The Alberta Human Rights Commission and what it does 

If you’ve been sexually harassed, you may be able file a formal complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission. One law that protects you from discrimination is the Alberta Human Rights Act. Sexual harassment under the act can constitute discrimination based on sex.

The commission will review your complaint and assess whether it should be accepted. Commission staff encourage parties to reach a settlement on their own (in a process called conciliation) or may investigate the issues. If the parties can’t resolve the matter and the commission staff recommend it for a hearing, the case will then go to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, the decision-making arm of the commission. 

When you think about filing a complaint, you might imagine a process that ends in an adjudicator definitively ruling that what happened to you was either right or wrong. But in reality, that almost never happens. The greatest number of cases are settled through conciliation.

We’re not saying don’t make a complaint to the commission, but it’s very unlikely the outcome will be a public acknowledgement of the fact that you were harassed. If you think you would be satisfied with a private settlement, which could involve such things as money to compensate you for the harm you experienced, an apology or a job reference, then having your complaint dealt with in a conciliation process could be right for you.

Facts about the Alberta Human Rights Commission and Tribunal

  • In 2022-23, 822 complaints were filed with the commission. Fifteen percent involved discrimination or harassment on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression. 
  • Roughly 80% of complaints never reach the tribunal and just a handful get decided at a hearing; in 2022-23, only 32 were closed this way. 
  • About 40% of the complaints closed in 2022-23 at the commission or tribunal stage were resolved through conciliation or private settlement; another 40% were dismissed or closed by the tribunal office; 17% were abandoned or withdrawn.
  • When the tribunal decides that someone was discriminated against or harassed, it sometimes gives them an award of money as compensation for lost wages and/or the hurt and loss of dignity that they experienced. There is technically no limit to the amount of money the tribunal might grant for hurt and loss of dignity, but in the past few years the biggest award has been $75,000.
  • Sources: Alberta Human Rights Commission Annual Report 2022-23, CanLII.

Why consider filing a complaint with the commission

If you decide to file a complaint with the commission, here are a few things you may get out of the process:

  • It could be a chance to tell the harasser what they did is not okay.
  • You might get back money you lost because of the harassment—maybe you didn’t get a special project or a promotion, or were fired.
  • You might get a reference for a new job.
  • You could request that your workplace make changes that would affect everyone there, not just you, like improving employee policies and training around sexual harassment.
  • It is possible you might get some money to recognize the emotional harm you suffered from the harassment.

How to make a complaint to the commission

To start the process of filing a complaint, you should first complete this self-assessment to find out if your complaint is covered by the Alberta Human Rights Act. If it is, then it’s important that you carefully read the Human Rights Complaint Guide, which contains detailed instructions how to make your complaint. You can access the complaint form online or download and complete a PDF version. 

You can file a complaint against anybody who is sexually harassing you at work—your employer, a co-worker, a supervisor, a customer, or a contractor. In your application, you can also name the company or organization you were or are working for. Even if your employer is not the one who’s harassing you, they have to protect you from sexual harassment and a harassing environment. See How to report sexual harassment to your employer. 

Will the commission accept your complaint?

  • You have one year from when the harassment happened to file your complaint with the commission. If the harassment happened more than once, the deadline is one year from the last incident of harassment. 
  • You can file a complaint with the commission if you work in Alberta or if the harassment happened in Alberta, but not if you work at a federally regulated workplace. See Am I a federally regulated worker? (And why it matters.) 
  • If you’re unionized, you must make your complaint through your union. See Working with your union. You’re covered if you’re non-unionized, temporary or permanent, an independent contractor, or undocumented. 
  • After you submit your complaint, a human rights officer from an intake team decides whether the harassment you faced relates to a ground of discrimination under the act. This takes about three weeks. If they reject your complaint, you can request that the director of the commission reconsider your case; you must do this within 30 days.

How conciliation works

Usually you and the respondent—the person your complaint is about—will be strongly encouraged to participate in conciliation. This involves you and the respondent finding a solution to your complaint—something you both agree to.

The commission will assign you a conciliator, who will talk with you and the respondent about your complaint and perhaps gather more information before a conciliation meeting. You or your lawyer can provide information or show documents to a conciliator and request they keep it confidential from the other side.

Conciliators are human rights experts who listen to you and the respondent and work with both of you to come to a settlement. They are expected to behave neutrally: They’re not supposed to pick a side, and they aren’t supposed to favour either you or the respondent. Their goal is to try to reach a solution that both parties can agree to so your case doesn’t have to go to the tribunal. The purpose of this process is not to determine whether you were sexually harassed according to the Human Rights Act.

Conciliation meetings are conducted by videoconference and are scheduled for half a day. It can take a year and a half or more from the time your complaint is accepted for it to get to this meeting. Sixty days are allotted for the time between when a conciliator is appointed to when you reach an agreement. If conciliation is not successful, the director of the commission decides whether to dismiss your complaint or to refer it to the tribunal. Dismissed complaints can be appealed to the chief of the commission and tribunals for a review, but about three-quarters of these appeals are unsuccessful.

For more information

The Human Rights Commission’s website includes a detailed page about the conciliation process.

Pros and cons of conciliation

  • The conciliation process is free.
  • Many people participate in mediation without a lawyer.
  • You are the one to decide what you will accept from the respondent to make up for the harm they caused.
  • More creativity is possible in conciliation. For example, you can’t ask for an apology in a hearing.
  • Everything you say is considered confidential, or “without prejudice”—it can’t be used against you later.
  • There is no risk in participating in conciliation. If it fails, your complaint may still be referred to the tribunal, though the director can instead decide to dismiss it. 
  • Conciliation doesn’t give you a chance to publicly say what happened to you or be told that it was wrong.
  • You can’t share details of any settlement you reach—you must sign an agreement saying the outcome is confidential.
  • You will likely not get everything you ask for—you have to be ready to compromise. 

What you might ask for

Money to compensate you for:

  • The harm to your dignity, feelings, and self-respect.
  • Lost wages.
  • The cost of counselling sessions you’ve needed and/or money to cover future counselling.

Besides money:

  • An apology.
  • Your job back or a reference letter.
  • A change at the workplace, like including a sexual harassment section in the policies handbook.
  • Your employer having to take a course about preventing and dealing with sexual harassment. 
  • A donation to a charity of your choice as a way of saying sorry.

What are you likely to get?

Details of settlements reached through conciliation are private. However, we know that in a number of cases the agreement doesn’t involve money at all; instead, the respondents are ordered to do things like take human rights training or create a human rights policy that all managers have to be trained about. See the commission’s remedy information sheet for more information. 

The types of monetary awards for emotional harm when sexual harassment cases are decided by the tribunal are a guide. In recent years the highest award has been $75,000. Larger awards happen when the harassment was particularly bad and went on for a long time. Otherwise, $10,000 or $15,000 isn’t uncommon.

Beyond mediation

When a case has been referred to the tribunal, there will be another attempt to mediate the case. A tribunal member handles this process, which is called tribunal dispute resolution; the meeting is called a TDR conference. A third of complaints are closed this way; another third are closed because the parties come to a private settlement. Only about 20% are resolved through a hearing, which happens after TDR fails. 

Pros and cons of your case being decided at a hearing

  • The tribunal has expertise in harassment. All it does is handle complaints of discrimination, including harassment.
  • The tribunal has the power to say that, yes, you were harassed, and that what happened to you was wrong.
  • The tribunal can order many different remedies. It can award you money. If you were fired or had to quit because of the harassment, it can order your employer to give you your job back. It can order your employer to make a donation to a charity or to provide anti-harassment training.
  • It can take years for a hearing to be held.
  • If you hire a lawyer to represent you, that will be expensive. If you don’t hire a lawyer, your chances of success are much lower.
  • People who represent themselves at the tribunal are less likely to have their complaints found justified.
  • Very few people end up being told by the tribunal that they were harassed and what happened to them was wrong—in the last three years, fewer than half a dozen.
  • Tribunal financial awards are fairly small. There is technically no limit to the amount of money the tribunal could award to you, but awards are generally well under $50,000. The amount of an award is affected by how severe the harassment was and how long it went on. And remember, with most tribunal cases, people don’t end up receiving any money at all.
  • If you choose the tribunal process, you may close the door to other legal options.
  • Even if the tribunal awards you money or other things, that doesn’t mean you will necessarily get them. It can be hard to force your employer or the harasser to give you everything the tribunal ordered.
  • Like in any legal process, your opponents will try to undermine your credibility and make you look bad. You could end up feeling disbelieved and unsupported.
  • Some psychologists believe it’s a bad idea for people who have experienced sexual harassment to get involved in any legal process. They say legal processes can slow down your ability to heal emotionally from what happened to you, because they keep you focused on the past. These experts believe that it can be healthier for the person who experienced harassment to put the past behind them and focus on their present and their future.

If your case goes ahead

The Human Rights Commission’s website has a page that outlines what to expect if the director of the commission refers your complaint to the tribunal process. 

While theoretically it is possible to proceed with a complaint representing yourself, this is very challenging, time consuming, and potentially harmful to your mental health. Your chances of success are much greater with legal help.

Here are some places that offer free or lower-cost legal services:

  • Independent Legal Advice for Survivors of Sexual Violence, a project of the Elizabeth Fry Society, is based in Edmonton and also serves the communities of Stony Plain, Morinville, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan, Ponoka, Camrose, Wetaskiwin, Red Deer, and Fort McMurray. You can receive up to four hours of free legal advice and can also attend legal clinics.
  • Justice Net is a not-for-profit service for those whose income is too high to qualify for legal aid but too low to afford regular legal fees. To qualify you must have a net family income under $70,000, or $90,000 if there are three or more people in your family, and be experiencing financial difficulties. Participating lawyers’ reduced rates vary depending on your family size and income.
  • 211 Alberta is a free and confidential 24/7 phone and text service that connects individuals to services in the province. You can call or text 2-1-1 to be connected with trained professionals to help find support services.
  • Your workplace union, association, or employee assistance program may be able to help you find legal services or cover part of your legal fees.
Important

This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you.

The Workers’ Compensation Board is an independent organization financed by employers that gives benefits and supports to people who’ve been injured at work. These can include replacement of lost wages, health care (including rehabilitation, counselling, and medications), and, in extreme situations, retraining.

Facts about the Workers’ Compensation Board

  • The WCB functions like an insurance provider. Employers pay premiums to the WCB for the people who work for them. As a result, those people are entitled to benefits if they suffer a workplace injury.
  • WCB coverage is mandatory for many employers. About 80% of Alberta workers are covered by the WCB.
  • Every year about 130,000 claims are filed with the WCB; 10% are ruled ineligible.
  • Fewer than 2% of claims are for a psychological injury; of those, about a third are made by first responders.
  • Sources: Workers’ Compensation Board annual reports, Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada

If you’ve been harmed by sexual harassment at work, you might think the WCB will help you. 

  • Maybe after you were harassed, you took time off work and so lost income.
  • Maybe the harassment damaged your mental health, and you ended up needing to spend money on medication for anxiety or depression.
  • Maybe the harassment had such an effect on you that you had to leave an industry and ended up needing to retrain for a new type of work in a different field. 

Those are the kinds of expenses—replacement of lost wages, medication costs, retraining costs—that the WCB often covers.

However, historically, the WCB has mostly handled claims related to physical injuries suffered by workers in male-dominated fields like construction, manufacturing, and uniform occupations like policing and firefighting. If you slip at work and break your ankle, or are struck by a falling object, or are injured in a fire or explosion: that is the kind of situation the WCB was designed for and has a lot of experience handling. 

It has less experience with mental health harms, which it classifies as psychological injuries, and the turndown rates for these are very high. For these types of claims, the WCB requires you to prove that your workplace was the “predominant” cause of your injury, whereas proof for other claims is only that the workplace was a “substantial” cause. That higher standard, worker advocates say, is another reason, in addition to the established WCB culture, why so few harassment claims to the WCB are successful.

Though we’re not saying don’t bother applying for WCB benefits, you should be aware that it’s unlikely your claim will be successful. If you want to pursue the claim after being denied, you’ll need to be prepared to go through an appeal process. Appealing can take a long time, and, of the few appeals that are heard, many are denied.

Important

Legally, if your employer is a WCB member, they are required to report any injuries that occur in their workplace. But really most are unlikely to do this in sexual harassment cases, because they often deny the harassment occurred or that it caused real harm.

Important

If you want to apply for disability insurance through your workplace provider, the insurer may require you to apply to the WCB first, and appeal if you are turned down.

Pros and cons of going to the WCB

  • It isn’t expensive or very complicated. 
  • WCB benefits can be generous. Wage replacement is up to 90% of your net salary.
  • Representing yourself is possible when first making a claim. But if your claim is denied, appealing is more complicated. There may be some legal resources to help if you still want to represent yourself.
  • The WCB doesn’t investigate or adjudicate whether you were sexually harassed. If you are looking for someone to tell you that you were sexually harassed, and to punish the harasser or your employer for allowing the harassment, the WCB won’t give you that.
  • The WCB has a high rate of denying mental stress or injury claims.
  • If the WCB rejects your claim and you appeal, the appeal process may be lengthy.
  • You can’t apply to the WCB secretly. You must notify your employer about your injury right away, which means they will have information about your private health circumstances.
  • Your employer will have the opportunity to dispute your claim. It’s very likely they will do this, in which case proving your case will be more difficult.
  • Your employer will be updated about any changes to your claim. That means they will continue to know about your personal health situation, even if you don’t work for them anymore.
  • To make a claim, you will need a medical professional to say that you’ve suffered an injury. If you don’t have easy access to a medical professional who will do this, making a claim will be harder.

Psychological injury claims

The WCB awards benefits due to the injury you sustained, which in your case would be damaged mental health. This requires a diagnosis of conditions described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5, like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment disorder, or anxiety. 

Under WCB guidelines there are two categories of mental health injuries:

Chronic onset psychological injuries or stress develops over time from ongoing work-related stressors. Being repeatedly sexually harassed by a co-worker might lead to this type of injury. This harassment has to be the major, or predominant, cause of the harm.

Traumatic onset psychological injury or stress results from a specific traumatic event, such as harassment that includes physical violence, the threat of physical violence, or a life-threatening situation. The incident itself is the source of the trauma. These claims are often based on a single traumatic event, but the WCB can also consider multiple incidents if the cumulative impact is traumatic. Examples might be witnessing the death of or severe injury to a colleague or being physically threatened yourself at work. It’s not likely this type of claim fits your situation. 

The WCB won’t cover every kind of mental stress that arises at work. If you develop a mental health condition caused by your employer making changes to your shifts or other working conditions, for example, or firing you, or due to interpersonal conflicts that don’t involve harassment, you aren’t eligible to file a claim.

How to make a WCB application 

First, you must decide if filing a claim with the WCB is the right choice for you. If you do choose to go to the WCB, you’ll find more information about work-related mental stress injuries and the application process on the website. See also submitting a report. You can file the completed online form (Worker Report of Injury or Occupational Disease) electronically (follow the instructional video on the WCB website) 

To file a claim with the WCB, you must be employed in a business or industry that is covered by the Workers’ Compensation Act. About 80% of workers in Alberta are included under the act

For more information 

The WSB website includes a fact sheet answering frequently asked questions about psychological injury claims. There are also fact sheets specifically about how chronic onset and traumatic psychological injuries are defined, how decisions to accept claims are made, and what happens next if a claim goes ahead.

The Worker Handbook is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of the claim process, including how to appeal a WSB decision. 

Legal help

Representing yourself is possible when first making a claim. But if your claim is denied, appealing is more complicated. Here are some places that offer free or lower-cost legal services:

  • The Advisor Office is an independent government agency that provides free and confidential services about workplace injuries and compensation to workers. This office can provide information, advice, and help with representation to you throughout the appeals process.
  • At the Women’s Centre of Calgary female volunteer lawyers offer free half-hour legal advice sessions.
  • Calgary Legal Guidance’s Sahwoo mohkaak tsi ma taas clinic provides Indigenous community members free legal advice on a variety of areas, including employment law. It may be able to offer free legal representation.
  • JusticeNet is a not-for-profit service for those whose income is too high to qualify for legal aid but too low to afford regular legal fees. To qualify you must have a net family income under $70,000, or $90,000 if there are three or more people in your family, and be experiencing financial difficulties. Participating lawyers’ reduced rates vary depending on your family size and income.
  • Your workplace union, association, or employee assistance program may be able to help you find legal services or cover part of your legal fees.

For advice on hiring a lawyer, see How to find and work with a lawyer.

Important

This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you.

The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission and what it does

The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission is the agency that receives and investigates human rights complaints regarding violations of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code. It helps people to mediate or settle their complaints. If a complaint can’t be resolved, the commission may refer the case to the Court of King’s Bench for a hearing. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission and the Court of King’s Bench deal with discrimination cases. Sexual harassment is considered sex discrimination.

When you think about filing a complaint, you might imagine a process that ends in an adjudicator definitively ruling that what happened to you was either right or wrong. But in reality, that almost never happens. The majority of cases are settled through mediation, not by an adjudicator.

We’re not saying don’t make a complaint to the commission, but it’s very unlikely the outcome will be a public acknowledgement of the fact that you were harassed. If you think you would be satisfied with a private settlement, which could involve such things as money to compensate you for the harm you experienced, an apology or a job reference, then having your complaint mediated could be right for you.

Facts about the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission

  • Every year about 500 people file a complaint with the commission. Just 20% of these are accepted, or formalized.
  • Roughly 10% of the people whose complaints are formalized say that they have been discriminated against or harassed on the basis of sex.
  • More than 60% of formalized human rights complaints are settled through mediation.
  • About 15% of formalized human rights complaints are settled by the Court of King’s Bench. 
  • Sources: Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission Annual Report 2023-24, CanLII

Why consider filing a complaint with the commission

If you decide to file a complaint with the commission, here are a few things you may get out of the process:

  • It’s a chance to tell the harasser what they did is not okay.
  • You might get back money you lost because of the harassment—maybe you didn’t get a special project or a promotion, or were fired.
  • You might get a reference for a new job.
  • You could request that your workplace make changes that would affect everyone there, not just you, like improving its employee policies and training around sexual harassment.
  • It is possible you might get some money to recognize the emotional harm you suffered from the harassment.

How to make a complaint to the commission

To start the process of filing a complaint, you should first check the Am I in the right place? page of the commission’s website to see whether your complaint is covered by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code. If it is, then you must contact the commission’s office, which will put you in touch with an intake officer. The intake officer will assess whether your complaint can go forward. If so, you will be asked to complete an intake questionnaire, and the intake officer will draft a formal complaint. 
You can file a complaint against anybody who is sexually harassing you at work—your employer, a co-worker, a supervisor, a customer, or a contractor. In your application, you can also name the company or organization you were or are working for. Even if your employer is not the one who’s harassing you, they have to protect you from sexual harassment and a harassing environment. See How to report sexual harassment to your employer.

Will the commission accept your complaint?

  • You have one year from when the harassment happened to file your complaint with the commission. If the harassment happened more than once, the deadline is one year from the last incident of harassment. In certain situations, the commission will accept late complaints if you can show there was a good reason for the delay.
  • The intake consultant may try to settle your issue through pre-complaint resolution before the complaint becomes formal. This approach is most likely if your complaint might be resolved quickly. This usually involves calling your employer and explaining the law, with the aim of resolving the case right away so that you can safely return to work. 
  • You can file a complaint with the commission if you work in Saskatchewan or if the harassment happened in Saskatchewan, but not if you work at a federally regulated workplace. See Am I a federally regulated worker? (And why it matters.)
  • You’re covered if you’re unionized or non-unionized, temporary or permanent, an independent contractor, or undocumented. 
  • Your complaint may be delayed if you have filed a complaint with the Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board. See Should you apply for workers comp?

How mediation works

Sometimes complaints can be resolved before they have been accepted, or formalized. Otherwise, once you and the respondent—the person your complaint is about—have submitted your versions of events, a commission mediator will facilitate mediation. This process might involve in-person mediation; it can also be shuttle mediation by phone or correspondence. The goal is to try to reach a solution that both parties can agree to within 90 days. Close to half of complaints are resolved through this process.

Mediators are human rights experts who listen to you and the respondent and work with both of you to come to a settlement. They are expected to behave neutrally. They’re not supposed to pick a side, and they aren’t supposed to favour either you or the respondent or advise you to accept a settlement. The purpose of this process is not to determine whether you were sexually harassed according to the Human Rights Act. 

Pros and cons of mediation

  • The mediation process is free.
  • Many people participate in mediation without a lawyer.
  • Mediation can be less stressful and simpler than a hearing. It doesn’t involve calling witnesses or testifying. 
  • You are the one to decide what you will accept from the respondent to make up for the harm they caused.
  • More creativity is possible in mediation. For example, you can’t ask for an apology in a hearing.
  • Everything you say is considered confidential, or “without prejudice”—it can’t be used against you later.
  • There is no risk in participating in mediation. If it fails, your complaint will move to the investigation stage.
  • Mediation doesn’t give you a chance to publicly say what happened to you or be told that it was wrong.
  • You will likely not get everything you ask for—you have to be ready to compromise. 

What you might ask for

Money to compensate you for:

  • The harm to your dignity, feelings, and self-respect.
  • Lost wages.
  • The cost of counselling sessions you’ve needed and/or money to cover future counselling.

Besides money:

  • An apology.
  • A reference letter or a letter confirming your employment.
  • A change at the workplace, like including a sexual harassment section in the policies handbook.
  • Your employer having to take a course about preventing and dealing with sexual harassment. 

What are you likely to get?

Details of settlements reached through mediation are private. However, we know that in a number of cases the agreement doesn’t involve money at all; instead, the respondents are ordered to do things like take human rights training or create a human rights policy that all managers have to be trained about. A maximum of $20,000 can be awarded for emotional harm, although the average settlement in mediation for this is about $8,700. 

Beyond mediation

If you and the respondent can’t come to an agreement through mediation in 90 days, the next phase is investigation. The investigator puts together an investigation plan, then interviews witnesses and examines evidence, which they can request the parties provide. They are starting fresh: They not allowed to know what was discussed or revealed in the mediation process. At any time during the investigation the parties can ask the investigator to mediate. This process may take six months or more. 

In the end, the investigator presents a disclosure report outlining their findings, which is sent to you and the respondent. This report contains the investigator’s recommendation as to whether the complaint should be dismissed or continue to the Court of King’s Bench for a hearing. The final decision about what should happen is made by the chief commissioner, who can agree with the investigator’s recommendation or return the case to them for more review. It may take several months before the chief commissioner makes their decision.

Before a complaint goes to a hearing, there is one more attempt to resolve it through what’s called directed mediation. The respondent is asked to make a final offer; if the commission believes that it is reasonable, but you don’t accept it, the chief commissioner will dismiss the complaint. Otherwise, your case will go to the Court of King’s Bench for a hearing.

Pros and cons of your case being decided at a hearing

  • The court has expertise in harassment. All it does is handle complaints of discrimination, including harassment.
  • The court has the power to say that, yes, you were harassed, and that what happened to you was wrong.
  • The court can order many different remedies. It can award you money. If you were fired or had to quit because of the harassment, it can order your employer to give you your job back. It can order your employer to make a donation to a charity, or to provide anti-harassment training.
  • It can take years to get to court.
  • If you hire a lawyer to represent you, that will be expensive. If you don’t hire a lawyer, your chances of success are much lower.
  • People who represent themselves are less likely to have their complaints found justified.
  • Very few people end up being told by the court that they were harassed and what happened to them was wrong.
  • Financial awards for harm to dignity are small. The maximum amount possible is $20,000, but the average is several thousand dollars less. In many cases, people don’t end up receiving any money at all.
  • Even if the tribunal awards you money or other things, that doesn’t mean you will necessarily get them. It can be hard to force your employer or the harasser to give you everything the tribunal ordered.
  • Like in any legal process, your opponents will try to undermine your credibility and make you look bad. You could end up feeling disbelieved and unsupported.
  • Some psychologists believe it’s a bad idea for people who have experienced sexual harassment to get involved in any legal process. They say legal processes can slow down your ability to heal emotionally from what happened to you, because they keep you focused on the past. These experts believe that it can be healthier for the person who experienced harassment to put the past behind them and focus on their present and future.

If your case goes ahead

The commission staff are trained to help you with the process, and the commission’s counsel will argue the case in court and will call evidence and witnesses. You don’t need to have a lawyer or present your own evidence, though some complainants chose to.

Here are some places that offer free or lower-cost legal services:

  • Pro Bono Law Saskatchewan provides free legal services to low-income Saskatchewan residents through 13 clinics across the province. Clients receive up to one hour of free legal advice from a volunteer lawyer. In some situations, lawyers from this service will represent clients through the whole legal process.
  • Justice Net is a not-for-profit service for those whose income is too high to qualify for legal aid but too low to afford regular legal fees. To qualify you must have a net family income under $70,000, or $90,000 if there are three or more people in your family, and be experiencing financial difficulties. Participating lawyers’ reduced rates vary depending on your family size and income.
  • 211 Saskatchewan is a free and confidential 24/7 phone and text service that connects individuals to services in the province. You can call or text 2-1-1 to be connected with trained professionals to help find support services.
  • Your workplace union, association, or employee assistance program may be able to help you find legal services or cover part of your legal fees.
Important

This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you. See How to find and work with a lawyer.

The Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board is an independent Saskatchewan government agency. It gives benefits and supports to people who’ve been injured at work. These can include replacement of lost wages, health care (including rehabilitation, counselling, and medications), and, in certain circumstances, retraining.

Facts about the Workers’ Compensation Board

If you’ve been harmed by sexual harassment at work, you might think the WCB will help you. 

  • Maybe after you were harassed, you took time off work and so lost income.
  • Maybe the harassment damaged your mental health, and you ended up needing to spend money on medication for anxiety or depression.
  • Maybe the harassment had such an effect on you that you had to leave an industry and ended up needing to retrain for a new type of work in a different field. 

Those are the kinds of expenses—replacement of lost wages, medication costs, retraining costs—that the WCB often covers.

However, historically, the WCB has mostly handled claims related to physical injuries suffered by workers in male-dominated fields like construction, manufacturing, and uniform occupations like policing and firefighting. If you slip at work and break your ankle, or are struck by a falling object, or are injured in a fire or explosion: that is the kind of situation the WCB was designed for and has a lot of experience handling. 

But if the injury is to your mental health, the WCB only offers benefits and supports when you have suffered “psychological injury,” which is very narrowly defined. Realistically, it’s extremely unlikely that if you apply for mental stress benefits, you’ll be successful. The WCB states that “workload or work-related interpersonal incidents may be considered [for coverage], but must show highly aggressive, threatening or discriminatory behaviour over an extended period of time.” 

In the meantime, your options could include making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission or taking legal action. 

If you’re reading this article, we’re guessing you’ve been harassed and you’re thinking about it a lot. When we’ve interviewed people, they’ve described themselves as “obsessing” or “ruminating” about the harassment. Maybe that’s true for you.

We’re going to ask you to do something that may seem a little weird.

We’re going to ask you to pretend for a moment that the harassment never happened. Just put it out of your head.

Then take a couple of minutes and think about these questions. We’re not going to ask you to do anything with the answers. We’re just asking you to think.

  • What do you like about your current job, and what do you dislike?
  • When you think about yourself five or 10 years from now, what job do you hope you’ll have?
  • What plans do you have to get there?

Now, try asking yourself these questions:

  • What’s the obvious next step in my career?
  • If I got a really great promotion, something that would make my friends and family really proud, what would that job be?
  • In a complete fantasy world, where I could do anything, what’s a job that I might find incredibly satisfying, where other people might be surprised to see me in it?

Now take a minute to think about what kinds of jobs you like.

  • Do you like stability and security, or do you prefer novelty and fun and excitement?
  • Do you like a job that’s calm and steady, or do you prefer time pressure and a fast pace?
  • Do you like to work alone, or do you prefer being part of a team?
  • Do you want work–life balance, or is work your number one priority?
  • Do you want to feel like your work is making the world a better place, or do you want to be creative, solve challenging problems, make a lot of money, or have power and authority?

Why are we asking you these questions?

Because sexual harassment has a way of pulling people off track and making them forget their own goals.

It totally makes sense. You didn’t ask to be harassed, you weren’t expecting it, and you probably don’t have a plan for handling it. So it makes sense that it would be an “interrupting” kind of event, and you’d need to drop everything else to figure out how to handle it.

That’s okay and normal and fine, for a while. But there comes a point where you are going to want it to stop.

If the harasser can drag you off course and force you to spend tons of time thinking about them and how to handle the harassment—well, then we think the harasser kind of wins. You’re all tied up in knots and running around in circles and meanwhile they’re…totally fine.

We want you to win.

So we want to make this super clear.

The number one way to protect your career is to stay focused on your career.

That’s what we want for you.

How to protect your career if you’ve reported the harassment

It might feel hard to focus on your work while you’re being harassed. We get that. It is hard. So here are some tips.

If you’ve reported the harassment, as soon as you can afterward, try to find opportunities to talk with your boss about other things

It doesn’t really matter what you talk about. The point is to have some normal, ordinary conversations with your boss that are not about the harassment. Your goal is to show them that you’re the same person you were before you reported the harassment, so you can have a normal working relationship where they don’t feel awkward around you. So they can see you more like “Alex, my employee,” and less like “Alex, who’s created a huge problem for me and the company.”

Try to discourage other people from pigeonholing you as “that person who got sexually harassed”

You can develop some scripts for this. Like, “I don’t really want to talk or think about the harassment too much; let’s talk about something else.” Or “I reported the harassment and now for me it’s basically over. It’s between him and the company now, it’s got nothing to do with me.” Or “To me, getting harassed was just a bad thing that happened, like a car crash or getting robbed. I would really like to just move on.”

Try to discourage people from imagining the situation as a personal dispute between you and the harasser

You can develop scripts for this too. Like, “Before this happened, I hardly knew that guy. I barely even knew his name.” Or “I have no idea why someone would do something like that. I was just doing my job and then, out of nowhere, he did that. It’s so weird.” Or “I actually don’t really have an opinion on what the company should do about him. I’m not a harassment expert or an HR person, so how would I know?”

Try to refocus people on thinking about you as a worker, an employee, with goals and hopes and dreams

This is really important. Try to seek out people who you think might be able to help you with your career, either at your job or outside it. Be open with them about your hopes and dreams for your work. Encourage them to tell you about opportunities, to recommend you for jobs, to tell other people you’re great. Other people can help your career a lot, but they can’t do it unless they know what you want.

That’s our advice.

If none of it is working and things are going badly for you, then we want to seriously advise you to consider job hunting. Sometimes getting a new job is the best way to protect your career—and if that’s true for you, it’s better to start looking early, before your career gets too messed up.

How to protect your career if you stay at work and don’t report

This one’s easy. If you stay at work and don’t report, your career may not get damaged at all.

In this scenario, the harassment eventually stops, or you figure out ways to shut it down or safely ignore it. You don’t need to change anything significant about your work to stay safe. Nobody gossips about you. And eventually you stop thinking about the whole thing.

Things often do play out this way, and if it’s what happens for you, that’s great. But you can’t count on it.

What sometimes actually happens instead is that you think you’re coping okay, but in reality the harassment is taking up a ton of your time and emotional energy. You’re “fine” (you’re not a mess, you’re surviving), but you just don’t have the time and energy you used to have for your work, and so you do less well at it.

Or, you’re not fine at all. The harassment is grinding you down and messing with your mental health. It happens so slowly that you don’t even notice it. But one day you realize you’re actually kind of a mess.

You don’t want that. So you need to keep an eye on yourself.

We recommend you check in on yourself. You can do it every day, or once a week. Maybe set a calendar reminder. Once in a while, ask yourself these questions:

  • When was the last time I thought about the harassment?
  • When was the last time I did something differently because of the harassment?
  • Is the harassment making it harder for me to do my job?

If you don’t like the answers to those questions, it might be time to start job hunting.

How to protect your career if you quit your job

By now you know that we think quitting your job might be a good way to protect your career.

It’s not fair and you shouldn’t have to do it, but realistically, sometimes it’s the best decision.

The four types of high-harassment workplaces

Researchers have found there are four types of work environments where sexual and gender-based harassment is most common.

Workplaces where most of the workers are men

These are sometimes called “majority-male” workplaces or “male-dominant” workplaces. And there are a lot of them, especially in industries like science and technology, construction and the trades, transportation and warehousing, mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, fisheries and forestry, and policing and the military. In these workplaces, the harassment is most likely to be what experts call “hostility based.” That means that some people think you don’t belong in their workplace or industry and are harassing you to force you out.

Workplaces where most of the clients or customers are men

This is true in much of the hospitality industry (bartending, serving, hosting). It’s true for sex work. It’s true for some kinds of health-care and personal support work (PSW, nanny, cleaner, personal assistant), and for many jobs in sales, consulting, and business services. In this kind of work, the harassment is most likely to be what experts call “desire based,” which means that some people feel like it’s okay for them to behave in sexual ways with you, even if you don’t want them to.

Workplaces where most people are white (if you’re not)

For racialized people, it can be hard to know whether you’re being harassed for reasons related to your sex or gender, or because of your race. Often it’s both. If you’re racialized, a majority-white workplace could be a high-harassment environment for you. This kind of harassment can be either hostility based or desire based, or a mix of both.

Workplaces where most people aren’t queer (if you are)

If you’re queer, a high-harassment environment for you is any workplace where queer people make up just a tiny minority, or don’t seem present at all. This is especially true for you if you’re trans, and/or if people perceive you as anything other than male. This kind of harassment is usually hostility based. Some people are offended by your presence (or even your existence), and so they want to force you out, or force you to behave in a way they approve of.

What leads people to change their careers

If you’re being harassed at a workplace like the ones described above, and you’re trying to decide whether to change your whole career as a result, the first thing you need to know is that you’re not alone. What you’re experiencing is very, very common.

It’s pretty simple.

If someone’s getting harassed at work and can’t find a way to make it stop, they will usually consider quitting their job. If they think they’re just as likely to be harassed at their next job, that’s when people start considering a bigger change.

  • They want to be able to relax at work, rather than needing to always be on guard and suspicious.
  • They want to be physically and emotionally safe.
  • They want to be able to focus on their work, instead of being distracted by harassment.
  • They want to be around people they like and can be friendly with—or at least, to avoid people who are hostile or predatory.
  • They want to be treated with a basic level of respect.
  • They want their work to be judged on the basis of their actual performance.
  • They want normal opportunities to advance at work. To be praised, promoted, and make more money.
  • They want to be able to be themselves at work, rather than needing to hide or change parts of themselves to avoid harassment.

Here are some real-life stories of people who changed their careers to get away from harassment. Some of them we talked with ourselves, and some are from books or news articles. A lot of examples:

  • A female software engineer was sexually harassed for more than 10 years while working at big tech companies. She quit the industry and went to work in the non-profit sector.
  • A female welder was harassed on her first day on the job, and every day after that. After two years she quit, and now she makes glass art.
  • A nonbinary person held a bunch of different jobs for about a decade and was harassed at all of them. Today, they are self-employed and working alone, doing bicycle repair.
  • After she transitioned, an auditor at a big accounting firm started getting harassed a lot by her co-workers. She quit and took a job bookkeeping at a hotel with a largely-queer clientele.
  • A First Nation woman became a city councillor and then resigned because the job exposed her to so much racism and sexism. Today she’s an Indigenous advocate and artist.

How to decide if changing your career is right for you

It’s actually a pretty simple trade-off.

The research says that people who change their career to get out of high-harassment environments end up happier but poorer. It’s that simple.

  • They’re happier because they feel like they can be themselves at work, and they end up working with people they like a lot better than their previous co-workers.
  • They’re poorer because they often go through a period of being unemployed or underemployed, because sometimes they need to spend money to retrain for their new career, and because their new career pays less. (We explain more about that a little further down in this article.)

So it’s a pretty simple question. Can you afford to make less money in exchange for more happiness?

(Okay, it’s not actually 100% that simple. If you’re working in a low-paid job right now, it’s definitely possible to go back to school and get training and end up making more money in the end. That absolutely happens; it’s not even uncommon. But if you want more money and less harassment, that isn’t always easy to get.)

How to get started changing your career

The first and most important thing you need to know is don’t wait too long.

If you think you might want to change your career, get started early. It’s going to take a lot of planning and a lot of effort, and meanwhile every day you spend in a harassment-heavy industry is going to cost you—emotionally, and maybe even physically.

So you are going to want to start now.

Here are some things to think about:

Trust your own instincts

We want to encourage you to trust your own instincts. If you think it’s right to leave, you are correct. We’re saying this because other people—your friends, your family, professional contacts—may encourage you to stay. If they do, you can ignore them. They’re not in your shoes and they don’t know what you’re experiencing. We urge you to trust yourself. You are the expert on you.

High-harassment industries pay more than low-harassment ones.

This is an important piece of information that a lot of people don’t know. Economists call it a wage premium, and it’s why practically everyone who switches their career to get away from harassment ends up making less money. If you’re considering a change, you need to know this. You should try to save as much money as much as you can now, before you quit. It’s also a good idea to start cutting back your expenses.

Consider independent contractor or consultant work

This is something a lot of people do. But researchers say that, for many people, this turns out to just be a stage that they pass through. Most people, five or so years later, are doing something completely different than what they were doing when they first got harassed.

Unemployment or underemployment is normal

A lot of people, once they quit a high-harassment industry, stumble around for a while before they figure out what they really want to do. It’s normal for people to be unemployed or underemployed for a year or two, or even more. This could easily happen to you. It’s another argument for saving money and doing a lot of planning before you quit.

High-harassment industries have higher status

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: The kinds of careers in which you’re likely to be harassed have higher status than harassment-free environments. Ugh, but it’s true. You might want to think about how much you—and your family and friends—care about status. If you care a lot, that might make your decisions harder.

Wanting to work alone is common

When people leave a high-harassment environment, it’s normal for them to go through a period where they don’t want to work with other people at all. Wanting to work alone, experts say, is a pretty common part of the healing process, and will probably naturally come to an end. If you find yourself wanting to work alone for a while, that’s normal, and it’s nothing to worry about.

Retraining is worth considering

Lots of people end up retraining for a new field. It’s worth thinking about whether you want to go back to school. Is there a particular field that’s always interested you? If you got some new skills, would that qualify you for work you might enjoy? You might feel like you’re too old to go back to school, or it would be too expensive. But if it puts you in a position where you’ll enjoy your work more, it’s definitely worth considering.

You might be happiest working with people like you

Researchers say that the people who end up healthiest and happiest after a career change are often those who move into an industry or field where they can work with people more like themselves. (Like, a trans woman working with other trans people, or a First Nation woman working with other Indigenous people.) If this is something you’re considering, it’s a really good idea to start building your network of people like you. Find out where they work and what they do. Ask if they like it. Ask how they got into it. Ask if there are any job openings.

Canada has a lot of laws aiming at protecting people who experience workplace sexual harassment. To know which ones apply to you, you need to know whether you are a provincially regulated worker or a federally regulated worker.

The vast majority of workers in Canada—about 93%—are covered under provincial laws. Those people are protected by the employment laws and human rights laws of the province or territory where they work. Most people are provincially regulated because everybody is provincially regulated by default, unless their industry has been officially designated as federal.

About 7% of Canadians work in federally regulated industries. Those people are protected by the Canada Labour Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act. Some people think that the Canada Labour Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act cover everybody in the country, but that’s not true. They only cover people who work in federally regulated industries.

What are the federally regulated industries?

There are two categories of workplaces that are federally regulated—the private and public sectors.

Federally regulated private sectors are:

  • banks, including authorized foreign banks
  • airports, air transportation (for example, Air Canada, WestJet)
  • interprovincial/international transportation (for example, railways, trucking companies, marine shipping, interprovincial buses)
  • fisheries
  • telephone, cable systems, and telegraph companies
  • television and radio broadcasting
  • uranium mining and processing
  • grain elevators
  • First Nation band councils (including certain community services on reserves)
  • Crown corporations (for example, Canada Post, Royal Canadian Mint)
  • private-sector firms and municipalities in Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut

Federally regulated public sectors are:

  • the federal public service
  • Parliament (Senate, House of Commons)

If you work in one of these sectors, you’re most likely a federally regulated worker. If you’re not sure, you can contact the federal Labour Program.

What legislation applies to federally regulated workers?

The Canada Labour Code

The Canada Labour Code covers all federally regulated workplaces. It sets out federal labour laws, and defines the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers in federally regulated workplaces. Federal workplace laws apply to all employers and workplaces that are the responsibility of the federal government.

Part II of the Canada Labour Code, Occupational Health and Safety, talks about harassment and violence in the workplace. The code defines workplace harassment and violence as “any action, conduct or comment, including of a sexual nature, that can reasonably be expected to cause offence, humiliation or other physical or psychological injury or illness to an employee, including any prescribed action, conduct or comment.”

This definition includes sexual harassment, sexual violence, and domestic violence in the workplace.

The Canadian Human Rights Act

The Canadian Human Rights Act protects people who are employed or getting services in workplaces under federal power from discrimination. These workplaces are:

  • the federal government
  • First Nations governments
  • Federally regulated private sectors

Under the Canadian Human Rights Act, it’s against the law for a federal service provider or employer to discriminate on the grounds of:

  • race
  • national or ethnic origin
  • colour
  • religion
  • age
  • sex
  • sexual orientation
  • gender identity or expression
  • marital status
  • family status
  • genetic characteristics
  • disability
  • having been pardoned of a criminal conviction

We can’t say this enough. Seriously, we can’t.

You need to build a support network to help you get through this.

When people look back years later, they all say the same thing: their support network was the thing that helped them the most.

Talk with people you can trust to listen and support you

Why do this?

It will help you emotionally process what’s happening. Sexual harassment can seriously mess you up. It helps to talk with other people.

But here’s something that may surprise you. Experts say the best people to talk with aren’t necessarily the ones you’re closest with.

What you’re looking for is someone to listen to you and sympathize with you. Sometimes, the people you’re closest to can’t do that. They might get mad or be overprotective. They might tell you what to do, or insist they’re going to do something. They might have strong opinions, and they might be wrong.

Experts say it’s best to talk with people who will give you 100% sympathy and kindness, and let you make your own decisions.

Don’t talk with people at work (at least, not right away)

Why not?

People at your work can be an important source of sympathy and information. They can also act as witnesses, if you end up reporting.

But experts say it makes sense to wait a little before talking with your co-workers.

There are a couple of reasons why:

  • If you tell someone at work what’s happening to you, they might report it and trigger a formal investigation. Even a co-worker could do that. If you’re not sure you want an investigation, it makes sense to avoid triggering one by accident.
  • They may tell other people. That can lead to you being gossiped about and judged. You could end up getting labelled as “a problem” or “difficult to work with.”
  • They may side with the harasser and believe that you are misunderstanding or exaggerating what’s happening. Experts say that, before you risk talking with people who might react badly, it’s better to first spend some time thinking and talking with people you know will be sympathetic.

Find additional sources for support, even if your family and friends are pretty solid

You might be surprised to hear that experts say it’s a good idea to call a domestic violence hotline or a rape hotline or a mental health crisis line.

That may seem like a strange suggestion, because what you’re experiencing isn’t domestic violence or rape, and you may not feel like you’re in crisis. You may feel like reaching out to that kind of support is overkill, and you’d be taking up services from people who need them more than you do.

But the experts say it’s a good idea anyway. They say it makes sense for you to reach out to people who have been specially trained to provide support. To listen without judgment, to not gaslight or disbelieve you, and to connect you with other resources that might help.

Or, you could find somewhere online to talk with people.

There are lots of websites and online communities where people talk about their experiences of sexual harassment and get support from one another. For example, there are some pretty good forums on Reddit, like the sexual harassment subreddit, the subreddit offering support for survivors of sexual assault, and the rape subreddit. Just be aware that most people on Reddit are Americans, and so any legal or HR advice they give you might not be true for Canada.

Why should you seek out support from these places? Experts say that, if you look for advice and support only from your family and friends, that won’t necessarily go well for you. They can feel helpless and overwhelmed, and that can end up straining your relationship and adding more stress to your life.

It’s better, experts say, to get advice and support from people who are voluntarily offering it, and especially from people who have personal experience or professional expertise. That’s what will help you the most.

If you’re a federally regulated worker and you’re injured or become ill because of something that happened at work, you fall under the Government Employees Compensation Act.

How workers comp works if you’re a federally regulated worker

Applying for workers comp for federally regulated workers is a two-step process. Rather than having its own system, the government uses provincial workers compensation agencies—for example, in Ontario, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board—to provide services for its workers. So you first make your claim through the Labour Program’s Federal Workers’ Compensation Service at Employment and Social Development Canada. The ESDC office then sends your claim to the appropriate provincial authority.

Only some provinces and territories accept claims for harm to mental health due to harassment or bullying.

 Find out how to apply for workers comp in your province or territory.

[Whistleblowing is] the reporting by employees and former employees of illegal, unethical, and otherwise inappropriate conduct to someone who has the power to take corrective action.

Terance D. Miethe, Whistleblowing at Work: Tough Choices in Exposing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse on the Job, Avalon Publishing, 1999.

For it to count as whistleblowing, you need to be going outside of your own chain of command. If you tell your boss or HR, that’s not whistleblowing; that’s just reporting.

To count as whistleblowing, you need to be blowing the whistle to somebody outside your own organization. That means telling your story publicly, by talking on social media or with a journalist, or reporting it to a body that oversees your employer, like a board of directors or a regulator or industry association.

To count as whistleblowing, experts say the whistleblower needs to be trying to prevent harm to other people, not just themselves. Usually with whistleblowing that harm is environmental or health related (like, if a company is releasing poisons into the air or water), financial (like, if a bank is overcharging customers), and/or legal (like, if a government is spying on its own citizens).

Some experts believe that reporting harassment doesn’t count as whistleblowing, because they think people report harassment to prevent harm to themselves, not others. We disagree. Practically everybody who reports harassment is motivated at least in part by wanting to prevent other people from being harassed. And so we believe that reporting harassment counts as whistleblowing.

Why people blow the whistle on sexual harassment

People who blow the whistle are usually motivated by a mix of moral outrage and a desire to protect others. Here are the kinds of things whistleblowers tend to be thinking when they blow the whistle:

  • Something bad is happening.
  • People are getting hurt.
  • The people who are supposed to fix the problem aren’t living up to their responsibilities.
  • What’s happening is being hidden or covered up.
  • It has been going on for too long and it needs to stop.
  • The public deserves to know the truth and people need to be held accountable.
  • I cannot stand to be associated with this.
  • I cannot live with myself if I am silent about this.

Here are some quotes from real people who blew the whistle, talking about why they did it.

This is far too rampant and I’m fucking tired of it. This wasn’t just about me, it was about everyone in the industry who faces this regularly.

In 2017, a bartender and social media manager at the Needle Vinyl Tavern in Edmonton quit her job and made a Facebook post complaining that one of the bar’s co-owners had sexually harassed her.

My fight was never about just me. My main goal was to make positive changes in the workplace so this would not happen to others.

In 2019, a former corrections officer complained to the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, saying he had endured years of harassment by his co-workers at the Manitoba Youth Centre because he is gay.

My intention all along was to speak out against harassment for my own protection, to make the workplace better and safer.

In 2007, a former firefighter complained to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, saying she had endured years of abusive and demeaning treatment from her co-workers because she is a woman.

I want to make sure that by standing up for myself, I may be standing up for those who may be gay or trans or lesbian or bisexual in our community who feel they don’t have a voice or who feel that they are oppressed and can’t speak up.

In 2019, an executive member of the New Waterford Nova Scotia Royal Canadian Legion filed a complaint with the legion and the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, saying he was the subject of taunts and homophobic slurs because he is gay.

What happens to people who blow the whistle

“To run up against the organization,” C. Fred Alford writes in his book about whistleblowers, “is to risk obliteration.”

Here’s what experts say happens to whistleblowers:

  • It’s very common for them to get fired.
  • If they don’t get fired, they get sidelined and shut out at work.
  • Their co-workers turn against them.
  • They are often blacklisted out of their industry.
  • Their involvement can drag on for years, and take way more time and money than they expected.
  • Their families get mad at them for putting a “cause” ahead of the family, and their primary relationship—spouse, partner—often breaks down.
  • Their mental health suffers, often seriously. Many end up suffering from depression or alcoholism. Many consider suicide.
  • They suffer both short-term and long-term financial problems.
  • They end up taking a job that’s significantly worse than the one they used to have.

Here, in their own words, is what people say happened to them after they blew the whistle.

When you blow the whistle, you become poison to the company. Your presence makes them sick.

Unnamed whistleblower, as quoted in Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, by C. Fred Alford.

Since I complained the men gather and talk about me and say the ‘little bitch’ won’t be happy till someone is fired.

A heavy equipment operator at a fly-in camp at the Mary River Mine in Nunavut complaining about sexual harassment in 2018.

I was expecting retribution within the unit. I wasn’t expecting that when it got to the senior executive arm of the military, when the higher levels stepped in, that they wouldn’t support me.

A former civilian employee at the Department of National Defence filed a grievance reporting sexual and racial harassment and was suspended and later fired.

It’s taken years and it’s taken our entire livelihood. I’ve already spent nearly $60,000 out of pocket for a human rights tribunal that hasn’t even started.

A former Toronto police officer talking about the financial and human cost of pursuing complaints against her fellow officers before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

If you blow the whistle, there’s a chance you could get sued for defamation

If you say bad things about a person or a business, they might sue you for defamation. “Defamation” is a legal term. It describes what it’s called when someone publicly says something that isn’t true and that hurts the other person’s or company’s reputation.

Anybody can file a defamation case. They don’t have to have a good case; they just need enough money to pay a lawyer.

Do whistleblowers regret blowing the whistle?

I think I was crazy to blow the whistle. Only I don’t think I ever had a choice. It was speak up or stroke out.

Whistleblower John Brown, as quoted in Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, by C. Fred Alford

If a whistleblower could go back in time, knowing exactly how everything would play out, would they still blow the whistle? Researchers say yes. Practically all whistleblowers say they would blow the whistle all over again, even if they knew exactly what would happen afterward.

That doesn’t mean they don’t regret it. Many do. The losses they’ve suffered are serious.

So why would they do it again? The experts say it’s because whistleblowers strongly believe in duty and responsibility. They just could not live with themselves, knowing about an injustice that was hurting people and was being ignored, if they didn’t at least try to do something about it.

That is part of why whistleblowing is so hard on people. Because they’re idealistic, and what happens afterward causes them to lose faith in their bosses, their co-workers, their family and friends, and the justice system.

From C. Fred Alford’s book Whistleblowers, here is a list of what Alford says whistleblowers believed before they blew the whistle, which they had to let go of afterward:

  • That law and justice can be relied upon.
  • That the individual will not be sacrificed for the sake of the group.
  • That your friends will be loyal even if your co-workers aren’t.
  • That the organization is not fundamentally immoral.
  • That someone, somewhere, who is in charge knows, cares, and will do the right thing.
  • That the truth matters, and someone will want to know it.
  • That if one is right and persistent, things will turn out all right in the end.
  • That even if they don’t turn out all right, other people will know and understand.
  • That the family is a haven in a heartless world, and your spouse and children will not abandon you.

How to decide whether to blow the whistle

We can’t tell you whether blowing the whistle is right for you. It’s a very personal decision.

Here’s what we can say.

Blowing the whistle is unlikely to get you justice.

But for some people blowing the whistle is the right answer anyway.

If you’re the kind of person who would blow the whistle, you probably know it already. If you’re not sure, ask yourself how you feel about these statements:

It’s important to tell the truth.
It’s important to keep your promises.
I have a strong sense of personal responsibility.
The real test of character is doing the right thing even when it’s hard.
To remain silent in the face of injustice is cowardly.
I couldn’t live with myself if I behaved without honour.
I couldn’t bear to associate with people who don’t live up to their obligations.
Privilege comes with responsibility, and responsibility requires accountability.
Integrity means doing the right thing, even if you end up being punished for it.
Important

This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you. 

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and what it does

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) is an arm’s-length agency of the provincial government where you can file a formal complaint saying you’ve been sexually harassed. One law that protects you from discrimination is the Ontario Human Rights Code. Sexual harassment under the code is a type of discrimination based on sex. If your complaint falls within the commission’s jurisdiction, it will accept it for processing.

When you think about filing a complaint, you might imagine a process that ends in an adjudicator definitively ruling that what happened to you was either right or wrong. But in reality, that almost never happens. In 2022-23, almost half of the roughly 3,400 cases the OHRT closed were dismissed by the tribunal; of the ones that weren’t, only 33 were decided on their merits, and in about half of those no discrimination was found. The majority of cases are settled through mediation, not by an adjudicator.

We’re not saying don’t make a complaint to the tribunal, but it’s very unlikely the outcome will be a public acknowledgement of the fact that you were harassed. If you think you would be satisfied with a private settlement, which could involve such things as money to compensate you for the harm you experienced, an apology or a job reference, then having your complaint mediated could be right for you.

Facts about the HRTO

  • Every year, about 550 people file a complaint with the tribunal saying they have been discriminated against or harassed on the basis of their sex.
  • Most of the complaints filed with the HRTO never get formally decided by the tribunal. If they’re not settled through mediation, almost 80% are abandoned before a trial for reasons that have to do the process taking so long—usually many years. 
  • When the tribunal decides that someone was discriminated against or harassed, it sometimes gives them an award of money as compensation for financial losses they suffered or the hurt and loss of dignity they experienced. There is technically no limit to the amount of money the tribunal could award, but it is seldom over $30,000.
  • Sources: Tribunals Ontario 2022-23 Annual Report; Tribunal Watch; Human Rights Legal Support Centre

Why consider filing a complaint with the tribunal

If you decide to file a complaint with the tribunal, here are a few things you may get out of the process:

  • It could be a chance to tell the harasser what they did is not okay.
  • You might get back money you lost because of the harassment—maybe you didn’t get a special project or a promotion, or were fired.
  • You might get your job back or get a reference for a new one.
  • You could request that your workplace make changes that would affect everyone there, not just you, like improving employee policies and training around sexual harassment.
  • It is possible you might get some money to recognize the emotional harm you suffered from the harassment.

How to make a complaint to the tribunal

To file a complaint for yourself you must complete Form 1. If someone like a lawyer or paralegal is filing for you, they should fill out Form 1G. The tribunal has a very comprehensive applicant’s guide to filing an application that will be useful, though a bit technical. A better option might be the information on the Human Rights Legal Support Centre website. 

The HRLSC, which is funded by the Ontario government and is not part of the tribunal, can help you with the tribunal process. Start with its online questionnaire, which lets you figure out whether you’ve been discriminated against under the Ontario Human Rights Code. If it seems that you have, the HRLSC can give you guidance on completing and filing an application and provide you with legal advice and assistance; sometimes this can include assigning you a lawyer to represent you at mediation or a hearing.

You can file an application against anybody who is sexually harassing you at work—your employer, a co-worker, a supervisor, a customer, or a contractor. In your application, you can also name the company or organization you were or are working for. Even if your employer is not the one who’s harassing you, they have to protect you from sexual harassment and a harassing environment. See How to report sexual harassment to your employer.

Will the tribunal accept your application?

  • You have one year from when the harassment happened to file your application with the tribunal. If the harassment happened more than once, the deadline is one year from the last incident of harassment. 
  • You can file a complaint with the commission if you work in Ontario or if the harassment happened in Ontario, but not if you work at a federally regulated workplace. See Am I a federally regulated worker? (And why it matters.)
  • You’re covered if you’re unionized or non-unionized, temporary or permanent, an independent contractor, or undocumented.
  • Even if the harassment happened outside Ontario, the tribunal may take your case if you work for an Ontario-regulated employer and you’re based in Ontario—for example, if the harassment happened while you were on a business trip outside of the province.
  • After you submit your application, the tribunal might decide that the harassment you faced doesn’t relate to a ground of discrimination under the code. In that case, your application will not proceed.

How mediation works

While both you and the respondent—the person your complaint is about—will be encouraged to participate in mediation, no one can be forced to do this. It involves you and the respondent finding a solution to your complaint—something you both agree to.

If you agree to the process, the tribunal will assign you a mediator. Mediators are experts in dispute resolution and human rights law who listen to you and the respondent and work with both of you to come to a settlement. They’re not supposed to pick a side, and they aren’t supposed to favour either you or the respondent. They may explain to you why your case is weak or strong, but they won’t make a decision about whether your complaint is justified. Their goal is to try to reach a solution that both parties can agree to, so your case doesn’t have to go to a hearing. The purpose of this process is not to determine whether you were sexually harassed according to the Human Rights Act. 

The mediator will not tell you what to do but they can tell you the strengths and weaknesses of your case. This can help you decide on a realistic settlement goal or what the outcome might be if you choose to go a hearing.

It can take five months or more from the time you and the respondent agree to mediation for a meeting to be scheduled. When that happens, it will probably be conducted electronically. 

For more information

The HRTO website includes a detailed guide to mediation. You’ll also find how-to guides about preparing for the mediation and hearing processes on the Human Rights Legal Support Centre site. 

Pros and cons of mediation

  • The mediation process is free.
  • Many people participate in mediation without a lawyer or paralegal.
  • Mediation can be less stressful and simpler than a hearing. It doesn’t involve gathering evidence, calling witnesses, or testifying.
  • You are the one to decide what you will accept from the respondent to make up for the harm they caused.
  • Reaching a settlement is usually faster than a hearing, which could take years to happen.
  • More creativity is possible in mediation. For example, you can’t ask for an apology in a hearing.
  • Everything you say is considered confidential, or “without prejudice”—it can’t be used against you later.
  • There is no risk in participating in mediation. If it fails, you still may have the option of a hearing.
  • Mediation doesn’t give you a chance to publicly say what happened to you or be told that it was wrong.
  • You may not be able to share details of any mediated settlement you reach if the settlement you agreed to includes a confidentiality clause—in that situation you must sign a non-disclosure agreement
  • You may not get everything you ask for—you have to be ready to compromise. 

What you might ask for

Money to compensate you for:

  • The harm to your dignity, feelings, and self-respect.
  • Lost wages.
  • The cost of counselling sessions you’ve needed and/or money to cover future counselling.

Besides money:

  • An apology.
  • Your job back or a reference letter for a new one.
  • A change at the workplace, like including a sexual harassment section in the policies handbook.
  • Your employer having to take a course about preventing and dealing with sexual harassment. 
  • A donation to a charity of your choice as a way of saying sorry.

What are you likely to get?

Details of mediated settlements are private. However, you’ll find brief descriptions of some real-life examples on the Human Rights Legal Support Centre site. In a number of those cases the agreement didn’t involve money at all; instead, the respondents were ordered to do things like take human rights training or create a human rights policy that all managers would have to be trained about. Where there was a financial settlement, no amount was shown. But the types of monetary awards when sexual harassment cases are decided at hearings are a guide. The range is really wide: from $10,000 to $200,000. However, there aren’t very many big awards, and they happen when the harassment was particularly bad and went on for a long time. 

Beyond mediation

If you or the respondent chooses not to participate in mediation or the process fails, it’s possible your case will go to a hearing. First, though, there will be a preliminary hearing where an adjudicator decides whether your complaint can go forward. Many complaints are dismissed at this stage because people have abandoned them.

This happens for several reasons that have to do with the really long time it takes for complaints to reach the hearing stage—if they do at all. 

  • Sometimes people withdraw their complaint because years have passed, and they decide it’s no longer worth pursuing. 
  • Sometimes they decide they want to move on with their lives after such a long delay or they don’t want to relive the harassment.
  • Sometimes the conditions they wanted changed are no longer the same as they were when the harassment happened: Maybe the person who harassed them has left the workplace or the business has changed hands.
  • Sometimes, after years of delay, they suddenly get a notice asking them to do something about their case and they don’t have enough time to respond. This is particularly likely to happen when people don’t have legal help.

Pros and cons of your case being decided at a hearing

  • The tribunal has expertise in harassment. All it does is handle complaints of discrimination, including harassment.
  • The tribunal has the power to say that, yes, you were harassed, and that what happened to you was wrong.
  • The tribunal can order many different remedies. It can award you money. If you were fired or had to quit because of the harassment, it can order your employer to give you your job back. It can order your employer to make a donation to a charity, or to provide anti-harassment training.
  • If you go to civil court instead of the tribunal, you might end up having to pay the other party’s legal costs if you lose your case. With the tribunal process that can’t happen. You will never end up needing to pay the other party’s legal costs.
  • It can take years for a hearing to be held.
  • If you hire a lawyer to represent you, that will be expensive. If you don’t hire a lawyer, your chances of success are much lower. People who represent themselves at the tribunal are less likely to have their complaints found justified.
  • Very few people end up being told by the tribunal that they were harassed and what happened to them was wrong. Tribunal data show that of all the cases that go through the tribunal process, less than 2% end up with the tribunal having a hearing and finding in favour of the person who was harassed. 
  • Tribunal financial awards are usually fairly small. There is technically no limit to the amount of money the tribunal could award you, but awards are generally under $30,000. The amount of an award is affected by how severe the harassment was and how long it went on. And remember, with most tribunal cases, people don’t end up receiving any money at all.
  • If you choose the tribunal process, you may close the door to other legal options.
  • Even if the tribunal awards you money or other things, that doesn’t mean you will necessarily get them. It can be hard to force your employer or the harasser to give you everything the tribunal ordered, or what you agreed to in mediation.
  • Like in any legal process, your opponents will try to undermine your credibility and make you look bad. You could end up feeling disbelieved and unsupported.
  • Some psychologists believe it’s a bad idea for people who have experienced sexual harassment to get involved in any legal process. They say legal processes can slow down your ability to heal emotionally from what happened to you, because they keep you focused on the past. These experts believe that it can be healthier for the person who experienced harassment to put the past behind them and focus on their present and future.

If your case goes ahead

You can find out more about the preparing for a hearing on the Human Rights Legal Support Centre’s website. 

This helpful video from the tribunal illustrates what happens at a hearing.

While theoretically it is possible to proceed with a complaint representing yourself, this is very challenging, time consuming, and potentially harmful to your mental health. Your chances of success are much greater with legal help.

Here are some places that offer free or lower-cost legal services:

  • The HRLSC provides free legal help and support to people throughout Ontario who have been discriminated against, including those who have been sexually harassed. It offers services in 140 languages, including Cree, Oji-Cree, Mohawk, and Ojibway. It can help with applications to the Human Rights Tribunal and may be able to assist with representation at the tribunal and other aspects of the process, though this is not guaranteed. The type of assistance that the HRLSC will be able to give you is decided on a case-by-case basis. 
  • Legal Aid Ontario funds over 70 community and specialty legal clinics, many of which provide employment law services. These can include assisting with complaints to the tribunal, including complaints relating to workplace sexual harassment. The specialty clinics serve Toronto clients based on their identity—Aboriginal Legal Services, the Black Legal Action Centre, Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples, for example. Legal Aid is only for those with low incomes; in 2024, the maximum income for one person to access clinic services was just under $23,000. Find a legal clinic here.
  • Pro Bono Ontario has a legal advice hotline. The lawyers there can help you determine what your legal issues are and aid you in drafting letters and basic legal documents. They may also be able to refer you to pro bono and other lawyers; the pro bono service is dependent on your income level.
  • The Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic assists low- and middle-income women-identified and non-binary people who have experienced violence. It has lawyers who can give you advice about your legal options if you have been sexually assaulted or harassed. The clinic’s #AndMeToo project is for marginalized women who have been sexually harassed at work.
  • JusticeNet is a not-for-profit service for those whose income is too high to qualify for legal aid but too low to afford regular legal fees. To qualify you must have a net family income under $70,000, or $90,000 if there are three or more people in your family, and be experiencing financial difficulties. Participating lawyers’ reduced rates vary depending on your family size and income.
  • 211 Ontario is a free and confidential 24/7 phone and text service that connects individuals to services in the province. You can call or text 2-1-1 to be connected with trained professionals to help find support services.
  • Your workplace union, association, or employee assistance program may be able to help you find legal services or cover part of your legal fees.

A “whisper network” is what it’s called when people quietly, privately, warn one another about other people who are dangerous.

A whisper network is different from a report or complaint, because it deliberately avoids people in positions of authority.

You can whisper about somebody and report them, or you can whisper first and report later, or you can do one and not the other. They’re totally separate things.

How whisper networks work

Whisper networks have been around forever. Here’s how they work.

Someone gets harassed. They tell one or more friends. Those people tell other people. Gradually, the harasser gets a reputation and people learn to avoid them.

Some whisper networks are centred around a single workplace. In those, the warnings are usually verbal.

Some are centred around an entire industry. In those, the warnings might be digital. Here are some examples of digital whisper networks:

  • In the U.K., women working in and around parliament made a group chat that they used to warn one another about politicians and other parliamentary workers who had harassed them.
  • In the U.S., women working in journalism made a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men,” where they shared stories of men working in the media who had harassed them. 
  • Sex workers have been collecting and publishing “bad date” reports for decades, warning one another about violent or dangerous clients. Those reports used to be printed on paper, but now they are usually posted online or shared by email.

The three big problems with whisper networks

Whisper networks don’t reach everybody

To warn somebody, you have to trust them, at least a little. (Because they could tell the harasser or your bosses, and that might get you in trouble.) That means people tend to whisper only with people they already know and trust.

So people who aren’t socially connected are the least likely to be warned. That’s bad, because they are also the people most likely to be harassed.

People left out of whisper networks tend to be:

  • new to the workplace
  • new to the industry
  • younger than everybody else
  • racialized, queer, or have a disability
  • neurodivergent, especially if they have autism
  • not very socially connected
  • not fluent in the majority workplace language

Whisper networks do nothing to make the harasser stop harassing people

They make it possible for some people to avoid harassment. But they don’t stop the harasser from trying to harass people, and they don’t do anything to punish the harasser or remove them from the workplace.

Because of that, a lot of people are critical of whisper networks. But we’re not. Stopping a harasser is not what a whisper network is for. A whisper network is purely for warning people. It doesn’t stop anybody from reporting or taking any other kind of action.

Whisper networks can get you in legal trouble

This is less likely to happen with a verbal network, and more likely to happen with one that leaves an evidence trail, like text messages or social media posts.

If you say someone is a harasser, or did some awful thing, it’s possible that they will sue you for defamation. “Defamation” is a legal term. It describes what it’s called when someone publicly says something about somebody else that isn’t true and that hurts the other person’s reputation. It can be something published, which is often called “libel,” or something spoken—in some parts of the country, this is called “slander.”

Being sued for defamation doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. Defamation lawsuits are getting more common than they used to be because today there is more likely to be a digital trail of the things we say and share.

Read more about defamation in our article about going public.

How to use whisper networks to protect yourself and other people

Here are five tips for making your whisper network work as well as possible.

Recognize a warning when you get one

Sometimes a warning is direct, like this:

“Jacob is a sexual predator. People have been complaining about him for years, but nobody stops him.”

But it’s much more common for them to be indirect, like this:

“Have you met Ryan? You’re gonna want to brace yourself. He’s a very friendly guy.”

Or this:

“I like Dave a lot. But I steer clear of him when he’s been drinking.”

Or this:

“Alain seems really into you. Ha ha. Be careful!”

People will practically never tell you flat out that someone is a harasser.

That’s because they’re afraid they’ll get in trouble. So instead of telling you directly, they will hint.

We’re going to dig into this a little, because some people have trouble recognizing this kind of hinting, and we don’t want you to miss it.

Here’s how to tell if someone is warning you:

  • They’ll probably do it when the two of you are alone together.
  • They probably won’t directly say that the person is a harasser. Instead they may use language that, if you quote them, won’t sound too bad. Like “flirty” or “old school.”
  • They usually won’t give you any facts. (They may know facts, but not tell them to you.) Instead they may say things that are vague and general, like “Kevin has a reputation” or “Everybody knows about Sylvain.”
  • They may talk about how much they like or admire the person they’re warning you about. You can ignore that part. They’re just doing it to protect themselves in case you tell people what they said.
  • Somewhere in what they say, maybe very buried, they will tell you to stay away from a person or group of people. That’s the important part.

A good rule of thumb is that, if someone is taking the time to warn you, then you should take them seriously, even if their tone and manner don’t seem very serious.

Thank the person who warned you

The person who warned you is taking a risk. They’re doing you a favour. You should thank them, so they know you understand what’s happening and won’t report them to the harasser or your boss.

Contribute your own warnings to the network

The more people who participate in a whisper network, the better it works.

People often hesitate to share information with the whisper network because they don’t think what they know is important enough to be worth sharing. But that’s not the right way to think about it. Your little piece of information may not be important. But put together with other pieces, it might be.

Here’s something that happened to someone we know:

At a conference, a man and a woman had drinks together, and then he hit on her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. She told a friend, and that friend told her friends. Once everybody had compared notes, it turned out that the guy had behaved badly with women at conferences several times before. They told the conference organizer. She investigated, kicked the guy out, and banned him from future conferences.

The moral of this story: Don’t hesitate to share information. Harassers want you to be quiet. But you don’t need to be.

Bring new people into the network

This is really important! The bigger the network is, the more it can protect people.

It’s especially important to bring in people who are new to your workplace or industry, who are young, not fluent in the majority workplace language, racialized, queer, disabled, or neurodivergent, and people who are shy, timid, or antisocial.

These are the people most likely to get harassed, and they’re also the ones most likely to be left out of whisper networks. You can fix that, by bringing them in.

Consider shifting from whispering to reporting

If people aren’t reporting sexual harassment at your workplace (or in your industry), there’s probably a very good reason. We’re not here to push you to report if reporting doesn’t feel wise.

But, if someone is getting named as a harasser over and over again, then it’s probably worth considering whether it’s time to formally report.

You shouldn’t pressure other people to report, and you definitely shouldn’t report what happened to someone else without their permission.

But if you’re finding there’s a person in your circles who’s repeatedly harassing people, it’s worth having a conversation inside the network about whether it’s time to report them.

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