VANCOUVER –
A CSIS officer’s accusations that she was repeatedly raped by a superior in agency vehicles triggered a harassment investigation, but also triggered an investigation into her that concluded the alleged attacks were a “misuse” of agency vehicles. agency on the part of the woman.
She is the same officer whose allegations of sexual assault in an article published by The Canadian Press prompted public promises of reform last year from David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
The officer said he was never told that he was the subject of an investigation, or that it was concluded that he had committed misconduct by using “service equipment” to carry out what the investigator’s report said was a “romantic relationship with a colleague”.
The woman said she believed the investigation was retaliation for her rape report, and only learned about the investigation this year, 10 months after its conclusion, when she made a freedom of information request for her personal information held by the service.
She said she was “absolutely not” in a consensual relationship with the other officer.
The five-page “management report” prepared by an outside party, which the officer provided to The Canadian Press, says they were retained by CSIS on Nov. 18, 2021 to investigate “allegations of misconduct against” the woman.
That was eight days after she formally complained to CSIS that she had been raped nine times by an officer decades her senior, who had been assigned to advise her on surveillance missions as her “route coach.”
The woman cannot be identified because of a law that prohibits the identification of undercover agents, but she is called “Jane Doe” in a previous lawsuit against the government.
The Canadian press first described his allegations last November.
She and another surveillance officer at the CSIS office in British Columbia said they were both sexually assaulted in service vehicles by the same senior officer while they were on assignments between July 2019 and spring 2021. Jane Doe said that on one occasion , a mission failed because its trainer broke. her out of a target’s surveillance to drive to a parking lot to rape her.
“This report is an incredible violation,” Jane Doe said of the investigation into her.
He called the management report “the exact definition of retaliation,” which he told an investigator in 2022 was his fear when he delayed reporting on the allegations. At the time, she said she believed she was being interviewed as part of an investigation into her alleged attacker, not herself.
Jane Doe said her complaint was the only reason CSIS became aware of her alleged misconduct.
“What would I have to gain by making up a false complaint to draw attention to me and all the things in the code of conduct that I apparently violated?” she asked.
“It doesn’t make any sense, so the fact that that report is allowed to exist shows that I didn’t have a fighting chance in hell,” he said of his attempts to get justice for his complaint.
Jane Doe said a federal labor relations official told her she was not told about the report because she was on leave when it was issued and CSIS believed it should focus on her well-being.
An email from the labor official on Tuesday, which Jane Doe shared with The Canadian Press, says the report was not “intentionally hidden.”
Jane Doe is currently on long-term disability leave due to being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
When asked about the investigation into the woman, CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam issued a statement saying: “Immediately upon learning of the allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior, CSIS promptly launched a third-party investigation.” “.
He said that in situations where it had been determined that “harassment, discrimination or misconduct” had occurred, a disciplinary committee would decide disciplinary action “up to and including dismissal from employment.”
Asked to confirm that the rape complainant had been investigated, Balsam said “the situation is complex and sensitive” and “it would be inappropriate for CSIS to comment further on specific labor relations issues.”
Matt Malone, an assistant professor of law at Thomson Rivers University who has handled hundreds of complaints as a workplace investigator, said Jane Doe’s treatment was “mind-blowing.”
Filing a workplace harassment complaint is a “protected activity,” Malone said, and complainants who become targets of investigations without their knowledge are in “a very vulnerable position.”
“They are not aware that their conduct could undermine the integrity of the investigation,” he said. “This raises a lot of difficult questions.”
Both Jane Doe and the other officer who said she was assaulted previously said they did not feel they could go to police because the CSIS Act prohibited identifying themselves or their alleged attacker as undercover officers, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. . The women, who are still employed by CSIS, said a flawed internal complaints process left victims vulnerable to retaliation.
When the women’s claims initially came to light last November, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called them “devastating” and said his government was following up “very directly.”
Days after the story was published, Vigneault called a public meeting for the more than 3,000 CSIS employees about the women’s allegations that he said left him “deeply troubled.” He told staff that the alleged rapist had left the service the day before the meeting and that he was ordering the “urgent” creation of an ombudsman’s office to handle labor problems “without fear of reprisals.”
Vigneault also said the agency would release annual public reports on harassment and wrongdoing at the agency.
There was no mention of Jane Doe being investigated.
The investigation made the agent nauseous
The outside investigator’s “final report” on Jane Doe is dated April 12, 2023, but she said she didn’t find out about it until February.
He said discovering the investigation made him “nausea.” When he first read that investigators had been hired to investigate his conduct eight days after his rape complaint, he thought it was a typo.
“I don’t know if they’ve been investigating me basically since I filed the complaint or if this was a reaction to the investigation,” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t know they were doing it, although he says he was.”
The misconduct report is heavily redacted. But it concludes that Jane Doe violated the service’s code of conduct due to “inappropriate use of service equipment while she was on duty” and withholding “information from management about a romantic relationship with a colleague.”
He quotes his alleged attacker as saying he “regrets that a consensual relationship resulted in inappropriate use of government (redacted) and time.”
The report says Jane Doe did not report the “relationship” out of “fear of retaliation,” and quotes her as saying she “was afraid of how it would affect my employment in the service, how it would affect my reputation and my ability.” continue working there and I was neither mentally nor emotionally in a position to accept what had happened.”
The report says his alleged violations of CSIS’s conduct policy “arose in the context of a harassment investigation.”
He told The Canadian Press that during his 2022 interview, the investigator did not ask him any details about the alleged sexual assaults, which he had documented in his complaint with dates, times and locations.
At that moment he thought that the researcher was being considerate.
“I even thanked her at the end for not asking because it was still something very new for me to talk about and I was very nervous and uncomfortable,” she said.
Now, realizing that she was being investigated, she felt as if she had been put in “a trap.”
The lack of details in that interview was “strange” because “there were so many things I didn’t want to know.”
“It was like he wasn’t asking, so he didn’t have to have the answer, so he didn’t have to include that in any of his findings, so the less he knows, the better,” he said.
He said the “evidence” the report relied on to conclude the relationship was consensual, including the other officer’s statements and photographs of the two together outside of work, were “lies.”
“So he and I were in a photograph together, a group photograph. Does that prove she wanted to have sex with him at work? she said.
Malone said whether an employer’s actions against a person who filed a complaint could be considered “retaliation” depended on many factors, including the time between the two actions or “temporal proximity.”
“Adverse actions following an employee complaint that occur within a short period of time could suggest that there is a motive for retaliation on the part of the employer,” he said. “In this case, temporal proximity is an important factor, because it is only a few days.”
Malone said it was standard practice to inform an employee if they were under investigation to allow them to respond. Jane Doe said she believed the service violated her own policy by not informing her.
Malone, who reviewed CSIS’s “conduct violations” policy, said he was “shocked” by what he called a “clear departure from its own policy.”
“But beyond that, it is a departure from due process and fair procedure,” he said.
The service’s policy says employees under investigation must be notified of the nature of the allegations against them, given an opportunity to respond, notified if they are found to be in noncompliance and given a copy of the report. Jane Doe said none of that happened.
“I can’t defend myself against something I know nothing about,” Jane Doe said.
The British Columbia Supreme Court dismissed Jane Doe’s lawsuit against the federal government, alleging constructive dismissal and seeking damages, in September 2023. It did not rule on her allegations, but concluded that she had not exhausted internal remedies. CSIS complaint.
He said he has now abandoned his plans to appeal and is exploring CSIS’s formal complaint procedures.
“It’s been my life for over two years now and the damage it has caused to my mental health and my career is obviously non-existent now, and I don’t see myself being able to get it back on track with this. hanging over my head,” he said.
“They just wear you down until you can’t take it anymore. “I’m sure I’m not the first and I’m sure I won’t be the last.”
The complaint from the second officer who says she was sexually assaulted has not received a response from CSIS.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 26, 2024.