Report on Julie Payette reveals next to nothing

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The upshot of that unsatisfying review of the “toxic” work environment under former governor-general Julie Payette is that it took nearly $400,000 in pricey consulting fees to get to square one: establishing that employees felt harassed.

There was no real investigation there, only interviews without probing questions or attempts at corroboration. Consultants were paid to document what was pretty much already known just so that it could be shown to Ms. Payette, and persuade her to go.

Reporters, particularly the CBC’s Ashley Burke, had months before reported that the governor-general’s employees had said she had yelled at staff. The review, conducted by Ottawa workplace-conflict consultants Quintet Consulting Corp., said that too. Journalists had reported employees’ assertions that Ms. Payette belittled staff and humiliated them in front of others, and Quintet found employees who said so, too. Press reports cited Rideau Hall employees saying their workplace was toxic. Quintet found lots of that, too.

So here we are months later, and what we really got for the $393,367 paid to Quintet was a crowbar to pry Ms. Payette out of the governor-general’s chair.

It’s not that there’s no value in that. Maybe it was worth it to the federal government, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the mandarin assigned to deal with the G-G, who both wanted to show her a document that would persuade her to vacate Rideau Hall.

But there was no teachable moment, no public accounting of what happened or went wrong, and no real sign that there is a grip on how to deal with such issues.

There were reasons to do this report in a less-than-complete way. It was necessary to get someone besides journalists to document employees’ complaints. Trying to prove specific allegations would have taken longer, and probably bogged things down with lawyers.

Instead, the process was basically to ask 92 people about their experience at Rideau Hall and let them talk for an hour. The interviews were summarized, and a report was written.

Again, it served the purpose of prodding Ms. Payette to resign. But it didn’t teach us much. If you are a civil servant or somebody else wondering whether the things happening to you are toxic, too, it might have been useful to hear examples of what actually happened.

If there were new details in the report, they were blacked out in heavy redactions before it was released under the Access to Information Act.

The redactions, ostensibly to protect an individual’s personal information, are justifiable if they protect the identity of current and former employees who were promised confidentiality, although the report itself suggests such details are not included.

But one suspects that a lot of the details were withheld to keep them from the public, or possibly to protect Ms. Payette – and, for the record, information that relates to an official’s job functions doesn’t count as personal information under the Privacy Act.

There was a section on the fact that employees felt they couldn’t raise complaints about the workplace, but most of that was blacked out, too. The public should know why no one felt they could speak up. Was it in part because Mr. Trudeau’s government hired her friend, Assunta di Lorenzo, to run the office, a job that was previously held by a veteran senior civil servant?

In short, this report about complaints that led to an unprecedented viceregal resignation didn’t tell the public much.

After all this time, the rumours, the press reports, the $393,367 – the equivalent of roughly 2,300 hours at $150 an hour, plus tax – the government has only managed to document employees’ concerns. It’s kept a lot of them hidden. The lessons learned from this fiasco? None.

What now? The report’s section on “next steps” tells the government to thank Rideau Hall employees, commit to making things better, and to “address and plan to address reported concerns.” It offers no suggestions at all about what the plan should be.

Maybe just getting Ms. Payette to go made this report worth every penny to Mr. Trudeau, but the rest of us should expect to learn a little more.

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