A "Failed State" of Affairs
By Meera Seshadri
Fifty-one percent of harassment complaints within the Canadian federal government are directed at managers or supervisors.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-government-harassment-numbers-9.7109000
As Montreal labour lawyer Pascale Leroy notes, the public service is characterized by complex bureaucratic structures in which “there are so many processes, so many departments, that there is a poor understanding of everyone's roles and responsibilities when it comes to eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace.” This “diffusion of responsibility” – a theory developed in 1968 by psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley to explain how humans are unlikely to take action if they believe someone else will – often shapes how harassment prevention programming is approached. Rather than exploring and examining the conditions that produce harm, administrators and leadership emphasize procedural clarity and compliance.
Within the Canadian federal government, one of the most widely used training programs—WMT 101—is implemented across departments such as Global Affairs Canada, the Department of Public Safety, the Canada Border Services Agency, and the Treasury Board. Yet after reviewing the training materials, labour lawyer Geneviève Desmarais, who has more than 25 years of experience in workplace law, concluded that the information provided appears insufficient to meaningfully reduce incidents of harassment.
This critique highlights a broader limitation of compliance-based approaches to workplace training. Focusing primarily on employees’ formal roles and reporting obligations may clarify policy requirements, but it does little to address the structural and social drivers of harassment. From the perspective of Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986), behavior is shaped through the reciprocal interaction of individual beliefs, social norms, and institutional environments. Training that centers only on procedural compliance fails to intervene in these dynamics; understanding rules does not necessarily cultivate empathy, shift norms, or build the self-efficacy required for employees to challenge harmful behaviour.
Similarly, Black feminist scholarship on intersectionality, most notably articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and the Combahee River Collective in 1977, emphasizes that systems of power such as gender, race, disability, and class interact to shape who is most vulnerable to harm and whose experiences are believed or dismissed. Policies and training that avoid examining power relations risk obscuring these dynamics, reinforcing environments in which identity-based harm persists and responsibility for addressing it remains unevenly distributed.
This is where Soteria Solutions’ workplace harassment training intervenes differently. Rather than focusing solely on individual misconduct or compliance with policy, our curriculum is grounded in social cognitive and intersectional frameworks that examine how organizational culture, power hierarchies, and social identities shape behavior. Through participatory curriculum development, we analyze the specific dynamics, relationships, and institutional pressures unique to each workplace environment. This process emphasizes collective accountability, helping leaders and employees understand how their actions influence social norms, and building the confidence and skills necessary to interrupt harm in real time.
By integrating structural analysis with practical intervention strategies, Soteria Solutions moves beyond compliance toward prevention. Through sustained engagement, trust-building, and dialogue with organizational communities, our training supports the development of workplace cultures grounded in dignity, accountability, and shared responsibility at every level of the organization.
References:
Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989) "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989, Article 8.
Create & Preserve: Workplace Safety, Respect, & Equity
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