It's International Women's Month. Let's Talk about the Culture of Covering Up Rape, Abuse and Silencing of Women across Canada
Politicians talk about being tough on crime - especially violent crime - but despite being a violent crime, sexual assault isn't treated that way.
It’s International Women’s Month, and I am going to write about Canada’s horrific and ongoing record of covering up the abuse and rape of women, especially in the workplace.
I was a legislator in Manitoba for five years, and the leader of a political party.
In my work, we often dealt with people whose cases were horrific. The mistreatment and abuse of seniors, children, mental health crises, suicides, and institutional crimes - mistreatment of entire communities.
This means dealing with and hearing about an enormous amount of trauma.
There are true horror stories about seniors, children, Indigenous folks, people in poverty, workers and women, and the injustices that each have suffered is sickening.
I am in the unique position that I have spoken to people who have been hurt and who are afraid to speak up, as well as people who have spoken up and had their lives ruined by retaliation.
It’s clear that these are not isolated incidents. In fact, the reaction to people speaking up has been refined and perfected, because in organizations across Canada, authorities have looked the other way when it comes to heinous crimes, while the perpetrators and their organizations use their power to suppress and silence people who report.
Politics is often treated as gossip, or as a form of theatre, with various critics weighing in with spin, with people posturing or providing lip service.
Real tragedies are very seldom told. Lots of people don’t want to have their trauma played out in public. When you consider the viciousness and scorn that is the current tone of the political age, you can see why. Others are afraid to speak, while some are silenced.
Over and over, when people report, they are demoted and the perpetrator is promoted.
Manitoba is the province that is home to convicted serial rapist Peter Nygard. Nygard, a fashion mogul, was recently convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault in Toronto. He is still awaiting trial for charges in Quebec, one charge in Manitoba, and for extradition to the U.S.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/12/business/peter-nygard-trial-guilty/index.html
Here in Manitoba, 20 women came forward with accusations. Of those, Winnipeg Police recommended eight charges, but Manitoba Justice refused to move ahead on any of them.
Winnipeg Police Chief Danny Smyth said in a statement that their recent investigation involved working 15 files, interviewing 29 witnesses, including survivors, and compiling more than 1,600 documents.
To this day, Nygard has never been charged by Manitoba Justice.
Instead, the government of Manitoba had to hand cases to a Crown prosecutor from the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan to press charges for a crime allegedly committed in Manitoba.
There is an incredible reason for that - which I know because I played a role in getting Nygard charged.
This had a real impact on women who were coming forward. It was discouraging for those who had - but there were other women who had been prepared to come forward, who were now changing their minds, because they didn’t want to have their reputation publicly destroyed. In some cases, they had already been to the police in the past and had been ignored.
These “sister survivors” of Nygard brought a case before the Manitoba Law Society for professional misconduct, and on November 28, the lawyer was disciplined.
That day in the Manitoba Legislature, I asked on behalf of those survivors whether the Manitoba Government would launch an independent review into the Nygard cases. I asked three times over. No one was remotely prepared with an answer.
We had a press conference with the survivors, and it was over an hour on Zoom, and the stories they told were so raw, and the agony so palpable.
At essence, all of these violations against women and girls are based on the idea they their body is not their own.
And the sheer human horror of it is that someone else thinks they can do whatever they want to you. You are powerless to refuse it as it is happening. You are powerless to seek justice, because no court will hear you. If you speak up, you will be attacked and smeared. The media may be afraid to print it - and even if the media does print it, nothing may happen.
In addition to private violation, people have to endure public humiliation.
That is profound, crushing powerlessness. The kind that breaks people.
For people who undergo this, they’ve suffered a profound mental and spiritual wound, that is compounded by injustice and indifference.
Later that week, my colleague, MLA Cindy Lamoureux, repeated the question.
To the amazement of survivors, the government agreed.
To my knowledge - after searching the legislative Hansard - we are the only MLAs in the last 30 years ever to ask for a review of Nygard’s cases.
The Manitoba Government did not call an inquiry, but they did take the eight cases that had been recommended for prosecution by the Winnipeg Police Service, and they would refer it to a Crown Prosecutor in Saskatchewan.
The Saskatchewan Crown moved ahead with one set of charges.
So I heard about it, and I saw how hurt people were by it. I met people with PTSD from their abuse - people who were never the same.
And what was truly disturbing is that every time I heard a story where I thought things could not possibly get worse, they did.
The acts that are being committed are crimes. Hurtful, deliberate, criminal acts. When people talk about “toxic workplaces” or “direspectful workplace policies” it can be about dysfunctional workplaces and people treating each other horribly.
We are talking about violent crimes. If there were degrees to sexual assault, this would be first degree: deliberate and hurtful criminal sexual violation of a person who does not want to participate.
Actual assaults - people being punched, kicked and beaten. The workplace harassment could include threats, intimidation, putting others in danger, and humiliation. Threats to property, persons, people’s family.
We are talking about vile behaviour, and criminal behaviour, that is being minimized, and in some cases covered up entirely for years.
There is no question of it. We know it because of current investigations into Hockey Canada, and the Military, CSIS, and the RCMP.
So, how is it that it has been so hard to get action?
One is simply that it is “small-p” political: people and organizations are protecting themselves against the consequences of their own wrongdoing.
Certain crimes are so disgusting and so far outside the normal of what most of us experience that we have trouble processing the horror.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the allegations against Nygard detailed in a class action suit really are like something out of the writing of the Marquis de Sade.
You can read the amended statement of claim here. The court case alleges that:
Nygard used his international connections and “recruited, lured and enticed young, impressionable and often impoverished children and women, with cash payments and false promises of lucrative modelling opportunities to assault, rape and sodomize them.”
Again, is you are unaware of the gruesome details, it’s because they are so far outside the norm that most media outlets won’t publish them for reasons of indecency. It alleges that Nygard did:
“assault, sexually batter, molest, and/or sex traffic these children and women and, in many cases, with knowledge that they were younger than eighteen years old. Defendants knowingly benefited from, and received value for, their participation in the conspiracy and/or venture and the Nygard Companies knew, or should have known, that Nygard would rape, sexually assault, sexually batter, molest, and/or sex traffic Jane Does Nos. 1-57 and the other Class members—many of whom were under the age of eighteen.”
What Nygard is accused of is worse than what Jeffrey Epstein is accused of.
There are 57 complainants who came forward, several of whom alleged that they were attacked in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where charges had never been laid, however Nygard International has kept a database of over 7,500 women.
It is alleged that women and underaged girls were tracked in a “ComCor” database that was started in the 1980s:
Nygard kept a database of potential victims that was maintained by the Nygard Companies’ corporate information technology (“IT”) department on the corporate server (mostly maintained in the United States). By the mid-2000s, this database was confirmed to have contained information on over 7,500 underage girls and women…
The protocol for most “pamper party” guests who enter Nygard Cay [in the Bahamas] is that they must “register” with ComCor by completing a form requesting personal information and taking a headshot and a full-body shot, which is then added to the ComCor database.
… Nygard also has a permanent residence and office of the Nygard Companies located in Marina Del Rey, California. Similar to his Nygard Cay property, the Marina Del Rey property is gated with security and no one can leave without Nygard’s express permission.
243. Upon entrance to the Marina Del Rey property, all of Nygard’s guests are similarly registered with the Nygard Companies’ ComCor employees. They are required to provide their personal information, a full body shot, and head shot. This information is then saved to the a ComCor database that is located on the same server as the database used at Nygard Cay.
… The database contains information and pictures of more than 7,500 girls, dating back to 1987. The database is hosted on a corporate server and is maintained by the Nygard corporate IT department.
Nygard is alleged to have run a production line of abuse: systematic, and with legal and corporate tools to back him up, and he is alleged to have leveraged legal and corporate tools to suppress the information.
For example, he used his influence to prevent negative stories from being run. Because he was extremely wealthy and his plants in Manitoba employed thousands of people, he could threaten to shut down production and move it elsewhere.
In 1996, the Winnipeg Free Press, which is largest circulation newspaper in Manitoba - arguably, the province’s “paper of record” was going to print an investigative series about Nygard. After the first piece ran, the rest were suppressed.
The series was spiked by the publisher, who had been pressured to drop the case. As a consequence, the story of an employee saying that she had been raped by Nygard never made it to print.
At the same time, Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong also sought to interview Peter Nygard, as well as three women who had filed Human Rights Claims against the company, but the women could not speak because they had been silenced using NDAs.
The publisher of Winnipeg’s other major newspaper, the Winnipeg Sun, was a Nygard executive.
When Canada’s national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran an expose detailing some of Nygard’s behaviour - including interviews and leaked footage shot for his company, Nygard filed a private prosecution against the producers and reporters for the offence of criminal libel. The journalists could actually face jail time
CBC has been charged with publishing defamatory libel in the rare private criminal prosecution, which allows private individuals — without the help of police or Crown attorneys — to bring criminal charges under a seldom-used portion of Canada's Criminal Code.
Both criminal libel and private prosecutions are both very rare. It’s not just a judge who had to agree with the care going ahead - the Province of Manitoba signs off on private prosecutions.
In this 2010 policy note, the Manitoba Department of Justice issued a policy statement on private prosecutions, which you can read in full here:
POLICY STATEMENT:
Guideline No. 5:PRI:1
Subject: Private Prosecutions Date: March 2010
All private prosecutions are subject to the scrutiny of the Attorney General. In assessing whether a private prosecution should proceed, Crown Attorneys should be guided by the same charging standard that applies to criminal charges initiated by the police. That is:
Is there a reasonable likelihood of conviction, and
Is it in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution?
While the document warns that Crowns should not be overzealous in staying private prosecution charges, it’s clear from the regulation that Crown Attorneys have to give the go-ahead to such prosecutions:
The Supervising Senior Crown to whom notice is given is expected to consider the merits of the case and make a decision as to whether it is appropriate for the private prosecution to proceed.
There is, of course a legitimate question of why a Crown Attorney would consider it in the public interest to allow Peter Nygard to pursue jail time for journalists - but they did.
The Criminal Libel case against CBC journalists was only dropped in November 2020 because of delays, not because the case fell apart. The class action suit with dozens of allegations had been filed months before - in July, 2020 and Nygard was arrested at his home in Winnipeg for extradition in December 2020.
In a note on the prosecution of journalists, The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that going ahead with Criminal Libel is rare and unusual, and that some provinces in Canada will not allow such prosecutions:
It is worth noting that some Canadian provinces have refused to enforce the defamatory libel provision of the Criminal Code at all due to its questionable constitutionality. For example, in early 2010, there was an attempt to file criminal libel charges in New Brunswick against an online blogger for online statements against police.28 However, such charges were dropped after New Brunswick’s Justice Department advised that it would not be in a position to seek a conviction in this case because it believed Canada’s criminal libel law to be unconstitutional.29”
How Charges are Avoided and Suppressed
When women report abuse, they may face the same challenge as a whistleblower.
When the abuse is by a person in authority - a politician, a celebrity, a movie producer, a billionaire, a union boss - or even a junior hockey player - the accused is able to marshal the resources of their organization against the survivor, to suppress their story. They are able to do this because there are a large number of people who depend on them for their jobs: the perception that a threat to the boss is a threat to all.
DARVO
One of the basic techniques is DARVO - a technique that is routine as a response to dismiss allegations of serious wrongdoing. DARVO is an acronym for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender roles” it is essentially a formula and a strategy regularly used to retaliate against whistleblowers or people trying to report a crime.
It goes further than a denial or disagreement about the nature of an accusation: it reverses the entire responsibility for who is to blame and attacks the victim.
The presumption of innocence is still critical to justice. It has to be acknowledged that, of course, there is such a thing as a false or mistaken accusation. Human beings make mistakes, and they don’t always tell the truth.
When cases of false accusations occur, it is doubly horrific: not only do people have to endure the life-destryong torment of a false of accusation, it also undermines the many, many people who are victims of crimes who can’t even get a hearing.
The number of real accusations and complaints that are ignored or turned aside is huge.
The tragedy of DARVO is that people who have already been attacked and disempowered and hurt, and are doing what everyone expects them to do (go to the authorities and police) are being treated as the villain.
Nygard’s team’s response to allegations was “DARVO” - to deny that the allegations were true, and to flip the accusations back on the accuser, saying that they are the ones in the wrong. Women reporting assaults were described as “paid actors” and the billionaire as a target for lawsuits from people looking to make money.
How collusion and silence is enforced
The reality is that a culture of intimidation by powerful institutions that can either make or break people’s careers and employment. They can reward people with promotions, raises and bonuses, they can punish people with demotions, layoffs, and firings.
The techniques used to do this are well established.
One is to demean, insult and degrade the person reporting (almost always a woman) and smear them in the public.
A Canadian whistleblowing organization described a “system reaction” to whistleblowers.
1) Flawed and non-independent inquiries are used to make “problems” go away.
Often, when reporting claims of harrassment or wrongdoing, people are obliged to report to “quasi-judicial” organizations that are supposed to investigate and rule on the case. Many Canadian organizations require individuals who are reporting to do it within the organization first.
These internal investigations - which are readily botched - can be used to discredit the complainant. Once this has been done, it makes it nearly impossible to approach law enforcement.
Internally, as well as in public, the whistleblower/complainant is painted as a liar, unreasonable or unstable.
This is supposed by collusion with other implicated individuals and intimidation of other employees to prevent further whistleblowing
This not only discredits the person as a complainant and witness, it is also brutalizes them, and sends a clear message to anyone else who might speak up, that should they dare to speak up, they will also have their reputation and character destroyed.
This is routinely used in the lead-up to trials to smear the reputation of women reporting.
Non-Disclosure Agreements as Lifetime Gag Orders
The other is the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to silence people. NDAs have extraordinary reach which people do not realize.
There is an international organization, Can’t Buy My Silence (which I support) to reform NDAs.
NDAs are a major reason we do not hear about any of this. NDAs are used to silence survivors and anyone else who might be able to speak up for them, because one of the only venues that people are free to speak is in a court of law.
NDAs are used everywhere: in private business, and in every public institution. Institutions themselves as well as everyone involved is barred from speaking.
Originally created for the protection of sensitive intellectual property and ideas, NDAs are routinely abused as a blanket way of obtaining people’s permanent silence about witnessing or experiencing mistreatment. They are so common that there is a Google Docs NDA template.
Monetary settlements for wrongdoing - even small settlements are often made conditional on signing an NDA.
To understand the scope of NDAs, NDAs mean that:
People are permanently and irrevocably surrendering their right to speak freely about what they’ve seen, unless it is to the police.
Signing an NDA may be a condition of working at a company, and if you break your NDA, you are liable to be sued for it.
People are prohibited from ever talking about their own lives in confidence to a spiritual advisor, to a therapist, to their family, or to an employer.
NDAs force people to take others’ secrets to their grave. There is a case in Canada where a woman abused by her father had to sign an NDA. Even after her father’s death, his estate is keeping her silent.
There are also “non-disparagement agreements” which mean that people can’t be critical even when it is true.
These NDAs combine with a culture of denial and toxic solidarity, where organizations or groups don’t want their “dirty laundry” aired in public. The threat of the truth coming out is real.
A production line of denial
While each complainant is isolated and operating on their own, the organization responding has a “system response,” which is to say there is a well-honed series of practices that are effectively a production line of denial, but in the last ten years we have seen many instances of widespread abuse that were “open secrets”.
Manitoba is considered the “epicentre” of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women in Canada. It has one the highest rates of domestic violence in the country.
In November, 2020, former Supreme Court Justice released a report into the toxic culture of the RCMP. Broken Lives, Broken Dreams: The Devastating Effects of Sexual Harassment On Women in the RCMP. As with so many of these reports, both the severity of the abuse and its sheer scale is shocking.
The term “harrassment” was broadly defined - so broadly that encompassed sexual assaults. There were more than 3,000 claims filed:
The level of violence and sexual assault that was reported was shocking. Indeed, over 130 claimants disclosed penetrative sexual assaults. Other claimants described a sexualized environment in RCMP workplaces. This was characterized by the frequent use of swear words and highly degrading expressions that reference women’s bodies, sexual jokes, innuendos, discriminatory comments with respect to the abilities of women, and unwelcome sexual touching.
Of particular concern in the context of policing was the denial, or the threat of the denial, of backup. Similarly, women who identified as LGBTQ2S+ were also subjected to ostracization, pejorative comments, sexual assaults and being outed without their consent.
It is impossible to fully convey the depth of the pain that the Assessors witnessed in the 644 interviews that were conducted and 3,086 claims that were assessed. What the women told the Assessors shocked them to their core. This process has forever tarnished the image of the RCMP as a Canadian icon. Bright, well-educated women said that they joined the RCMP seeking to help others, sometimes because they themselves had needed help as a young person. They told the Assessors of the brutal treatment they experienced which ground them down, broke their confidence, and shattered their trust in their fellow officers. The full tragedy and suffering of what the RCMP’s failure to provide a safe workplace has done to these women is overwhelming.
Many women that the Assessors interviewed had been diagnosed with serious psychological injuries including Major Depressive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, panic attacks and substance dependence. Claimants also reported a lack of trust in the RCMP, a lack of trust in men, feelings of isolation, withdrawal from social activities, friendships and sexual relations, humiliation, lack of self-esteem and lack of confidence. Many women experienced eating disorders, alcohol abuse, panic attacks, vomiting on the way to work, inability to maintain a positive relationship with their spouse and children. Some reported intentionally injuring themselves repeatedly. Self-blame is common, even after blatant sexual assaults. We heard stories of women who sat with their service revolvers in their mouths and were only stopped from killing themselves when they thought of their children or their pets. Heartbreaking stories of despair. One claimant committed suicide during the claims process.
That is what is happening in Canada’s national police force, which is also the contract police force providing municipal policing services across all of rural Western Canada, as well as the Maritime provinces.
Police oversight and complaints are, generally, provincial - not Federal.
Similar allegations arose in the British Columbia Office of CSIS, Canada’s Security and Intelligence Services. Once again, what is referred to as a “toxic” culture is actually a culture where female officers are being raped by their “colleagues” on the job.
A rookie surveillance officer with Canada's spy agency and another officer decades her senior were tracking a person in British Columbia in the summer of 2019 when they lost sight of their target.
She said the senior officer later blamed a communications failure due to a radio dead zone.
But the woman said the real reason was her colleague was raping her, having broken off surveillance to drive to a parkade where the alleged attack took place in their Canadian Security Intelligence Service vehicle.
She said she was raped by her colleague nine times while at work in CSIS surveillance vehicles between July 2019 and February 2020.
A second officer said she too was sexually assaulted as a rookie by the same officer in surveillance vehicles during covert missions, despite warnings from the first to their bosses that he should not be partnered with young women.
They say supervisors told them other women had complained about not feeling safe around the man in the past.
“Nothing was done, and I started hearing these stories that there was this history of all these women (who) used to be working at our region. They used to be there, and they all had the same thing to say, and they all just ended up leaving,” the second officer said.
A research report by the Canadian Labour Council found shocking levels of violence at work, including assaults, sexual harrassment and sexual assault.
Almost three-quarters (71.4%) of survey respondents experienced at least one form of harassment and violence or sexual harassment and violence, in the two years prior to completing the survey.
Among survey respondents who experienced sexual harassment and violence, 4% were sexually assaulted, 60% had experienced unwanted touching or invasion of personal space, and 23% were stalked.
… survey respondents experienced negative consequences for their careers as a result of their experiences across all forms of harassment and violence, including being transferred, suspended, fired, and denied a promotion, pay increase or good performance rating. A majority of respondents transferred or quit to take another job, demonstrating the impact of these behaviours on workplaces as well as on individual workers.
Survey respondents reported that 25% of the perpetrators were co-workers - and the majority said that reporting made the situation worse:
For survey respondents who did report experiences of harassment and violence or sexual harassment and violence, the majority believed that reporting made no difference or made the situation worse. For those who experienced sexual harassment and violence and made reports, less than 1 in 4 believed that by reporting to a supervisor or manager, reporting to their union, or filing a formal complaint or grievance their situation was made better.
All of that does not include other scandals involving the suppression of harrassment and abuse claims - including crimes - in the Canadian Military, and at Hockey Canada, which used “used player registration fees to pay off victims of sexual assaults and quiet them with non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.”
When these scandals erupt, there is outrage, but little change, because there is no recognition that of the depth and breadth of the problem, which is reinforced by current practices, which is a culture of cover-up. A culture of “no rats,” and toxic solidarity is another. Legal gag orders in the form of NDAs.
This is sometimes talked about as “toxic masculinity” or as a “feminist issue” when. It is feminist in the sense that women are human beings who deserve equal protection under the law, and can’t get it, but it is fundamentally a very old story of human corruption, because the people who will rush to the defence of a violent criminal is broader. When people with status and money are accused, there are also people who can gain status and money defending them.
That is exactly what one person told me, when I asked how it was that people could turn a blind eye to rape. The answer was money. People did not want to lose their job, and could get a better one.
The language we use shows how squeamish we are about all of this. We use passive phrasing and talk about “domestic violence” and other violent crimes as if no one is committing them. While these crimes are largely committed by men against women, but the enablers are considerably more diverse.
While people talk “tough on crime” the reality is that we need to enforce existing laws, ensure that there is funding for courts, victims services. We also need to recognize the ways in which people are being intimated and pressed into silence, because it is still happening, and what I described above is only the tip of the iceberg.
These aren’t just “HR” issues, and this is not about a “new culture”. These are crimes being committed in the workplace. There was never a time in history when these actions were legal.
In seeing all this - and trying to shine a light on it, one conclusion crystallized for me, which is that for both freedom and justice to prevail for anyone, the individual rights and freedoms of the injured party must take precedence over the collective.
These crimes against the individual are being suppressed in the name of group, which can be any human organization: victims of crime are told that they need to stay quiet, because it threatens the organization. The argument is that it is for “the common good” of the collective - whether it is a corporation, union, a university, a church, a police force or a political party or any other institution. Human beings are both individual and collective: that’s life.
Covering up a crime - and allowing perpetrators and their protectors to rape and harass with impunity is made possible when the needs of the collective suppress the rights of the individual to justice and redress.
I have to come to believe that this is the reason we have individual and human rights. It is not about the heroic individual or the “great man” - it is because justice can only prevail when individual truth cannot be trumped by collective interest when it is corrupt.
That means a bedrock commitment to the rule of law.
It’s been said that the only way to achieve the kind of change is through a political revolution. Another option, as one Nygard survivor told me, is an exorcism. At the very least, Canadians need to open their eyes to the abuse. Too much of what we think about these crimes is because we do not realize the enormous pressures people are subjected to. This needs to change, and it starts with some sunlight.
• DFL