For years I wondered what happened to the two women who merely wanted to put an end to the behaviour of a lecherous cook and ended up at the Supreme Court of Canada defining sexual harassment. In 2009 on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision about sexual harassment, I interviewed the initial adjudicator, renowned Winnipeg lawyer and human rights expert, Yude Henteleff. At the end of the article, I wrote, “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Dianna Janzen and Tracey Govereau, please let me know.” To my surprise, a few months ago, I got an email from a Dianna just saying “thanks”.
I called her back and sure enough it was one of the two women who made such a difference in Canadian law because they had the courage to speak up and fight…through many legal battles and more than six years.
May 4th is the 22nd anniversary of this historic decision and Dianna Janzen was gracious enough to record an interview with me for an hour. Today you get half the article and the other half on Thursday. However, you can download and listen to the MP3 interview right now. Just click here.
In August 1982, on the recommendation of a friend, Dianna Janzen left one waitressing job to work at Pharos Restaurant on St. Mary’s Road, just East of the Red River in Winnipeg. While taking a full course load at University, Janzen hoped to work full time so she could live on her own and pay for school.
Early on, the cook Tommy Grammas began grabbing her and making sexual advances towards her. After almost 29 years, Ms. Janzen still has a hard time discussing the actions of that cook. “Well, I think that’s detailed well enough in the court documents so I’d prefer not to detail that right now,” she said.
In fact when I read the case years ago, and when I think of a sexual harassment scale of 1 to 10, I put the actions of Tommy Grammas in the 9 to 11 category.
Janzen made it clear “in no uncertain terms” that his actions weren’t appreciated and tried to deal with it on her own. When after a month of futile attempts with Grammas, she spoke to the owner who hired her, Phillip Anastasiadis. “Phillip’s immediate reaction to my complaint was ‘you need a fuck anyways,’” said Janzen.
That’s when she started to doubt herself. “My feeling at that point was oh my gosh, there really is something wrong with me, that I’d be so bothered by what was happening. So I held my ground with the cook. I let him know that I wasn’t interested and I just wanted to do my work, but I felt that at every turn I was being sabotaged and not being able to perform my duties.”
Janzen felt the same way many women felt when they don’t get support and therefore doubt themselves. For a long time, even after the case was long settled, she wondered… She thought, “If I’d only done things differently. If I hadn’t worn that skirt, or if I hadn’t smiled that way, or if I hadn’t been so trusting. If I had been different or smarter none of this would have happened. And I did blame myself.”
But she needed a job and felt an obligation to the person who got her the interview in the first place. In the end she quit, something she says she would have done much sooner, with the advantage of more years of wisdom.
I asked Janzen why she didn’t leave sooner? She said, “Because I was naïve, because I was young, because I was stupid, because I was putting up with a lot of stuff, because I didn’t know my own rights. I did know that I had a right to my own body, I have a right to my own thoughts, I have a right to work without being harassed like that and I thought that if I could put a stop to it, that I could still continue in this job that I thought was ideal for my situation at that time. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.” So with a little more than two months at Pharos, she left.
Sexual harassment was, and still is prevalent in many workplaces in Canada, but very few people are willing to take the simple step of picking up the phone to contact their human rights commission or tribunal. Yet this woman did. And strangely enough, so did her fellow Pharos waitress, Tracy Govereau.
At that point Janzen and Govereau hardly knew one another as their work only overlapped by about two weeks. Govereau started her job on October 13th and Janzen quit on the 31st. Govereau encountered similar harassing behaviour from Grammas and when she spoke up, he and Anastasiadis began yelling at her in front of other staff. They used the excuse of an alleged customer complaint and Govereau’s last shift was December 11th.
When Janzen filed her complaint at the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, she was told, to her surprise, that Govereau had done the same thing and would she mind if they combined the cases, to give it more strength.
About their relationship, Janzen said, “I didn’t know Tracy very well at all. We worked together for a very very short time and in that time I was pretty self-absorbed in terms of just getting through my shifts.” Despite all they went through, after the appeals were all done, she only ran into Govereau once on the street, never seeing her again.
Not every case is clear cut, but their case was about as classic as they come. The damages they were awarded don't seem like a lot today, but at the time they were considered ground-breaking. For loss of pay and exemplary damages, the company was to pay Janzen $3,980. For Govereau, it was $6,000, as she was out of work longer. According to adjudicator Henteleff, “I quite deliberately made them large and it caught the media’s attention. I didn’t exaggerate the damages, but I wanted to make people aware of the psychological damage involved with sexual harassment and that it will cost [employers] lots.”
But to her dismay, Pharos appealed. While the Court of Queen’s Bench judge Michel Monnin (now on Manitoba’s Court of Appeal) agreed with the adjudicator’s decision, he knocked the awards down to just $1,480 for Janzen and $2,000 for Govereau.
In response to that decision Pharos appealed, saying they shouldn’t be legally responsible, while Janzen and Govereau cross-appealed, feeling the original damages should be restored. When it got to Manitoba’s top court, two prominent judges, Justices Charles Huband and Kerr Twaddle (now both retired) came down with a decision that surprised many.
As far as Huband was concerned, he was “amazed” that an employer would be responsible for the actions of their employees and also “amazed” that sexual harassment could be considered discrimination based on sex. Twaddle drew very distinct and exact legal lines in the sand, referring to “sex appeal” and “random selection”, but basically he summed it up by writing, “it is nonsense to say that harassment is discrimination.”
Their ruling was in complete contrast to numerous Canadian courts, including two top courts from other provinces. Huband and Twaddle ruled that sexual harassment is not a form of sex discrimination, and therefore not a violation of Manitoba law. They also said the restaurant cannot be responsible for the actions of their lecherous cook. At that point it seemed their fight was over.
Asked about her feelings after that decision, Janzen replied, “It told me that it had all been for nothing.”
It was an emotional rollercoaster and with the reduction of the award and then having her case completely dismissed, Janzen was of two minds. On the one hand she said, “It didn’t take long before I felt that it was a blessing in disguise because I don’t know that there was any other way for it to go forward to the Supreme Court except through appealing the decision.” And even though she had doubts about her own actions, she realized how out of touch these judges were. She said, “I think one of the judges in his statement had actually compared what I had gone through to a boy pulling my pigtails in the classroom and I thought he just doesn’t know.”
“Yes I was a waitress and yes it’s considered a lower level job, but I’m not stupid, and I’m trying to interpret their judgment and to me it was ridiculous.” By this time, more than four years had passed since Janzen quit her waitressing job. But onward she, Govereau, the Human Rights Commission and the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) went to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Part II will be available on Thursday. You’ll get to hear how she felt after the Supreme Court decision, what’s she’s learned since that time and what advice she has for others in similar workplaces throughout Canada.
Stephen
Related Resources:
This blog: http://www.humanrightseachday.com/
My website: http://www.stephenhammond.ca
My Podcast: Type in “HumanRightsaDay” to the iTunes store and listen to each day's event from my book, Steps in the Rights Direction (the easiest way is to go to the homepage of www.StephenHammond.ca )
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Rightstoday (each day has historical human rights info)
Stephen Hammond, B.A., LL.B., CSP, is a lawyer-turned professional speaker. He’s written two books, Managing Human Rights at Work: 101 practical tips to prevent human rights disasters and Steps in the Rights Direction: 365 human rights celebrations and tragedies that inspired Canada and the world. Both can be purchased on his website www.StephenHammond.ca
copyright - Stephen Hammond - Finding Dianna Janzen: the historic fight against sexual harassment in Canada