"Tell me where it hurts": workplace sexual harassment compensation and the regulation of hysterical victims.

• Author: Makela, Finn

Informed by a feminist analysis, the author examines a new development in the legal responses to workplace sexual harassment in Quebec. Sexual harassment bas been recognized as a psychological injury, compensable through the province's Commission des accidents de travail. This classification was confirmed in the Beliveau-St-Jacques case, in which an alleged victim of workplace sexual harassment filed a civil suit seeking damages from her employer based on both the civil liability regime and the antidiscrimination and anti-harassment clauses of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. The Supreme Court of Canada found that Quebec's Act Respecting Industrial Accidents and Occupational Diseases ("AIAOD") extinguishes the right to all civil remedies for workplace injuries, including punitive damages in cases of intentional and illegal violations of a protected right. This approach was subsequently entrenched in the new psychological harassment provisions of the Labour Standards Act.

The author discusses the implications of Beliveau-St-Jacques for victims of sexual harassment, particularly women. While the decision goes far in recognizing the systemic nature of sexual harassment in the workplace, it also somewhat illogically includes violations of fundamental rights within the ambit of "occupational hazards." Responding to sexual harassment through the no-fault workplace compensation scheme causes the distress and anguish experienced by sexual harassment victims to be assessed as a medical condition. Women become the objects of an administrative regime that causes them to surfer further affronts to their dignity. The author contrasts the legal treatment of sexual harassment with that of a different harm to dignity--defamation, which constitutes a narrow exception to the exclusion of civil remedies under the AIAOD.

L'auteur, inspire par une analyse feministe, etudie une nouvelle addition a l'arsenal juridique disponible aux victimes de harcelement sexuel au travail au Quebec. Depuis 1996, le harcelement sexuel a ete reconnu comme un dommage psychologique, duquel la victime peut etre indemnisee par la voie d'un recours devant la Commission des accidents du travail. Cette classification trouve sa source dans l'affaire Beliveau-St-Jacques, dans laquelle une personne, supposement victime de harcelement sexuel au travail, a entame une poursuite judiciaire contre son employeur en se basant sur le regime de responsabilite civile et les clauses anti-discriminatoires et anti-harcelement de la Charte quebecoise des droits et libertes. La Cour supreme du Canada a statue que la Loi sur les accidents du travail et les maladies professionnelles du Quebec privait la victime de tout droit a une reparation pour les dommages subis basee sur le regime de responsabilite civile, incluant tout dommage purutif pour une atteinte illicite et intentionnelle a un droit garanti par la Charte. Par la suite, cette approche a ete solidifiee dans les nouvelles dispositions de la Loi sur les normes du travail visant le harcelement psychologique.

L'auteur discute des implications de l'arret Beliveau-St-Jacques pour les victimes de harcelement sexuel, particulierement les femmes. Bien que l'arret reconnaisse la nature systemique du harcelement sexuel au travail, il classifie egalement, quelque peu illogiquement, les violations de droits fondamentaux dans la categorie des >. Tenter de redresser les dommages du harcelement sexuel par le biais d'un systeme de compensation des accidents du travail sans egard a la faute mene a l'evaluation de la souffrance des victimes en tant que condition medicale. Par ce fait, les femmes deviennent les objets d'un regime administratif les obligeant a subir de nouvelles atteintes a leur dignite. L'auteur contraste le traitement juridique du harcelement sexuel avec un type different d'atteinte a la dignite : la diffamation, qui constitue une exception restreinte a l'exclusion des reparations basees sur le regime de responsabilite civile.

Introduction I. Historical Background A. The Workplace Accident Compensation Scheme B. Compensation for Psychological Injuries II. Beliveau-St-Jacques A. Background B. The Supreme Court Decision C. Consequences: Intentional Harassment as Accident D. Expansion of the Doctrine III. Regulating Victims A. The CSST as Castle B. Foucault and the Medicalization of Dignity C. The Hysterical Turn IV. Private Injuries and Public Harms A. The Defamation Double Standard B. Dignity for Some Conclusion Introduction

In 1987, Catharine MacKinnon remarked: "Sexual harassment, the event, is not new to women. It is the law of injuries that it is new to." (1) In Quebec, almost twenty years later, a new development in legal responses to sexual harassment has emerged. Sexual harassment is a workplace injury. It is the consequences of this development and the assumptions about women and their bodies that underpin it that I will explore in what follows.

I begin with a historical overview of the workplace accident regime in place in the province of Quebec, paying particular attention to the treatment of psychological injuries in relation to the civil law category of moral damages. I then provide a critical reading of the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Beliveau-St-Jacques v. Federation des employees et employes de services publics inc., (2) in which it was decided that the statutory compensation regime displaces the remedies that would otherwise be available to victims of workplace sexual harassment under Quebec's Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. (3)

My reading of the Beliveau-St-Jacques decision forms the basis of a feminist critique of the workplace accident compensation scheme. The critique mobilizes Michel Foucault's concept of a disciplinary discourse that regulates individuals, in order to make the argument that the compensation system is part of an administrative apparatus that symbolically and materially constitutes women in such a way that their emotional life is inseparable from their bodies.

In the final section, I interrogate the only currently accepted exception to the displacement of Quebec Charter remedies established in Beliveau-St-Jacques: damage to reputation. This exception, I argue, bolsters my earlier claims about the workplace accident compensation regime, in that it allows compensation for a uniquely un-embodied harm.

1. Historical Background

   1. The Workplace Accident Compensation Scheme

      The Act Respecting Industrial Accidents and Occupational Diseases (4) constitutes a no-fault regime similar in nature to an insurance scheme. The first step in the scheme's creation was the 1909 adoption of the Act respecting the responsibility for accidents suffered by workmen in the course of their work, and the compensation for injuries resulting therefrom. (5) This act withdrew workplace accidents from the general law of civil responsibility, which was unsuited to the problems posed by industrialization. (6) The concept of fault was replaced with the notion of "occupational risk", described by one commentator as "[1]e resultat d'un compromis social historique entre des forces contradictoires." (7) Workers were relieved of the burden of showing that their employers were at fault for injuries sustained in the workplace. In exchange, they renounced the right to full compensation, receiving instead a partial indemnity, the cost of which was distributed across employers.

      In 1928, application of the scheme was dejudicialized with the creation of the Commission des accidents de travail ("CSST"). (8) The accident fund, consisting of employer contributions, became the source of indemnification in 1931 with the passing of the Act Respecting Workplace Accidents. (9) After more than fifty years of relative stability, the regime underwent a major revision in 1985. (10)

   2. Compensation for Psychological Injuries

      Unlike in the common law, (11) psychological injury has not historically been problematized in the civil law tradition. Thus, rather than basing compensation for harm on a Cartesian view of the self, in which body and mind are treated as radically distinct aspects of personhood justifying differential treatment by the law, the subject of the civil law is an organic whole bearing "personality rights" whose integrity is recognized as inviolable. (12) Commission of a civil fault entails liability for reparation of the injury caused, whether it is "bodily, moral, or material." (13)

      Early doctrinal treatment of European workplace accident legislation in civilian jurisdictions (14) illustrates that developing compensation schemes recognized psychological injury, despite textual reference to "l'integrite ou a la sante du corps humain." (15) The flexible concept of "moral damages" was consequently not transposed without adaptation. Instead, psychological injury related to workplace accidents was described in medical terms, viewing the brain rather than the mind as the site of damage. Thus, "[l]a folie est une alteration du cerveau, un traumatisme, au meme titre que la rupture d'un muscle, la perforation d'une artere ou la fracture d'un os." (16) As a corollary, moral injuries were described as medical conditions such as dementia, hysteria, hypochondria, neurasthenia, et cetera. (17)

      Despite this historical willingness to recognize psychological injuries within the framework of workplace accident compensation schemes, acceptance of claims based on harassment came relatively late in Quebec. (18) Early jurisprudence often dealt with the traumatic effects of witnessing violence (as in the case of police officers (19) and prison guards (20)), though illnesses resulting from a work environment poisoned by harassment were the basis of at least some of the early claims. (21)

      The first case in which a psychological injury caused by workplace harassment was indemnified was decided in 1984. (22) The appeal board of the CSST eventually confirmed that workplace harassment could lead to a...