Chief Eric Stubbs was blunt in a video message to every member of Ottawa’s police force last month, sharing examples of gender-based violence and harassment in their ranks, the effect it has internally, and the public trust it violates.
Some of his police officers are “seeing a woman at a coffee shop, coming out of a gym, driving next to them, getting their license plates and running them on the system,” Stubbs said in the video obtained by CBC News — turning police databases into “their own way to meet women.”
“We’ve seen members messaging vulnerable victims on calls that they’ve attended in an attempt to develop an intimate relationship,” he added, and “members making sexually themed comments directly to women in the service in the workplace.”
Behaviours that are “happening way too often,” “that can’t be tolerated” and “tarnish every one of us.”
But as stark as his demand may be that officers must change their ways or quit, some say there’s little evidence that the force’s culture — and the commitment of all its leaders to turn the tide — have meaningfully shifted.
The chief’s video was sent May 8, and in it Stubbs said it was not made in response “to the CBC articles that came out in recent days.”
Those articles included allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment made by college students against an Ottawa police sergeant who died by suicide in March, and an allegation of sexual assault against Ottawa police union president Matthew Cox being investigated by Ontario’s police watchdog.
Stubbs nears the end of the video by saying that the force has committed to hiring enough women to make up 30 per cent of its workforce.
“But you and I will be recruiting them and that might include your daughters, your neighbours, your friends. You have to be able to look them in the eye with confidence and say, ‘You’ll be safe in the walls of the police buildings. You will be treated with respect,'” Stubbs said.
“Can we say that right now?”
After a decade of assessments, recommendations, promises and millions of dollars spent by the Ottawa Police Service to end this kind of misconduct, some current and former employees of the force tell CBC News that in spite of what Stubbs has said, they don’t think meaningful change is coming.
Their prediction comes amid a wave of reporting about Ottawa police officers that includes allegations of intimate partner violence and officers searching databases for information about women they’re attracted to.
It also comes on the heels of the police service’s latest review of its workplace safety policies, and as Stubbs and other members of the executive command prepare to face their oversight body, the Ottawa Police Service Board, on June 22 with details of that review.
The anticipated update follows a special in-camera meeting the board held in late May with Stubbs and other police leaders in response to CBC’s recent coverage. In a news release, the board said it “made it clear” to brass at that meeting “that sexual harassment, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and gender-based misconduct are unacceptable and have profound impacts on survivors, workplaces, and communities.”
The Ottawa Police Service’s latest review is its fifth on this topic since 2015. It was done in 2025 to audit its safe workplace program process, policy and structure; assess resources, options and best practices elsewhere; and find out which kinds of complaints can be handled internally to improve “service delivery, timeliness, accountability and cost control,” Ottawa police wrote in a statement.
The force commissioned this latest review itself. The oversight board wasn’t involved in approving the review or selecting Maclean Investigation Services to do the work, the board wrote in its own statement. CBC has requested a copy of the report and was told by Ottawa police to file an access to information request.
Concerns about the force handling complaints about its own members was one of the focus points of a previous review — a far-reaching 2021 assessment of the Ottawa police workplace. It was commissioned by both the force and the police board as part of a joint strategy to tackle workplace sexual violence and harassment in response to a previous wave of CBC reporting about sexist conduct by officers.
A cornerstone recommendation of that 2021 review was the creation of an independent workplace investigations office — outside the chain of command — to better handle complaints about members and leaders without interference.
But staffing the office required bringing it back under the chain of command, the force has said.
Then in 2023, a year after the office was created, the force announced to the police board that it had shut it down.
People close to the issue, including some current and former members of the force, told CBC that Ottawa police should not have closed the quasi-independent office.
None of the employees would speak on the record, and details about their complaints could reveal who they are. They said they believe their careers would suffer if their identities were found out and that the force would make their lives more difficult. Some said they’ve already faced enough discrimination and ostracization for making complaints about colleagues internally.
A year wasn’t enough time to sort out the kinks and make the office work, and it should have been allowed to continue because police shouldn’t be policing themselves, current and former employees said.
“Yes, it’s difficult to change the culture and implement new things. But no one was willing to stick it out because it was uncomfortable and inconvenient,” one former member said.
“Organizations are going to try and get away with things … if they don’t make it a priority to have a professional, independent office that oversees the overseers, including the chief. Because they can make the wrong decisions in some of these circumstances,” she continued.
According to the force, the chief wasn’t always able to exercise his authority and legislated obligation to have police officers investigated for misconduct without maintaining oversight of the investigations, because he wasn’t getting the information he needed.
Part of the problem? That the independent, internal office was “staffed with permanent employees … within the chain of command,” the force said in a report.
Police chief questioned about scrapped independent workplace investigations office
In an interview with Stubbs, CBC asked if police sought input from the police board before closing the independent office, since its creation stemmed from a joint police and board strategy to combat violence and harassment by police.
“It wasn’t like a two-month discussion, that’s for sure. It was within the week. I can’t remember off the top of my head … it was relatively quick, but it was obvious to us at that time for a number of reasons that this is the path that we had to go on. So we took that path,” Stubbs said.
In fact, the board found out about the office closure Oct. 23, 2023 — the day of its regular board meeting, the board told CBC.
The closure was not announced publicly at that Oct. 23 meeting because it was discussed in camera as a confidential labour relations issue, both the board and the force said.
Instead, the public agenda included two reports about the office that did not mention it had been closed: the office’s first and only annual report, and another annual report on the force’s Safe Workplace Program. Both reports said office processes were being sorted out and that work would continue in the upcoming year to improve them.
The first public mention and explanation of the closure came before the board five months later in March 2024, it said, when a report was received with no discussion.
Another former member of the force said that “nothing seems to hold the organization to account,” citing the force’s decision to shut down the office with no board consultation or repercussions.
“So to see another report being done — it could have brilliant recommendations,” she said. “But if nothing will actually hold the service to implement those and to be enforceable,” what’s the point?
Stubbs said inappropriate workplace behaviour is a “very difficult” issue in policing specifically, adding that “if there was a model, if there was a program that existed [to end it], we’d all be doing it, right?… It would go across the country like wildfire.”
He said he’s impressed that the force has repeatedly invested money in workplace safety audits and recommendations over the past decade “to fix things in an organization that needs some fixing when it comes to this work and this behavior.”
In January 2022, police told its oversight board that $8.2 million had been budgeted to implement and sustain its new safe workplace program — including the independent office — up to and including 2026.
Police now tell CBC that $5.4 million is the “current and most up-to-date budget” for its workplace investigations and safe workplace program, and that so far about $4.9 million has been spent.
To explain the drop, police said the 2022 budget included costs that may have been budgeted or delivered through other areas of the force, such as for training, work by the Professional Standards Section, member supports and more.
Last month, the City of Ottawa’s auditor general announced that Ottawa police projects are sometimes moving ahead without proper budgets and with inaccurate reporting to oversight bodies.
Asked if those problems could be playing any role in the budget discrepancies, Stubbs said some independent office costs, such as salaries, didn’t end up being spent “because the program collapsed and we moved on to something else.”
At the same time, Stubbs said the force is spending too much for three agencies to investigate some of its workplace complaints.
“That’s money I don’t want to spend.”
Stubbs said last year was the right time to commission another assessment of its safe workplace program and processes. It follows the 2016 gender audit that stemmed from a 2015 human rights complaint settlement against the force, the 2017 gender equality audit report, the 2021 report and overhaul, and the 2023 review following the closure of the independent office.
“To me there’s nothing wrong with that, of having an independent look at what we’re trying to do. Yeah, we could wait five years before we do it again, but that’s too long,” Stubbs said.
“It’s a living process to get better. But we take it very seriously. We are investing a lot of time, a lot of people, funding in the past to try to address this. And we’ll continue to do so until we get to a level where we’re comfortable with our process. That yes, what we’ve got, it’s not perfect, but it’s as good as it’s going to get.”
Leighann Burns, who helps assess Ottawa police responses to calls for service about intimate partner violence, said police “can’t just keep throwing mud at the wall” with reports and audits, “and then run into the next decade throwing some more mud at the wall.”
The authors of the 2021 report were also concerned about the number of assessments.
“The [Ottawa Police Service], with the support of its board must set its course of action, commit to it, and resolutely execute,” the report’s executive summary stated.
“The time for more audits and reports is over.”
Burns said all the analysis has been “challenging to watch” over the years, but she thinks police are making these efforts in good faith.
“What they seem to struggle with is setting out an all-of-service plan that’s co-ordinated, evidence-based, monitored and tracked over time,” Burns said.
A currently employed member with more than 20 years of service said the force is “doing the same thing over and over again [with its audits] and we’re expecting a different result. That’s the definition of insanity.… There needs to be concrete change. Stop studying the problem instead of addressing the problem.”
He’d like to see more leadership from the chief’s office as well as the staff sergeant major, who has a stronger connection to rank-and-file members than the executive branch.
And he’s tired of the internal disciplinary process for officer misconduct charges, which can take years to unfold while rewarding the vast majority of suspended officers with pay as they wait for that process to conclude.
Stubbs said he “would love that [disciplinary process] to be quicker,” but it’s quasi-judicial and mandated by the Community Safety and Policing Act.
An improvement could be establishing strict deadlines for those hearings, Stubbs said, like the Jordan provisions established by the Supreme Court of Canada in an effort to guarantee trials in a reasonable timeframe.
In his May video to the force, Stubbs said he recently received a letter from women employees about the conduct of some of their colleagues.
“There was a long-standing and ongoing issue within the policing culture in which sexual misconduct has too often been ignored, tolerated and, in the most troubling cases, implicitly celebrated. We believe there is a clear need for [Ottawa police] leadership to acknowledge that this issue remains present and to speak openly about it. Silence or minimization only allows the behavior to continue,” Stubbs read, quoting a “snippet” of the letter.
He also talked about the impact on victims who often aren’t believed.
“But you can believe this: that when a victim does come forward, believe that it took courage to do so,” Stubbs said.
“Believe that her confidentiality will be breached and she’ll feel completely isolated. Believe that her name will be dragged through the mud. Believe that she’ll walk around her workplace in fear of who knows and who doesn’t, who’s an ally and who is vilifying her. Believe that she’s terrified it will end up in the media. And believe that she never wanted any of this.”
Employees who don’t engage in misconduct but do nothing when they see it happening — “and if I’m being honest, I was part of this group for most of my career in the RCMP,” Stubbs acknowledged — have to become allies to women, support and stand up for them, and “call out the behaviour when they see it.”
And to anyone at the service who will deny there’s a problem, “two things need to happen, and there are only two things,” Stubbs added.
“Change your behavior now, or quit.”
Current Ottawa police Staff Sgt. Barb Sjaarda is the employee who filed the 2012 Human Rights Tribunal complaint that resulted in the 2016 gender audit, setting everything that followed in motion.
Still bound by two non-disclosure agreements, she agreed to provide a written statement.
“I continue to care deeply about the strength and effectiveness of our police service. While I identified challenges around gender equity, access to training, and workplace culture.… I have not been part of developing or implementing any of the solutions that may have followed.”
Sjaarda wrote that she recognizes and appreciates the chief’s “stated commitment to the organization and his willingness to confront long‑standing cultural challenges,” and that she’s looking forward to his June 22 update on those efforts to the board.
“Real change requires the courage to impose meaningful consequences for poor behaviour, prevent the marginalization of those who sound the alarm, and committing to merit‑based equality of opportunity rather than performative equity,” she added.
