Employer took action after learning of sexual assault charges from police report
Corrections Canada (CSC) should have gotten more information before indefinitely suspending a correctional officer for criminal charges outside of work, an adjudicator has ruled.
Balkar Singh Basra was a correctional officer at Matsqui Institution, a medium-security federal correctional institution near Vancouver. During his time with CSC, there were no disciplinary issues on his record and he was considered a good employee.
On Sept. 10, 2004, Basra was accused of sexually assaulting a woman he had gone out with that evening. The woman claimed Basra had drugged her and assaulted her while she was unconscious. Basra had given the woman a false name but police were able to find him though cellphone records. Basra denied knowing her and refused to give a DNA sample. A sample was obtained through a warrant and it matched DNA taken from the woman.
Basra was arrested and charged with sexual assault. On March 17, 2006, a government privacy co-ordinator informed Matsqui’s warden of the charges — following protocol for when government employees faced criminal charges — outlining the police report. Basra was suspended without pay for failing to notify CSC of the charges, pending an investigation into whether he had violated the CSC code of conduct. Basra claimed that he hadn’t heard anything since he was charged and thought the matter was over. However, the investigators didn’t interview him.
By early May 2006, the investigation was incomplete and the union filed a grievance. The adjudicator found the suspension became a disciplinary one rather than an administrative one because CSC took so long to conduct an investigation, and ordered CSC to reinstate Basra as of May 3 with full compensation.
CSC appealed to the Federal Court, which found the adjudicator had incorrectly dismissed the privacy co-ordinator’s letter as hearsay because it was based on a police report’s summary. Basra appealed, and the Federal Court of Appeal agreed with the Federal Court. The courts also disagreed with the adjudicator’s finding that there was no evidence Basra had deceived the police and the appeal court remitted the case back to the adjudicator for a re-hearing.
CSC argued that the letter provided a sufficient basis for an interim disciplinary unpaid suspension due to the seriousness of the charges and the violations of the CSC’s code of conduct.
Basra was eventually convicted, but the adjudicator found this had no bearing on the issue because it happened two years after the suspension. The adjudicator maintained that the privacy co-ordinator’s letter — the only evidence upon which CSC relied — was a summary of the charges but was not written by anyone who directly dealt with the case. Much of the information “can be characterized as second-, third- or fourth-hand hearsay,” said the adjudicator.
The adjudicator also found that CSC made assumptions which weren’t true, such as that Basra lied to police about his name and the charges were for violent sexual assault. The former wasn’t true — Basra only gave a false name to the woman — and there was no indication in the letter that the charges stemmed from violent behaviour.
