Manitoba’s sole cabinet minister has defended her work at a Winnipeg college and said she’s being unjustly targeted more than five years after an investigation concluded she had harassed an employee.

At least three employees of Red River College Polytechnic filed separate complaints about the behaviour of their boss, Rebecca Chartrand, in 2019.

Chartrand, who won the riding of Churchill-Keewatinook Aski for the Liberals in April, was chosen by Prime Minister Mark Carney to be part of his inner circle.

Between her failed 2015 run for office and her successful second try, the new MP and minister of Northern and Arctic affairs spent about 2-½ years in a senior management role at RRC Polytech’s Indigenous education unit.

On Tuesday, Chartrand provided a lengthy statement in which she touted her commitment to positive change and the progress she made on “enhancing programs and fostering a student-centered environment” at RRC Polytech.

She said her work is a “source of great pride.”

“Let us concentrate on building up the community and supporting positive developments within the Indigenous community, instead of focusing on negativity that fans lateral violence within the Indigenous community,” the cabinet minister said via email Tuesday.

The findings of the 2019 probe into her treatment of one particular employee on campus was leaked against the backdrop of the rookie politician’s sudden rise up the ranks on Parliament Hill.

Investigators from Rachlis Neville LLP concluded Chartrand had repeatedly harassed and humiliated a subordinate, who is also an Indigenous woman, over an extended period in 2019.

RRC Polytech hired the firm that fall, after undertaking an internal investigation sparked by the same complainant. That one concluded Chartrand had breached school policy when she pushed through a controversial student survey — a project that several of her colleagues had raised concerns about — and taken retaliatory action against the employee who flagged the suspected breach.

That individual, who left the college in 2020, repeatedly flagged the gist of those conclusions with her federal Liberal contacts before the April 28 election.

“As an Indigenous Liberal member who supports Mark Carney, I have been trying to warn the Winnipeg Liberal head office about (Chartrand). She will be a liability if elected and a scandal waiting to happen,” she wrote in an April 6 email to a fellow Liberal who was heavily involved in Carney’s campaign.

The Free Press has interviewed that employee and four others who worked closely with Chartrand when she oversaw Indigenous strategy at RRC Polytech from June 2017 to December 2019.

Each of them expressed serious concerns about her treatment of employees — either themselves, former colleagues or both — who had voiced differing views to ones she held. Three said they made written complaints about her, but the report of only one of them was escalated and substantiated.

They all agreed to share their experiences on the condition of anonymity.

“She’s very authoritarian and she surrounds herself with ‘yes’ people and if you’re not a ‘yes’ person, you’re not going to be there — or she’s going to make it really tough for you,” one source said.

She said she frequently witnessed what she called “lateral violence” — undermining and bullying of the whistleblower whose complaint was escalated. Chartrand’s hostile behaviour made others “cower,” the source said.

Another ex-staffer recalled being fired on the basis of “insubordination” after questioning the appropriateness and legalities of collecting deeply personal information from prospective students, via the survey.

Chartrand faced criticism during the 2018-19 school year for creating “an assessment readiness tool,” exclusively prepared for applicants of an Indigenous studies program, that requested details about their alcohol and recreational drug use.

Multiple sources described Chartrand as a vindictive ladder-climber, citing one instance when she uninvited a staff member from an international trip to a conference he had pitched they go to because they’d had a disagreement. The employee in question had expressed problems with the survey, sources said.

The decision to push forward the initiative and write off workers’ concerns showed her “bad judgment,” said a fourth ex-employee who indicated he contacted the federal NDP after learning Chartrand was nominated as the Liberal candidate for Churchill-Keewatinook Aski.

That employee said he left RRC Polytech when his complaints involving Chartrand were unresolved.

The Liberal party has declined to comment on the vetting of specific candidate applications, citing confidentiality. RRC Polytech has released limited information about Chartrand’s tenure over the same rationale.

“I’m really disappointed at (the Liberals’) lack of integrity or their lack of an answer to the people,” said the whistleblower whose complaints were substantiated by Rachlis Neville LLP.

“To be honest, it makes me question if the prime minister has been given the correct information to make the best decisions for who is in key positions.”

She noted it was the party that had first brought her and Chartrand together, as they both worked on her 2015 bid under the leadership of then-Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

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