By Nancy Carr, The Associated Press
TORONTO (CP) -- When native corrections officer Michael McKinnon raised a stink about being called “Wagon Burner” and “Crazy Horse” by his managers at a Toronto jail, all employees were ordered to take a day-long class in sensitivity training.
It was, McKinnon said, “a waste of time.”
“They didn’t tackle the hard issues, like racism itself,” said McKinnon, who has been on paid leave for 13 months from his job as an acting manager at the Toronto East Detention Centre.
Instead, the training put on for workers in the Ministry of Public Safety and Security dealt with a scenario about a native inmate making racially offensive comments to another native inmate. Not a mention was made about supervisors making their staff feel uncomfortable, he said.
At the same time, the ministry is fighting a December order from Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal that senior ministry staff, including deputy minister John Rabeau and assistant deputy minister Gary Commeford, take the training, too.
Sensitivity training was also ordered for an Ontario provincial police officer, media reports revealed last week, after he made racist remarks about native protesters during a standoff at Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995.
But the training isn’t just remediation for native altercations.
The Halifax police department said earlier this month it will give all officers new training to improve racial sensitivity after admitting black boxer Kirk Johnson was discriminated against by members of the force.
And in 2002, a teacher in the same province attended sensitivity training after allegedly encouraging students to hit a boy with Down syndrome.
Sensitivity training, also known as diversity training or anti-harassment training, is a popular tool used by employers these days. New hires on police forces, at hospitals, schools, stores and jails often have to sit through a few hours of the training before they can start work. The interactive, role-playing seminars are meant to teach how diverse people can work together to create an environment where everyone is respected, said one trainer.
“It’s about helping people understand concepts of fairness and inclusion ... so that customers, clients, patients, consumers, etc., can feel that they’re respected and treated with dignity,” said Linda Grobovsky, a principal with World Links Grobovsky, Pages and Associates.
“Most people don’t wake up in the morning and want to get into a problem at work.”
However, because sensitivity training is such a broad form of education, and not all programs are created equally, they’re not always effective. As well, the people who attend the training are not always receptive to learning.
“For people who are already sensitive, (sensitivity training) has a huge impact,” said Phebe-Jane Poole, an author and expert in diversity training.
But about one per cent of the people Poole trains are what she calls “hard-core harassers,” whose attitudes are harder to change.
"(Sensitivity training) would probably change their behaviour, along with an employer or an organization who says, `You cannot do that or say that in our organization,’ ” Poole said.
“But when we start to get into changing beliefs of people, it’s really hard to do that.”
Carol Tator, a writer, scholar and teacher in the field of racism, is more blunt. She would probably understand why McKinnon called his sensitivity training “lip service.” And she is doubtful the cop who was forced to take the training for uttering racist comments at Ipperwash -- the day before native protester Dudley George was killed by an officer at the standoff -- was helped by his training.
“If that guy sat in that (training) room from now until forever, the organization and the institution he went back to after the training would still be the same,” Tator said.
Without examining the workplace as a whole, and creating policies that support diversity, training individuals isn’t worth much, she said.
“It’s finding a quick and dirty solution,” Tator said
Most people who work in sensitivity training also agree the training is much more effective if it is done by an independent organization, rather than a trainer affiliated with the workplace.
But the sensitivity training McKinnon and the other corrections officers got was just the opposite, he said, noting that the facilitators were government workers.
“That’s the fox looking after the hen house,” said McKinnon from his home in Brooklin, Ont., about 60 kilometres east of Toronto.
Ontario’s provincial police force has done the same, putting a staff member, Insp. Glen Trivett, in charge of the force’s native cultural training, which every recruit must undergo. The program includes having elders from a First Nations community speak with recruits about their history and their culture.
Trivett, who himself is native, declined to speak about the police force’s cultural training program, saying he is a potential witness in the upcoming Ipperwash inquest.
But Chief Glen Bannon, with the Anishinabek police service in northern Ontario, had nothing but praise for Trivett’s training course.
“I would say it is 110 per cent effective,” said Bannon, who is also the past president of the First Nations Chiefs of Police.
The fact that Bannon hasn’t ever attended Trivett’s sensitivity training wouldn’t be surprising to Tator.
“Is the chief . . . going to go to sensitivity training? Unlikely,” Tator said.
“He might come and introduce it.”
For McKinnon, the fact that senior ministry staff continue to fight sensitivity training, and that the training alone might not be enough to remedy what the human rights tribunal called his “racially poisoned” workplace, may mean many more months on paid leave.
He calls the situation embarrassing.
“It’s absolutely embarrassing the money that’s going out to pay people who have been harassed,” he said.
“I’ve been offered buyouts. I’ve been offered transfers and I’m not leaving because I did nothing wrong.”