Case Will Continue Against Safety Trainer for Using Pictures of Naked Women

A female worker claimed that during a safety training session in which she was the only woman, the instructor showed pornographic pictures of naked women. The Ministry of Forests removed him from the list of approved trainers but later reinstated him. So the worker filed a sexual harassment complaint against the instructor and the Ministry. The Human Rights Tribunal dismissed the complaint against the Ministry but ruled that the case against the trainer could proceed. The trainer admitted using pictures he’d scanned from Playboy to “relax” the mainly male training class. Thus, he didn’t establish that the worker’s complaint had no reasonable likelihood of success [Pitcher v. BC (Ministry of Forests), [2012] BCHRT 70 (CanLII), March 12, 2012].