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Royal Canadian Mounted Police | Gendarmerie royale du Canada receives LiveWorkPlay Inclusive Employer Award

Public Sector Inclusive Employer Award: Royal Canadian Mounted Police | Gendarmerie royale du Canada

Anna Nelson, Director of LiveWorkPlay Employment Supports:

The Inclusive Employer award for the public sector goes to a government department or agency that hires one or more jobseekers and promotes the hiring of workers with intellectual disabilities or autism to public sector peers and external audiences.

In the past this award has gone to Health Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the Public Service Commission of Canada, Finance Canada, and last year, to Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada (ISED).

We are pleased to have representation from ISED here with us tonight to help give out the award to this year’s recipient, thank you Alexandra Prestera for being here to present this award for 2025.

You may have noticed that all our past recipients are from the federal government, so I want to make sure to be clear that the provincial government and municipal government are both eligible for this award, and we’d love to work with them to make that happen. We are optimistic about that possibility thanks to some great discussions with the City of Ottawa over the past few months. Perhaps in 2026, we’ll see a City of Ottawa representative at the podium.

Here to introduce this year’s public service inclusive employment award recipient, we are blessed to have with us a legend of Canada’s federal public service, who is retired but now serves as the hardworking volunteer chair of the LiveWorkPlay Federal Employment Strategy Group. Please join me in welcoming Mary Gusella to continue with this presentation.

Mary Gusella, Volunteer Chair, Federal Employment Strategy Group (FESG)

Thank you Anna, I look forward to this every year. We’ve got another very deserving recipient in 2025.

As many of you know, we started our work with the federal public service in 2015 and have now supported 220 hires working with 43 departments who have hired at least one person with LiveWorkPlay support. But it was not until 2019 that we saw the achievement of the first indeterminate employment status. That’s the name we use in the public service to indicate that an employee has a permanent position.  And we now have 47 indeterminate positions, and the push is on for 50!

The recipients of this year’s award still employ that original indeterminate hire, who is known around his branch as the “computer wizard”.  After attending the ceremony where that hire was announced as an indeterminate position, our LiveWorkPlay co-leader Keenan Wellar told the rest of the team: “They could lead a seminar about this at a supported employment conference. Their focus is on making the workplace accessible and inclusive and helping the employee shine, and I am overwhelmed to see the degree to which this attitude is shared throughout the organization!”

But they did not stop at one hire. Jump ahead to spring of 2024, and they reached out to say they were interested in additional hires. Over the next 6 months, they made 3 new hires. And just as that third person was being hired, a conversation was started about how to develop more hires in the NCR and other locations across the country. We are excited to able to assist them with those future hires through a network of partners- called the Canadian Network Supporting Inclusive Public Service Employment (or CNIPSE for short) that we developed in 2019. We cannot wait to see what happens next.

Beyond what I have mentioned already, this agency and its employees stand out in other ways. Robert Olsen, Inclusive Employment Specialist at LiveWorkPlay, describes their team leads and managers as phenomenal partners to work with, and I quote: “They are always keen to hear our recommendations about Standard Operating Procedures and how to make them more accessible. They have focused on developing great trainers for supporting new employees, and the team leads are incredibly invested in the process. They see inclusion as a core responsibility that they embrace with their colleagues as true and valued members of their team. “

Please join me in congratulating the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as this year’s recipient of the Inclusive Employer Award for the public sector.

We have amazing representation from the RCMP here tonight, and here to accept the award is the Chief Human Resources Officer, Shelley Peters. Congratulations, and we welcome you to share a few words.

Stéphane Drouin, Chief Superintendent, Director General, Workplace Responsibility Branch, shared remarks on behalf of the RCMP.
[The transcript below is an unofficial rendering of live comments].

Well, thank you very much. After your speech, it will be very difficult to get to such a high bar. But I would just say the RCMP takes this very seriously. We want to be an inclusive employer. Why is this important? Because we’re serving a population, and we need to reflect the population. And we do this by changing the culture one step at a time.

So I will stop soon but what I would say is we have four amazing employees. We have, the first one was Troy, who’s not here today. Oh, okay. Therem you can see, he’s here. Then we also have Andrew, Desmond, and Mathieu. I had the pleasure to talk to Mathieu’s mom a couple of minutes agoSo thank you. Those 4 individuals are doing amazing work, and I’ll tell you why. They work with the ATIP division, the Access to Information and Privacy division of RCMP. They’re digitalizing all the documents for us.

Why is it important? It’s because when we do it in due time, when you guys or any Canadians are making a request to know what happened, what was the cause of this, we provide the information to you in due time. So they’re contributing therefore to democracy. When you’re contributing to democracy, you’re making sure that people don’t have to go to social media and get what we call misleading information. So their job is really important.

But if we have a success today, it’s because we have a great collaboration. I heard this mentioned many times, and I want to, especially underline your work, inclusion workers providing solutions. Thank you to Robert Olsen, and all this LiveWorkPlay team, and also the management team of RCMP. This is all about teamwork and it would not have been possible without all of you. So thanks for reaching out. We’re very happy to be part of this success and looking forward for, as you mentioned, soon to be 50 hires, or more [throughout the public service] most likely!