Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.
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The Canadian Human Rights Commission does not capture or track whether dismissed complaints involve trauma, coercive control, surveillance, systemic misconduct, abuse of authority, or administrative injustice, records released through Access to Information confirm. None of those six terms are prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, so the federal commission tasked with screening human rights complaints does not record them as data points when it dismisses a file.
The release, request number A-2025-00003, was produced by the Canadian Human Rights Commission on August 7, 2025. It responds to a request for statistical data on human rights complaints dismissed between January 1, 2023 and May 20, 2025 that cite any of those six specific harms. Instead of the requested breakdown, the commission returned two aggregate totals and an explicit note that the requested categories are not tracked.
What the Documents Show
Across the 28-month window covered by the request, the commission dismissed 270 complaints filed under all 13 prohibited grounds of discrimination identified in the Canadian Human Rights Act. That works out to roughly 9 to 10 complaint dismissals per month, on average, against federally regulated employers and service providers.
A separate count tracks dismissals categorized as systemic discrimination — complaints concerning policies, practices, or organizational structures that, whether by design or effect, create or perpetuate unfair disadvantage for certain groups. Sixty-five systemic discrimination complaints were dismissed across the same window. Systemic files therefore accounted for roughly one in four of the dismissed complaints during the period, a share that points to how often broader pattern-and-practice allegations come through the commission and how often they fail to advance.
The 13 prohibited grounds the commission does count are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, and conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted. Systemic discrimination is defined in the release as covering employment, services, accommodation, or the display of discriminatory material — particularly in cases involving complex systemic issues.
What the commission flags as outside its tracking framework is the more striking part of the release. The note attached to the dismissal totals states plainly that "the terms trauma, coercive control, surveillance, systemic misconduct, abuse of authority, or administrative injustice are not prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Act, and as such this information is not captured or tracked." The commission did not estimate, sample, or otherwise produce data for the six terms named in the original request.
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What the Six Untracked Terms Mean
The six terms named in the request describe forms of harm and patterns of conduct that complainants frequently raise when they file with federal or provincial human rights bodies, but that do not map onto the Canadian Human Rights Act's enumerated grounds. Trauma describes the psychological injury that often follows a discriminatory act rather than the act itself. Coercive control refers to patterns of intimidation, isolation, and surveillance most commonly discussed in the context of intimate partner abuse, and is a recognized criminal-law concept in several jurisdictions but not a human rights ground. Surveillance, administrative injustice, and abuse of authority describe how institutions behave toward individuals; systemic misconduct points to organizational failures.
None of these terms appear in section 3 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which defines the 13 grounds. The commission's intake and case-management systems are built around those grounds, which is why an individual complainant alleging coercive control by a federally regulated employer would be recorded under whichever protected ground their complaint cites — likely sex, disability, family status, or another listed category — not under "coercive control" itself.
The practical effect of the records released here is that there is no federal dataset answering the question the original requester asked. A researcher or member of the public looking to understand how often Canadians complain about surveillance or abuse of authority within federally regulated workplaces will not find the answer in CHRC dismissal data, because the commission does not record those characterizations of the underlying conduct.
Dismissal Patterns and the Wider Context
The 270 dismissed-complaint figure does not, on its own, indicate how many total complaints the commission received during the same 28-month window or what proportion of received complaints were dismissed versus referred onward to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The release covers only the dismissal count, not the broader case flow. Without those denominators, the dismissal rate cannot be calculated from this document alone.
The 65 systemic discrimination dismissals are notable because systemic files typically allege wider patterns rather than single incidents — alleged discriminatory hiring practices at a federally regulated employer, for example, or an institutional policy with unequal effects across protected groups. Systemic complaints generally require more evidence and broader investigation, and dismissals at the screening stage in this category often turn on questions of jurisdiction, evidentiary sufficiency, or whether the matter could more appropriately be dealt with by another body.
Demand for federal complaint mechanisms has been rising. Recent reporting on complaints to other federal commissions, such as the 17 per cent year-over-year rise in telecom complaints, shows Canadians are increasingly turning to formal federal channels to escalate disputes. The CHRC's dismissal numbers sit within that broader pattern, but the absence of granular tracking on terms like coercive control or abuse of authority means parts of that demand remain invisible in the federal data.
What's Not in the Documents
Several pieces of information that would sharpen the picture are absent from the release. The records do not break down the 270 dismissals by individual prohibited ground — they are bundled as "All Grounds of Discrimination." That bundling prevents any analysis of which grounds dominate the dismissal pipeline, whether disability complaints are dismissed more often than family status complaints, or whether sexual orientation and gender identity complaints follow different screening patterns.
The release also does not include the reasons for dismissal. Federal human rights complaints can be dismissed for a range of reasons, including being outside the commission's jurisdiction, being trivial or vexatious, being more appropriately handled by another procedure, or being filed beyond the one-year time limit. The records show only that 270 complaints were dismissed; they do not show why.
The request itself signals what the requester was probably trying to learn. By naming six specific terms — trauma, coercive control, surveillance, systemic misconduct, abuse of authority, and administrative injustice — the request appears to have been looking for evidence of how often Canadians who file human rights complaints describe their experience using language that falls outside the Act's protected categories. The commission's response confirms that this evidence does not exist within its data systems, which is itself an answer of sorts: the federal complaint framework does not collect information at that level of granularity.
Implications for Transparency and Future Requests
For organizations and individuals advocating on issues like coercive control or abuse of authority in federally regulated workplaces, the release confirms that aggregate federal data will not support quantitative claims about how widespread those experiences are within the complaint pipeline. Provincial human rights commissions track somewhat different ground frameworks and may produce different data, but the federal commission's records will not.
The release also points to a recurring feature of access-to-information work in Canada: the response often reveals what is not collected as clearly as what is. The earlier Parliament Hill rally calling on the Carney government to prioritise human rights attracted demands for stronger federal action on rights issues; the data infrastructure underpinning the existing federal complaint system, as the A-2025-00003 release shows, captures discrimination through 13 enumerated grounds and does not extend to the language complainants and advocates frequently use to describe what happened to them.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission is currently undergoing structural and resource reviews tied to wider federal department changes, and any future updates to its case-management framework could expand or contract the data fields it captures. As of the documents released through A-2025-00003, however, the six terms named in the original request remain outside the commission's tracking framework.
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Support Government FilesAll figures referenced are from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, request A-2025-00003, obtained through Access to Information. The records contain aggregate counts of complaints dismissed between January 1, 2023 and May 20, 2025 across the 13 prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and a separate count of dismissed systemic discrimination complaints. The commission confirmed it does not track the terms trauma, coercive control, surveillance, systemic misconduct, abuse of authority, or administrative injustice.
