The Norms Behind the Bad Behaviour: What AHS v United Nurses of Alberta Teaches Employers About Sexual Harassment Training

Why norms belong in your training program

Norms are an essential part of sexual harassment training because they force you to look beyond the bad behaviour to what's enabling it. This can be tough. It takes some self-reflection and, often, acknowledgment that management has also dropped the ball.

Most training programs teach people what harassment looks like and how to report it, often with a disproportionate focus on overtly sexual misconduct. While important, it's not sufficient. Apart from missing the non-overtly sexual gender-based harassment that affects most workplaces, this approach overlooks the fact that harassment is not just a behaviour problem. It is a norms problem. It runs on shared, mostly unspoken assumptions about the relative value and power of individuals and who gets to move freely through a workplace.

A recent labour board decision out of Alberta shows those norms in action: Alberta Health Services v United Nurses of Alberta, 2026 ALRB 88.

What happened

The grievor was a registered nurse who had worked her way up to Assistant Head Nurse at an Alberta hospital. In May 2019, she texted an attending physician about a deteriorating patient, a routine part of her job. After the clinical exchange ended, the doctor kept texting. He offered to bring her supper. When she said she needed to sleep, he sent a sexually explicit text.

She brought up the incident during a job interview for a temporary Assistant Head Nurse position on another unit. She became emotional and did not name him. She got the job. For nearly a year, she managed the problem herself, with her manager's knowledge and support: leaving the unit when the doctor attended, arranging for a nurse practitioner to handle consultations with him. Management did not conduct an investigation on the mistaken assumption that doing so required a formal complaint first.

In April 2020, almost a year after the text, the nurse filed a formal complaint. The hospital referred it to Medical Affairs, the department responsible for physician complaints. She eventually received a letter saying appropriate action had been taken, with an apology from the doctor, but was told the Medical Staff Bylaws prevented disclosure of what that action was.

Her mental health suffered. The Workers' Compensation Board accepted her psychological injury claim and issued medical restrictions. In June 2021, she and the doctor crossed paths in a stairwell. They did not speak. It was devastating anyway, and she needed medical leave afterward.

When her restriction against working with the doctor became permanent, the hospital concluded it could not keep her on her unit. It moved her through five temporary placements, including COVID screening roles, and eventually to a hospital in another town. She struggled to adjust, she wasn't able to make use of her skillset, and her depression worsened such that she needed to shift to part-time hours. The doctor, throughout all of this, kept his practice, his privileges, and his freedom of movement.

The union grieved. The arbitrator found the hospital breached its duty to maintain a safe workplace, discriminated against the nurse based on gender and disability by removing her from her unit, and failed to accommodate her to the point of undue hardship. In July 2026, the Labour Relations Board dismissed the hospital's review application, finding the arbitrator's reasoning justified, transparent and intelligible under the reasonableness standard.

Four messages the employer sent

Legal findings tell you what an employer is liable for. Norms analysis asks a different question: what did the employer's conduct communicate, to the nurse, to the doctor, and to every worker watching?

Consider what messages were sent when the employer:

1. Took no action until she filed a formal complaint almost a year later

The hospital knew about the harassment within days. A manager offered the nurse information about complaint options and supports. What the hospital did not do was investigate, or take any step directed at the source of the problem, until the nurse herself triggered the formal process almost a year later.

Telling a worker about her complaint options is not action. It is a transfer of responsibility.

The message: this is your problem to escalate, or not.

2. Deputized the nurse to protect herself

In the meantime, the nurse's safety strategy was avoidance, and she was the one doing the avoiding. She left her own unit when the doctor attended. She rearranged her duties around his presence. And she had no way of knowing when he would show up, because nobody required him to give notice.

The hospital supported these measures, which is to say, it did not punish her for taking them. But support for self-protection is not protection.

The message: you are on your own, and we will accommodate your hiding.

3. Claimed it could not restrict the doctor, without ever testing that claim

When the WCB restrictions required that the nurse and doctor not interact, the hospital's position was that it could not control the doctor's movements. His clinical privileges were governed by the Medical Staff Bylaws, and only the Medical Affairs process could touch them.

The arbitrator rejected this. The hospital could have issued simple directives to the doctor, outside the bylaw process, to notify the unit before attending or use a designated stairwell. These measures would have required modest administrative effort. They stemmed from his own misconduct. And they would have let the nurse keep her job. The hospital never seriously considered them.

The message: His routines are too important to tamper with. Yours are negotiable.

4. Bounced the nurse from placement to placement while the doctor moved freely

Having decided it could not restrict him, the hospital's solution was to relocate her. Five temporary placements, then a hospital in another town. The roles did not use her skills. The removal from her unit cost her the chance to compete for the permanent version of the position she was already doing, a position the arbitrator noted she would likely have won as the incumbent. Her depression worsened.

To be precise about the law: the arbitrator found that the removal from her unit was discrimination based on gender and disability, and that the failure to accommodate her there breached the employer's duty. The subsequent placements themselves, and the search outside the hospital, were found lawful. But lawfulness is not the whole story. A watching workforce does not parse which links in the chain were upheld. It sees a woman who reported harassment being moved, again and again, while the man who harassed her stayed put.

What norms do these messages reinforce?

All of this broadcasts that the female nurse is, indeed, inferior to the male doctor, and that this power differential can be exploited without consequence. That the complainant is really the burden to be dealt with. And that informal self-protection will have fewer career and wellbeing ramifications than engaging the employer's formal complaint process.

This nurse tried to handle it herself for almost a year. Then she used the formal process. After that, she could not return to her home unit, she lost her role, she was moved out of the hospital altogether, and she ended up at half her hours. Almost none of that was found unlawful. That is rather the point. A worker watching this sequence does not learn that the system works. She learns that the informal route was the safer one. And that is precisely the norm that keeps harassment invisible.

It is also why the duty to address harassment cannot wait for a complaint. Courts have been clear on this. In Metrolinx v Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1587, the Ontario courts confirmed that there are many reasons a survivor may not want to proceed with a formal complaint, and that an employer's occupational health and safety obligations do not depend on one being filed.

The legal duties, briefly

I'm mindful that the doctor was not an employee of the hospital. His privileges were governed by the Medical Staff Bylaws, and changes to those privileges run through a separate process. This is standard in Canadian hospitals, and it genuinely constrains what a hospital can do. It could not fire him. It could not discipline him in the ordinary employment sense.

But none of that absolved the employer of its duties to the nurse, who was its employee:

• A duty to investigate every incident, not just every complaint. Alberta's OHS framework requires employers to treat harassment as a workplace hazard and to investigate incidents of harassment and violence: Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Code, s. 390(1). The trigger is the incident. The hospital knew about this one within days.
• A duty to protect. The employer was obligated to ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of its workers, and to eliminate hazards or, where elimination is not possible, control them. The arbitrator found that the doctor's presence was a medically confirmed workplace hazard for this nurse. Tiptoeing around a hazard is not controlling it.
• A human rights procedural duty. Before concluding that accommodation on her unit was impossible, the employer had to actually canvass its options, including the directives. Undue hardship cannot rest on impressionistic, speculative or unsubstantiated concerns, which is how the arbitrator characterized the hospital's position. The hospital decided it was easier to move her out of the way, and called that decision a constraint.

The arbitrator also confirmed another human rights law principle from Hale v University of British Columbia Okanagan: an employer's inadequate response to sexual misconduct can itself constitute discrimination if it results in further damage. The harm did not end with the text. It continued in the response.

What this means for your training program

It's important to recognize that individual managers in this case really did seem to care about this nurse and respected her professional skills. And so, this is not an indictment of the people that make up management. But the reality is that it is ultimately up to management to introduce norm-shifting systems that dismantle the entitlements driving sexual harassment.

What does that look like in practice?

• Train on the response, not just the conduct. Few training programs teach managers how to respond to an incident of harassment when there is no complaint, which requires a deeper understanding of survivor/victim behaviour and trauma- and violence-informed care.
• Audit whose movements your solutions restrict. Be wary of reinforcing the power differential the harassment exploited.
• Do not wait for the complaint. Build your incident response to trigger on knowledge, not paperwork. Your statutory duties already work this way.
• Pressure test your "we can't" claims. Before concluding a constraint is real, canvass the less drastic options and document that you did.

You can either let the norms proliferate or do something about it. Your training program does not do much unless it helps you with the latter.

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If your sexual harassment training stops at defining the behaviour, it's not doing its job. I design training that equips managers to recognize the norms enabling harassment and to respond in ways that protect workers instead of relocating them. Book a strategic advisory session to review your training and response protocols against the standards in this decision.