‘Zero tolerance policy’: How sexual assaults permeate planting camps

The day I planted 4125 trees. If you look closely at my forearm, you can see the number of boxes of trees I planted drawn in pen. (Photo provided by Sarah Pledge Dickson, 2017

Two numbers stick out in my head when I think about my time tree planting – 4,125, the most trees I planted in a single day. And 475, the number of trees I planted a day after I was raped in my tent on night off. 

Tree planting was the first time I spent more than a weekend camping. And most planters will tell you that planting is nothing like camping. I was 18 and had just finished my first year of university. I knew next to nothing about the industry and no one that had ever done it before. 

Before planting became the industry it is today, it was a lucrative manual labour job that paid well for piece rate. Making nine or 10 cents per tree planted when you could plant between two and three thousand trees a day used to mean raking in cash. 

When I planted in 2017 and 2018, I was still making nine or 10 cents for almost every tree I planted. I had a few lucky days where I made 11 or 12. 

Planting camps were also male dominated. But for a job that falls into the resource sector, tree planting is now one of the most gender-balanced industries. But some of that “macho” culture and those power dynamics remain.

What happens in camp outside of work hours shapes the undercurrents of these planting camps. Little is known about what happens in tree planting camps, from the party culture, the drugs and alcohol and the unreported or neglected sexual harassment and assault allegations. 

There is very little public awareness of sexual assaults in planting camps, but they happen, a lot. Packing 60 kids into what is essentially a bush party that lasts three months has been what many planting camps have looked like for years. 

In 2019, Airika Owen asked planters to share their stories about sexual harassment and assault in camps. The anonymous survey conducted by Owen while she worked as the executive administrator for the Northern Society for Domestic Peace in Smithers B.C., was met with overwhelming response, enough to garner national news attention.

The survey is still collecting data, but the preliminary findings have been described as “deeply disturbing,” by members of the forestry industry. Owen has travelled to various planting camps to help implement sexual harassment and assault training. When the study was first released, there were at least 70 responses from British Columbia alone, from harassment on logging roads to assaults in camp. 

I was one of the people who wasn’t ready to share their story. And as with many of the sexual assault cases that go unreported, I know I wasn’t alone in my silence.

Erica Dolman has been working in planting since 2016 and was managing a crew of tree planters in a camp in 2020 that experienced an assault. The head of their camp, known as “Tuna,” took matters into his own hands after health and safety protocols failed him and his team.

“And the pinnacle thing that happened was there was an assault on night off,” said Dolman. “About mid-season, and it just destroyed our fucking camp. Tuna decided to fire the perpetrators. And he said, if you don’t agree with me or my decision, then you should probably leave this camp. And about half the camp quit.” 

Power dynamics are complex in tree planting camps. Often, the differences between staff and managers are nothing more than a couple years of planting experience and a different dinner table to eat at. And on party nights, the lines blur even further. I once walked in on staff rolling a joint in the head office and stood next to the camp’s supervisor in a drinking game of flip-cup. 

The camp that I was living in when I was assaulted had a “zero tolerance policy.” I told my crew boss what happened, and he was required to bring it to management. I met with the health and safety coordinator and the camp’s supervisor, and they met with the perpetrator. From my conversations, neither had ever dealt with an assault in camp before. It was clear to me that they didn’t know what to do and that there wasn’t a clear chain of command.  

Dolman’s camp had the same policy. And upper management outside her camp didn’t have any additional resources. 

“We had no support from upper management,” Dolman says. “It’s just zero tolerance, written on one piece of paper: ‘zero tolerance for sexual assault.’ Ok cool, but you know, it’s fucking bullshit and it doesn’t work.” 

R.J. Krampus planted for five seasons starting in 2006. After suffering a serious workplace accident, he started working as a health and safety coordinator for planting camps. He now works for Parks Canada but says that zero tolerance policies don’t prepare people for when something actually happens. 

“It was a lot of lip service,” Krampus says about the policies. “It was like, this won’t be tolerated? Well, what about when things actually happen? Have we addressed the difficulty that someone would have in reporting?” 

In my conversation with the health and safety coordinator, I was directed to an anonymous email account I could contact if I wanted to report anything to the company. While we did go into town on days off, there was never service or internet within the camps. The perpetrator, who was in a leadership position, wasn’t fired. 

The whole process lasted two weeks. By the time it was over, I’d convinced myself I was over everything and ready to pound trees into the ground so long as I didn’t have to work directly with him. 

This was enough for the camp’s leadership, who never asked me again how I was doing.

Despite that, he continued to live a stone’s throw from my tent and ride the same bus into town. And for the last two shifts of the season, he was moved onto the same crew as me. 

Dolman remembers that it took a few weeks of the season to fire the two people who were perpetrators in the assault in her camp. I asked her if there were guidelines for what to do. 

“The short answer is no,” she says. “I don’t even remember if there was an actual protocol in the event that an incident occurs.” 

She credits Tuna, the supervisor, with managing the situation.

“I think largely these people were fired and taken out of our camp because of Tuna’s leadership,” says Dolman. “I don’t really know that would have gone the same way if it was somebody else leading our camp.”

A lack of training in handling sexual assault or any harassment in camp is something people who’ve been in the industry for a number of years have noticed. 

Lark Richard, 46, started planting in 1996. He’s finally retiring this summer after nearly three decades in the bush. He says that when he started, the mentality surrounding planting was much different. 

“When I started, it was ‘go out and conquer the bush. Conquer nature,’” he says. 

But that’s slowly changing. Richard told me about the most recent seasons he’s worked and the training he received. 

“At the start of the season, we’re having workshops about consent,” he says. “Unfortunately, they’re kind of tied into the harassment and bullying workshops. But it’s still something that’s discussed. And I don’t think that it was ever considered before.”

Allison Rich helped to implement, for her camp’s first time, specific training for sexual assault and harassment. She started planting in 2016 and saw some dominant and competitive culture. 

“The high ballers were the cool people,” she says. High ballers are people with very high production each day. “It was like they were royalty. If you were a rookie, it was almost like I’m gonna give you a couple weeks and then decide if you’re worthy of being my friend.”  

Rich was involved in her university’s orientation, or “frosh” week. She’d had some training on teaching about sexual assault and harassment before becoming a planting crew boss. On one of the earliest days in camp last summer, she made a speech from the bed of one of the trucks. Standing at five-foot-nothing, she says she doesn’t give off an intimidating vibe. But she felt it was important that the training was coming from the camp staff. 

“I think when you have somebody standing up there, who is in camp and will always be in camp, it’s going to make it more serious,” she says. “It’s like, I am here talking about this, we are passionate about this, we do believe in this. And they [planters] are seeing that.”

And training like that is paying off. Some planting companies have “planter liaisons,” planters who you can approach with issues that can be anonymously brought to the camp’s management. 

Ashley Moodie, 27, is going into her fourth season this summer in northern Alberta. She joined a Facebook group for planters before her first season in 2019 to get to know more people. Someone from the group reached out to her in case she had any questions. At the time, she says it was cool. 

Shortly after, however, she describes their conversation as being inappropriate and harassing. In her second season, she shared a campsite with another camp. The person who’d been messaging her was in that camp. 

She approached the camp’s planter liaison who brought the issue up the ladder. Her concerns were met with immediate action from the supervisor. 

“He took me aside after dinner one day to ask me what happened,” Moodie says. “I tell him that it all happened in the offseason and that it’s not a big deal. And he was like, Ashley, this is a huge deal. What if he did something to you or one of your friends? He was like, I’m not taking any chances.” 

Moodie’s supervisor approached the supervisor in the other camp about him. They’d already been having difficulties with him, so he was promptly fired. Moodie says that seeing the quick response was impressive. 

“I felt like that was a really cool thing,” she says. “Because we have all these discussions surrounding sexual harassment and consent. So, to be able to go to a supervisor who just acts on it right away, that was so cool.” 

Like most industries, change in tree planting is coming but it’s slow moving. Talking to planters about their experiences showed me that change will come from the people working in the bush, the people who measure their days amid the bleak landscape and the robotic rhythm of planting trees. 

There’s one more number from my time planting that I remember well, 2020 trees: the day I outplanted the perpetrator.