Hampstead Managers Cash in while Workers Decry Harassment and Threats on the Job

At his lowest point, Eric* would leave work every night, sit in his car and cry.

He says that, for nearly three years, his supervisor at Hampstead Public Security taunted him, humiliated him in front of his colleagues and even used the town’s resources on a prank that mocked the constable’s ethnicity. 

Towards the end of his time at the town of Hampstead, a Montreal suburb, Eric developed a series of stress-related health issues. His jaw began to lock from constant clenching, and he couldn’t sleep at night. A series of gastric issues led Eric to undergo a colonoscopy and gastroscopy. 

“I was destroyed inside,” said Eric, who did not want his real name published for privacy reasons. “I didn’t have any problem getting a doctor to sign for sick leave when I opened up about what had been going on at work.”

Management at the town Hampstead was initially supportive when Eric brought up the sense of discomfort he felt around his boss, Captain Brent Roberts. 

Thierry Houle, the town’s head of security, even encouraged Eric to document his experiences. In messages reviewed by The Rover, Houle comes across as caring and attentive to Eric’s complaints. 

But still, nothing changed.

Eric went on leave in December 2022 and quit his job in 2023. Roberts was kept on as Captain. Shortly after Eric went on sick leave, another constable sent a resignation letter to Mayor Jeremy Levi and Hampstead’s six councillors, citing problems with an unnamed supervisor on the public security team.

“My mental and physical health has been destroyed by this toxic and unhealthy work environment,” the constable’s letter reads. “It is a place of work in which there is strong negligence, constant stress.”

In a telephone interview Thursday, the letter’s author confirmed it was referring to Cpt. Roberts. 

He was one of four former constables who told The Rover that Roberts’ attitude played a role in their decision to quit the public security team between 2022 and 2023.

By the time of Eric’s departure, the issues surrounding Roberts’ leadership were well-known at Hampstead Town Hall. The town had already paid an outside firm $18,000 to investigate claims by Eric and five other constables of psychological harassment against the captain. But he was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing.

Each of the constables interviewed by The Rover called Hampstead a great place to work. Just a 15-minute drive west from downtown, Hampstead has an almost pastoral aesthetic; brick houses with pitched roofs, winding streets lined with maple trees and parks that host little league baseball.

“It is an absolutely beautiful place and the people are lovely, but there’s a dark side to Hampstead,” said one former constable. “The people working to keep it safe, to serve their community, they’re living in fear of their boss.”

The Rover twice contacted the town of Hampstead to request a comment from Roberts or his superiors. We also contacted Roberts directly on his work email. The town’s director of communications stated that the allegations against the captain were treated with rigour and that they take all complaints from their employees seriously.

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For the past month, The Rover has taken a close look at the workplace culture inside the town of Hampstead. In our reporting, we interviewed a dozen current and former employees of the town. They detailed a toxic workplace that has resulted in two external investigations into psychological harassment in the last three years, a high turnover rate on the public security team and the resignation of its director general last year amid accusations of financial impropriety.

They also spoke about the threat of arbitrary dismissal for even the smallest infraction, of being assigned to tasks that were far outside of their job’s official mandate and encountering strong resistance to any questions about management’s use of public funds.

None wanted to go on the record for fear of reprisals.

As the workplace climate devolved, Hampstead’s highest paid managers saw their bonuses nearly double in the first three years after Mayor Jeremy Levi replaced Mayor Bill Steinberg in 2021.

The town did not make any of its elected officials available for an interview. None of the allegations that surfaced in our investigation are criminal, but some could lead to lawsuits.

***

As complaints against Roberts racked up and were even acknowledged by Houle, the captain’s boss collected bonuses considered far outside the norm in municipal politics.

Houle — whose job it is to oversee security and information technology at Hampstead — collected a $9,000 bonus in 2022, another $9,000 bonus in 2023 and a $13,500 bonus in 2024. This was in addition to his six-figure salary, according to documents obtained through an access to information request. 

Though bonuses are commonplace for managerial positions at cities and boroughs across the island of Montreal, they are performance-based and typically range between 1 and 5 per cent of a manager’s salary. This is according to two former borough mayors who spoke to The Rover on background.

Houle’s bonuses, by contrast, ranged from 7 to 10 per cent of his annual pay. He was hardly alone in receiving lavish bonuses. 

After taking over from longtime mayor Steinberg in 2021, Levi oversaw a dramatic increase in the allocation of performance bonuses to upper management. In 2020, Steinberg’s last year in office, the town paid out a total of $65,000 to Hamstead’s upper management. By Levi’s third year as mayor, Hampstead awarded $149,000 in bonuses to the town’s highest-paid employees.

The Rover sent a series of questions to the town of Hampstead, notably how the municipality determines the amount of bonus pay awarded every year. Are they contractually mandated or performance-based? The town did not answer that question but stated that “Hampstead places the highest importance on fostering a respectful, safe, and professional work environment.”

If the bonuses are performance-based, Hampstead appears to be an incredibly forgiving workplace for upper management.

Sources inside the public sector union that represents Hampstead’s office workers showed The Rover nine grievances sent to human resources director Simona Sonnenwirth between February of 2023 and early 2025. A grievance is a breach of the collective bargaining agreement, which can ultimately land the town before a labour tribunal and open it to a possible court case.

In one of the grievances, an employee wasn’t receiving their sick leave benefits because — according to an email from Sonnenwirth obtained by The Rover — Hampstead’s insurance provider hadn’t yet approved her claim. After going without a paycheque for nearly a month, the employee asked her boss for proof of employment so she could apply for employment insurance.

“She was a mother who wasn’t going to be able to pay her rent that month,” said one union source. “All they needed to do was send proof of employment. It takes two minutes. They didn’t.”

Many of the other grievances — for psychological harassment, unpaid bonuses and constables being assigned to do the work of building inspectors — were not specifically directed at Sonnenwirth, but they fall under her responsibilities as director of human resources.

She received over $40,000 in bonuses between 2020 and 2024.

“I can’t speak to the facts of the matter, but based on the claims being put forward, this sounds like a highly dysfunctional work environment,” said Seth Spain, the Chair of Concordia University’s Department of Management. 

Last December, former Hampstead urban planning employee Jeremy Biskin showed up at a town hall meeting and questioned Levi about incidents of psychological harassment he witnessed. A source inside the urban planning department where Biskin worked provided The Rover with a recording of a manager referring to one of his colleagues as “sick in the head,” “incompetent” and mocking the worker loud enough that several co-workers could hear. 

The manager was angry with the employee for being too thorough in his building inspections, referring to his work as “foolishness.”

When he heard Biskin’s testimony at the meeting, Mayor Levi said he was “completely stunned” and promised to thoroughly investigate the matter. An investigation that wrapped up in February found no evidence of psychological harassment. 

The probe conducted by the mediation firm Relais was not made available to the public. A version provided through access to information was almost entirely redacted due to privacy concerns.

The department Biskin worked in, urban planning, appeared to be particularly problematic. In March 2024, the Commission municipale du Québec (CMQ) released the results of a four-year audit on how Hampstead and four other municipalities’ urban planning departments issued construction permits and building certificates. Hampstead received the lowest grade (60 per cent) compared to the municipalities of La Pêche (87 per cent), Otterburn Park (80 per cent), Saint-Honoré (70 per cent) and Stoneham et Tewkesbury (67 per cent).

Specifically, in the four years since being issued 10 clear recommendations by the CMQ, Hampstead had made zero progress on two of the recommendations and “unsatisfactory” progress on another two.

Throughout the period covered by the CMQ audit, Mario Duchesne — Hampstead’s director of urban planning and building inspections — collected $30,500 in bonuses in addition to his six-figure salary.

“With regard to our urban planning department, we are actively engaged with (the CMQ) and are committed to implementing all of their recommendations diligently and transparently,” wrote Sarah-Ève Longtin, the communications manager at the town of Hampstead, in an email to The Rover.

The most highly publicized of Hampstead’s alleged financial carelessness led to the resignation of its director general, Richard Sun, in 2024. 

Between 2018 and 2023, Hamsptead’s director Sun used the town’s credit card to spend between $30,000 and $60,000 for trips to Las Vegas, Disney World, Barcelona and Chicago. He was also found to have charged roughly $150,000 on the town’s credit card in 2022 for expenses incurred at Apple, the liquor store and Costco, according to a report by the CMQ. Many of those expenses, according to the CMQ, appeared to be personal in nature.

“Reprehensible acts were committed,” the CMQ report states. 

The report’s conclusions were later confirmed by a third-party firm, SIRCO, which found “careless spending” by Sun but did not order him to reimburse the taxpayers. Throughout the six-year period outlined in these reports, Sun collected $53,000 in bonuses in addition to over $1 million in salary.

Sun resigned as director general in 2024, and Armin Klaus, the town’s treasurer who signed off on Sun’s spending, retired in 2023. Privately, two sources in upper management at Hampstead say Sun’s reign as director general was a dark period for the town and that Klaus should have picked up on the problematic spending.

In public, however, Mayor Levi has fervently defended Sun and even criticized the CMQ’s damning report. And rather than part ways with Klaus after his retirement, the town awarded him a consulting contract that paid him $100 per hour, according to a resolution adopted by the council in 2024.

Bill Steinberg, Hampstead’s former mayor, told The Rover he never authorized councillors to attend conferences outside of Canada when he was in office. His logic was that Hampstead is a municipality of just 7,000 people whose police service and public transit are handled by the city of Montreal.

“I limited those trips to one a year, and I stressed that they had to be inside Canada,” Steinberg said, in a telephone interview. “They can attend the (Federation of Canadian Municipalities) conference and learn all they need to learn there.”

Steinberg pointed to one egregious example: Hampstead’s council approving a taxpayer-funded trip to Tel Aviv in 2023 for councillors Jason Farber and Leon Elfassy to attend the International Smart Mobility Summit.

“We have no business using taxpayers’ money to send two councillors to Tel Aviv for a conference on transit when we don’t even control our own transit system,” Steinberg said. “I think (Mayor Levi) was naive and they took advantage of that.”

The summit was cancelled after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023.

Steinberg is a political opponent of Levi’s, having lost his bid for re-election to the current mayor in 2021. Last week, Steinberg confronted Levi during question period at the town hall, accusing the mayor of reckless spending in a heated exchange. Ultimately, someone at the town called 9-1-1 on the 77-year-old former mayor and had Montreal police remove him from the public meeting.

In 2024, a year that saw 15 employees in upper management collect $149,000 in bonus pay, Hampstead announced that it would award bonuses so its 62 blue-collar workers could keep up with rising inflation. 

They were given $300 each, totalling $18,600.

***

In a brief conversation with The Rover, Joe Nunez — who was hired to replace Sun as director general — said he’s implemented changes to the way Roberts handles his interactions with subordinates and admitted there were problems with the captain’s management style.

Nunez said he has zero tolerance for the bullying tactics and racist remarks outlined by Eric, but that he’s never been presented with solid evidence on the matter.

One former public security constable, who went on to take a job as a police officer in 2023, said he’s relieved to no longer be working under Roberts.

“He was volatile, one day he’d scream and swear at you over something trivial and then the next he’d act like nothing happened,” said Adam*, who did not want his real name published for privacy reasons. “He would say really inappropriate things to us pretty regularly. Then he’d brush it off and say something like ‘I just have a hard time with how you young people handle things.’ Like it was all our fault that he would go into one of his rages.”

Another former constable, who resigned citing Roberts’ behaviour, told The Rover the captain often spoke to him like he was a “bag of shit.” 

Over the years, Eric had saved screenshots of text messages from Roberts that mocked his Latin American heritage, often referring to him as “Ramirez” instead of his real last name and giving him nicknames like “cupcake,” “mumbles” and “Boomhauer,” a reference to a cartoon character whose speech is incomprehensible. 

Roberts had gone so far with his “jokes” that he used city funds to get a custom badge with the name “Ramirez” and a Mexican flag on it (despite the fact that Eric is Colombian). Roberts then displayed it on the constable’s work bag. 

“He would say, ‘You Latinos are all the same, what difference does it make?’” Eric told The Rover. “I didn’t know how to react, so I just pretended to laugh it off. What else could I do?”

These were not text messages between friends, where those kinds of off-colour remarks might be easier to explain. They were professional interactions between a superior and his subordinate.

“Generally, the way we conceive of a hostile work environment is, if we have a good relationship at work and we can joke around with each other and even make fun of each other, that might be okay,” said Spain, the chair of Concordia’s department of management. “But if someone’s uncomfortable with them, if it impacts them in a meaningful way, that’s a hostile work environment. The behaviour described does not sound like good-natured ribbing. 

“It sounds like people were emotionally harmed by this, it sounds like — if people have existing mental health issues — this will cause them material harm. Based on the descriptions I’m hearing, this sounds like what HR would define as a hostile work environment. The use of slurs or racial stereotypes is particularly troubling.”

When asked about Eric’s abilities as a constable, three former members of Hampstead’s public security were effusive.

“He was like our older brother, always looking out for us,” said Adam. “If you needed something, he was there right away. If the citizens needed something, he was there right away. He gave 1,000 per cent of himself to this job.”

In 2021, Eric joined a Facebook Messenger group making a collection for Norman Havill, a dispatcher at the town of Mount Royal who had died of cancer that summer. Though they did not work together, they were part of a small, tight-knit community of first responders. Eric took it upon himself to make a collection from his Hampstead colleagues so they could buy a plaque commemorating their colleague.

He says that when Roberts found out, he lost it.

“(Roberts said) ‘Fuck them, they can buy their own plate, they have money, and you can lose your job.’” Eric wrote that in a report he submitted to his union. This interaction was corroborated by two colleagues of Eric’s whom he confided in that day.

In the end, Eric and another constable were scared that simply being seen at their colleague’s funeral might land them in hot water with Roberts. So they didn’t go. 

“It’s not like the guy was my family, but I wanted to go pay my respects,” said Adam. “But I was afraid that if (Roberts) found out, I’d be put on an overnight shift or maybe even lose my job. He threatened us with that sometimes.”

Another expert in management says that the behaviour described by workers is disconcerting.

“To the extent that these stories are accurate, these certainly raise some red flags,” wrote Kathleen Boies, a professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business, in an email to The Rover. “But the stories themselves (including instances of what we might consider racism and ostracism) seem to be instances of abusive supervision and this is typically associated with a wide array of negative consequences, both for the individual on the receiving end of that and also for the organization as a whole.”

The security team at Hampstead, including Roberts, are all members of the Syndicat des fonctionaires municipaux de Montréal (SFMM), a union that represents white collar workers in the city. 

For years, Roberts was the delegate in charge of Hampstead’s workers. Eric says he believes that may have protected Roberts from scrutiny.

When asked to provide a comment on June 4, a representative from the SFMM declined, stating that the union’s president was busy that week. When The Rover twice offered to push our deadline, the union representative once again answered that the president was “extremely busy.” Pressed one final time to comment on claims that members of his union were the target of racial taunts and psychological harassment, the representative wrote that “considering certain elements of this are before the courts, we will not be able to provide an interview.”

Eric shared a 24-page document with the union, outlining his complaints and providing screenshots of text messages and photos of the “Ramirez” badge. The document, which was reviewed by The Rover, is the basis of a grievance that could wind up before the courts. 

In the end, Eric believes he was coerced into resigning in May of 2023. Though he had provided his employer with a doctor’s note outlining the extent of his suffering and Hampstead’s insurance provider accepted the claim, he says he was constantly being contacted by human resources while on sick leave.

Eric also underwent a psychiatric evaluation in which he shared instances of childhood abuse he suffered. Though Eric believed he was speaking to a psychiatrist in confidence, he was puzzled when sensitive and personal information he disclosed to the psychiatrist was shared with his employers.

“I felt betrayed… I know I’m a strong guy, I have five kids and a mother with Alzheimer’s disease and all I want is what’s best for them,” Eric said. “I couldn’t keep being a good dad and continue working in an environment that made me feel worthless. I couldn’t do that to my family.”