Whistling in the dark
Canada's real-life whistle-blowers say Ottawa's new protection bill will only make it harder to speak out
Jamie Tarrant - December 12, 2005
Whistle-blowers may be popular these days, but it hasn't always been so. Ask Brian McAdam. He spent a 30-year career in the Canadian Foreign Service, but after preparing a report revealing that known Chinese spies and criminals were regularly being issued Canadian visas, he was harassed by his bosses and eventually told to resign.
Had McAdam gone public about government malfeasance today, he'd be hailed as a hero. Whistle-blowers have become the taxpayers' best friend, thanks to the ones who tattled on government wrongdoing and helped uncover the federal sponsorship scandal. In an effort to side with the do-gooders, the federal Liberals are rushing to pass whistle-blower protection legislation. But the whistle-blowers who inspired it say the new bill makes it less likely scrupulous employees will come forward in the future.
Allan Cutler was the government procurement officer who, after losing his job for refusing to authorize bogus Liberal contracts, told a Public Accounts committee about the funny business going on in the Public Works Department. In his Nov. 1 report on sponsorship, Justice John Gomery singled out Cutler as "[t]he only subordinate who challenged [ministry official Chuck] Guit?'s authority when he was told not to follow required procedures ... and the consequences of his defiance were immediate and dramatic." Gomery noted: "If whistleblower legislation is to have any meaning, it must protect public servants from the kind of retaliation to which Mr. Cutler was subjected."
That, insists Treasury Board president Reg Alcock, is what C-11 will do. Unlike its previous incarnation, Bill C-25, which was introduced in March 2004 but died on the order paper ahead of the June election, the latest whistle-blower bill improves employee protection, he says. Critics complained that under C-25, wrongdoing must be reported to senior bureaucrats--cabinet appointeees like Guit?. The new bill calls for the installation of a special parliamentary commissioner. "If a whistle-blower comes forward and says they have been harmed or acted against because they raised a concern, the commissioner has the ability to act and correct that," says Alcock.
But the man who helped expose Adscam says whistle-blowers are safer now than they will be under the proposed law. Cutler notes that, under C-11, officials accused of wrongdoing are entitled to a taxpayer-funded lawyer, while the whistle-blower may only request legal assistance from his superiors--the very people he may be challenging. What's more, he adds, ethical employees will still risk everything. "There is nothing in there that says you have to compensate . . . a whistle-blower," Cutler says. "It was a bad bill when it was tabled and, in spite of [opposition] efforts, it is still a bad bill."
McAdam notes there's no guarantee of whistle-blower safety with a commissioner, who is bound to be just another government patronage appointee, just as susceptible to ministerial pressure. "Anybody that is part of that is part of the inner circle," McAdam says. Moreover, C-11 says the commissioner will report findings back to the self-same senior bureaucrats who may be at the heart of the misconduct. Meanwhile, information provided by a whistle-blower becomes confidential for five years, so the complainant is further prevented from tipping off the media. It also blocks the sort of access to information requests that reporters used to verify tips they received about Adscam--information that eventually uncovered the massive Liberal kickback. Canada's information commissioner John Reid recently told a parliamentary committee that, far from protecting whistle-blowers, the Liberals' new legislation is "designed to keep the details about alleged wrongdoing secret."
Joanna Gualtieri, a former portfolio manager at the foreign affairs bureau who was fired after revealing unnecessary expenditures in her department, calls the new legislation "a disaster." Says Gualtieri: "It's nothing more than the government trying to protect itself and fooling people into believing they've acted when in fact they have made things worse." She's formed an advocacy group, the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform, intent on stopping the bill, now before the Senate. The group hopes to convince a Senate committee of the dangers of C-11. But they'll have to work quickly. With an election in the offing, the Liberals want the new law ratified by Christmas as a demonstration to voters that they're making efforts to ensure Adscam can't happen again. But if government corruption does rear its head once again, the new bill might just see to it that Canadians never find out.