I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to give testimony.
I represent FAIR, which stands for the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform. FAIR is Canada's first public interest organization created to protect whistle-blowers, by which I mean employees who speak out to protect the public interest when they see wrongdoing. FAIR has been doing valuable work in this field for the past 11 years.
I'm going to cover two closely related topics in my remarks. The first is that I want to comment on the nature of the management systems upon which the industry and, ultimately, the public are increasingly dependent for ensuring food safety. I'll also comment on the vital role that whistle-blowers play in protecting the public when these systems fail and on the challenge of protecting these people.
I'll start with the food industry. As we have heard in this testimony over the past several weeks, the food industry is changing rapidly, from a host of modest family farms to a few industrialized producers operating on a huge scale. Just like transporting people in ever larger passenger planes, this creates economies of scale. It's very efficient while it works, but when it goes wrong, the result can be catastrophic, with many lives lost.
We've also heard a great deal about management systems being implemented in industry as a safeguard. I want to comment on that, because before I took on my current role, I spent my career in industry as an executive and a management consultant working in management systems. I've been working in this field since the mid-eighties, which is before the food industry began to become interested in this subject.
I've written a couple of books on the subject that have been translated and distributed on four continents, so I feel comfortable in making some observations about management systems. I'd like to tell you that obviously without these systems and the techniques they embody, it would not be possible today to build a reliable automobile or to safeguard the blood supply or to launch man into space. It's no accident that HACCP, which we've heard so much about, had its origins in NASA.
As our food system evolves into a vast industrial complex, it won't be possible to have a safe food supply without very expert and diligent implementation of these systems. However, these systems, as effective as they are when they are working well, are fragile. This is a key point, because they require considerable expertise to implement and absolutely consistent support from management, from the CEO right down.
The moment that the technical expertise is compromised or the management support weakens, then the system begins to degrade and will likely soon fail. All it takes for our food supply, then, to be poisoned is for one company in financial difficulty to start cutting corners, or for one manager, perhaps on a night shift somewhere, to overlook a problem rather than stopping the production line to fix it. We're only one bad actor or one incompetent decision-maker away from a catastrophe.
This is not an empty claim. The U.S.A. recently suffered a devastating salmonella outbreak, one of many outbreaks they've had. This particular one sickened an estimated 19,000 people in 43 states. It contributed to nine deaths and triggered the largest food recall in U.S. history and, indeed, an international food recall. All of this was caused by one family-owned peanut plant in Georgia. That's right.
About half of those who fell ill were children, so you begin to see how vulnerable we are. That's why it's absolutely essential, in my opinion, that we have mechanisms in place to inform us when things are going wrong, before disaster strikes.
I'll turn to whistle-blower legislation. The typical whistle-blower is not someone who rushes off on some kind of crusade or to find problems and publicize them. They are typically ordinary employees doing their jobs conscientiously who find themselves in a situation where they see some wrongdoing going on or have come into possession of some information that is embarrassing to their employer or their bosses. Then they put themselves at risk by trying to bring that to management's attention.
The whistle-blower is someone who puts his or her career at risk in trying to protect us. It's not someone who is acting irresponsibly. I think it's just plain common sense that if everyone in the food industry—in government and the private sector—could speak out freely if they saw matters of concern, then we'd be a lot safer than we are today. There is compelling statistical evidence from other sectors suggesting that whistle-blowing is potentially the most effective way we have for exposing problems and wrongdoing.
Some of you might be thinking, well, shouldn't people come forward anyway? Why do they need protection? But I'd like to emphasize that the typical experience of someone who tries to draw attention to concerns their bosses don't want to hear about is that they suffer vicious and calculated reprisals--attempts to isolate them, to make their colleagues frightened to speak to them, and to humiliate them. This abuse and bullying typically goes on until the employee can't take it anymore. At some point their doctor will say to them, “You can't go to work any more because it's killing you.” At that point, the organization has succeeded in ridding them from the workplace and silencing them.
It goes further than that, because employers will very often make every attempt to prevent the whistle-blower from being employable. So they not only lose their immediate job, but also their career. One U.S. expert remarked that the typical fate of a nuclear engineer who blows the whistle is to end up selling computers at RadioShack—and that's certainly my observation too.
The consequences for these people and their families are enormous: loss of livelihood, loss of their careers, loss of their homes, and very often the loss of their families. And they typically end up with post-traumatic stress symptoms, including nightmares, flashbacks, chronic depression—and regrettably, some are driven to commit suicide.
You might think this type of behaviour would be expected from a firm whose profits are threatened, but surely not from government employers. As Canadians, we've been raised to trust our government, but you'd be entirely wrong to do that. I want to give you just one or two examples.
The founder of this organization, FAIR, is Joanna Gualtieri, who blew the whistle on waste and extravagance in Foreign Affairs in the early nineties and was harassed out of her job. She sued her bosses for harassment, and that lawsuit is now in its eleventh year. You could ask, how could it possibly take so long? Well, government lawyers, paid by us, have dreamed up more than 10,500 questions to put to her and have subjected her to more than 30 days of pretrial examination, when the norm is one day.
This is not an unusual example. You've also heard of Shiv Chopra and the Health Canada whistle-blowers who lost their jobs after testifying to the Senate. The Senate was unable to protect them, and they've had to take legal action to try to regain their jobs. Their hearings have been going on for close to five years now.
In Canada, we're latecomers to whistle-blower protection. The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act came into force in 2007, and it was claimed to offer ironclad protection to whistle-blowers and to be the Mount Everest of whistle-blower legislation around the world. Unfortunately, those claims seem quite ridiculous today. We have a Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, who is an agent of Parliament, with a substantial staff and a budget of $6.5 million, and after two years of operation her office has not found a single example of wrongdoing in the entire federal public service. So our view is that whistle-blowers in Canada are not in any way protected, and there's not even the pretence of protection for them in the private sector.
I'm going to leave you with one very simple message, which is based on two decades of experience I've had with management systems and from what I've learned about whistle-blowing in the past five years or so. If you don't remember anything else, then please remember this. In my opinion, unless we create effective whistle-blower protection for the people working in the food industry, from the public servants who make policy and oversee the industry to the managers and workers on the production lines, Canadians will continue to die needlessly because of avoidable failures within the food supply.
I'm not claiming this is a comprehensive solution. Obviously there are many things that have to be done. But I'm saying it's a very important component that can provide a safety net when everything else goes wrong.
Thank you.
