Government Operations Committee on Feb. 7th, 2017

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

For example...?

[Carl Trottier]

Let's say the employee or the manager is gone. The situation has self-corrected. They're no longer working with this consultant, and therefore the relationship has been breached. There are possibilities of that.

In other instances, clarifications have been provided that have resolved the situation itself. There are a lot of examples, and you're going to ask me for examples and I don't have one. There are a lot of examples of discussions that take place between managers and employees where conflict is resolved through discussions that don't end up in reports of corrective action.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Okay. I'll hand it over to Mr. Whalen.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Ms. Stevens, can you walk us through, again, the question I asked you before? I'll try to rephrase it. We talked about how we could correct the act so that people who are falsely the victims of reprisal, even though they had no participation in the disclosure.... How could we protect them, or could we protect them in some other way? How could we protect them under the act?

[Mary Anne Stevens]

Right now, the protection is for anyone who has made a protective disclosure or participated as a witness in an investigation. Potentially that could be expanded to anyone who—I'm not giving you the actual wording in the legislation—is mistakenly believed to have been a discloser.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Okay, so change the definition of reprisal to include that class of people. That's what you—

[Mary Anne Stevens]

Yes.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

I'm not sure if the clerk can remember. I don't think that was the question I asked, unfortunately. I should have written it down.

In your opening remarks, Mr. Trottier, you mentioned that most crown corporations are covered. Which ones aren't? Do you believe they should be?

[Carl Trottier]

We don't have the list here, but we can provide the ones that are to this committee at a later date, if that's appropriate.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

I guess we're more interested in knowing which ones aren't—

[Carl Trottier]

We can do that. We'll provide you a list of those that aren't.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

—and whether or not the department has any views on whether or not they should be covered.

[Carl Trottier]

Okay.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

That would be a change.

I'll go back to Ms. Ratansi's questions about the 93 for Canada Border Services, the disclosures. A third of the disclosures were related to Canada Border Services, and 60% of the “not acted upons” in this chart that we were referring to for the 2015-16 report were also from Canada Border Services. Is there something particular there that the committee or a committee of Parliament needs to look into regarding the situation in 2015-16? It's just such an outlier.

[Carl Trottier]

We're not sure what drove those numbers. It would be wise to ask CBSA what's driving their numbers. Those are their internal numbers.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Okay, but these reports are collected by you. This is such a massive outlier. It represents a third of all the activity. Did you not make any investigations into why this represents a third of all the activity across government under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act?

[Carl Trottier]

No, we have not looked at that. There are variations in the numbers, and this is a variation. I would strongly encourage you to ask the questions to the organizations that have created these numbers.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

When your department—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Before I excuse the witnesses, I will invoke the privilege of the chair to ask a question. I use that privilege very sparingly. I don't ask very many questions. It's a bit of a follow-up to what Mr. Whalen was saying originally.

I'm curious, and this may be a very extreme situation. I don't anticipate it happens often. In the case that employee A lodges a complaint against employee B, an investigation ensues and employee B is completely cleared; however, employee B feels that the accusation was deliberate and malicious and in fact was a form of harassment. Does employee B have any recourse whatsoever?

[Carl Trottier]

If the employee believes that it's harassment, there is a process where the employee can grieve through the normal grievance process and all elements will be taken into consideration when dealing with this, the circumstances that led to the initial disclosure, and a determination will be made at the departmental level.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Trottier, Madam Stevens, thank you very much for your appearance here today. You've been helpful and instructive. Particularly, I appreciate the fact that some of the questions that were posed of you would be better answered by perhaps the Integrity Commissioner or the tribunal. I thank you for pointing that out to members of this committee because they will be appearing before us at a future date. You are excused.

We'll suspend the committee for just a couple minutes and then we'll go in camera for committee business.

[Proceedings continue in camera]