I would assert that whistle-blowers in Canada are significantly worse off now than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That's happened in three stages. The first was with the Public Service Modernization Act. There is a section in there that strips public servants of the right to sue their bosses if bad things are done to them. That was slipped through quietly and that was very insidious.
The second was this act, and you've heard several times how bad we think it is.
With regard to the third stage, part of this law requires codes of conduct for each department. The logic, clearly, is that if you look at the definition of wrongdoing, most of it is up in the stratosphere. You can do a lot of wrongdoing without actually breaking the law. It's the code of conduct that tells you the sorts of ways in which most of the wrongdoing really happens, so it made a lot of sense for the law to refer in its list to the code of conduct, but it called for a new code of conduct.
Treasury Board sat on its hands for five years or so and eventually came out with a new code of conduct, and each department had to write its own. Many departments rewrote their code of conduct to criminalize whistle-blowing and to make it a firing offence to say anything negative about your department, and all kinds of negative consequences would flow from that. The media reported that.
Whistle-blowers were better off 10 or 15 years ago.