I do. Thank you very much.
Members of the committee, thank you for inviting PIPSC for your review of the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. I feel like I've been involved in whistle-blowing legislation in one form or another since I was a baby steward and the institute's general counsel was a new employment relations officer at the institute, so we've been in this for a long time.
This is Isabelle Roy, who is general counsel for the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. She will help to answer some of your questions today as well.
Canadians rely on public services every day to make their lives safer, healthier, and more prosperous. Our members are the ones who provide those services.
PIPSC is Canada's largest union of professionals, working predominantly for the federal government. We're proud of our service to Canadians and we're committed to their well-being. Whistle-blowing fits that commitment. It is ultimately a testament to the integrity of public service professionals.
Let me reiterate that whistle-blowing is a service to the public. It only happens in the rarest of circumstances, when public service professionals have tried every other avenue for resolving a significant concern, only to have their concerns dismissed by higher-level authorities.
When public service professionals take the action of blowing the whistle on a wrongdoing, they are doing us all a service, and they're doing so in keeping with their deep commitment to protecting and promoting the public good. Sadly, whistle-blowing has also meant sacrificing your career for the sake of public interest, and it shouldn't be that way.
Think about PIPSC members such as Dr. Shiv Chopra, Dr. Margaret Haydon, and Dr. Gérard Lambert, who blew the whistle over concerns about the veterinary drug approval process within Health Canada. They knew the drugs given to cattle could have made each and every one of us sick. Think about it. Every time you drink milk, eat cheese, or enjoy a steak, you should be thanking these public service professionals, who put their careers on the line to save you from potential illness.
What did they get? They got 15 years in litigation, and their cases have yet to be completely resolved.
The work of this committee is to ensure that whistle-blowing is recognized and appreciated as a service, not punished as a betrayal. It's your work to ensure that we favour whistle-blowing, not put up insurmountable barriers in the way of whistle-blowers. That was the promise of the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, but sadly, it's failed to live up to that promise. Let's fix that.
Before I propose three specific ideas from PIPSC, I want to affirm our support for one recommendation that you've heard from almost every witness before this committee, and that's to reverse the onus of reprisal in law. Fear of reprisal remains one of the main obstacles to whistle-blowing, and the current law fails to address that concern.
Reprisal against whistle-blowers who disclose wrongdoing is often difficult to prove. As a result, it's rare that one could find a smoking gun that would assist in proving that the reprisals have taken place. The simple solution to this problem is to require a reverse onus, which means that an allegation of reprisal is assumed to be true unless the employer can rebut it.
In addition, we recommend to the committee to take the following three steps.
The first is to fix the investigation process under the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner. Our experience in representing members demonstrates that the commissioner's investigation processes are often unfair, lacking in thoroughness, and insensitive to whistle-blowers.
Think about the case of our member El-Helou. Two years after filing a reprisal complaint, the commissioner came back with a decision to dismiss two of the three allegations, but the Federal Court set aside the commissioner's decision on the basis of failure to investigate crucial evidence, and also a failure to make the parties aware of the substance of the evidence the commissioner had gathered.
Following the Federal Court decision, the commissioner decided to re-investigate the allegation it had already determined had merit to go to the tribunal. Now, four years after the initial complaints were filed, the commissioner came back to say that none of the allegations warranted referral to the tribunal. What kind of message does this send to public service professionals who see wrongdoing and want to blow the whistle on it?
In our experience, the deficiencies in the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner's process require unnecessary litigation and result in unacceptable delays. They have to be fixed.
Our second recommendation is to eliminate the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner's gatekeeper role and replace it with a direct access system. The commissioner performs a gatekeeper role in respect of reprisal complaints. This role means that only the commissioner can decide which complaints are referred to the tribunal. This gatekeeper role places enormous discretion in the commissioner as to how reprisal complaints are dealt with.
As a result, very few reprisal complaints have been referred to the tribunal. The committee should eliminate the gatekeeper role and replace it with a direct access system that would allow reprisal victims to go directly to the tribunal to get relief.
Our third recommendation is to close the outsourcing accountability loophole. As you may know, PIPSC is a leading voice in fighting against the government's overreliance on outsourcing. Our research has shown that outsourcing is costing the federal government money, jobs, morale, accountability, and productivity.
Federal overreliance on outsourcing is creating a shadow public service to which the rules, regulations, and guidelines for accountability simply do not apply, and that's true for the act you're studying. The shadow public service is a massive loophole when it comes to the the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act.
First, the act has no jurisdiction over private companies that receive government contracts. If the whistle is blown on a wrongdoing and an investigation leads the commissioner outside the public service, the investigator's hands are tied.
Second, contract workers have absolutely no protection under the act. If a contract worker decides to blow the whistle on a wrongdoing committed by their company or the government authorities who awarded that contract, they have no recourse under this legislation. Worse still, these contractors do not even have the protection and the resources of a union like PIPSC to help them navigate life as a whistle-blower.
One has to wonder if the whistle would have been blown on Phoenix or the email transformation initiative before their implementation. If the right protections had existed in law, would these things have played out the way they have?
The government has to end its overreliance on outsourcing. I recommend that you study the issue of outsourcing in full, but in the context of your current study of whistle-blowing, I urge you to pay close attention to the accountability loophole created by outsourcing. It's a loophole that must be closed.
Finally, I want to point out that the important work of this committee in reviewing the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act should be augmented with another accountability measure that is sorely lacking.
Years ago, the Gomery commission called for a code of conduct for ministers and their political staff to ensure political staff don't meddle in the work of professional public servants. As you know, one of the larger groups represented by PIPSC is the federal scientists, who over the past decade have felt the chill of government muzzling. I'm proud to say that our scientists work hard to enshrine the right to speak into their collective agreements, and now they're working with their U.S. counterparts as they fight to protect their scientific integrity against the Trump administration.
The same threat of muzzling and political meddling still exists for all other public service professionals. It's not only disrespectful and demoralizing to have ministers and their political staff undermine the professional work of public service experts; it's also an immense waste of public knowledge and expertise. Let's bring in a code of conduct that ensures muzzling and meddling in the work of public service professionals never happens again.
Thank you.