I was able to cover all the points in the best practices that I thought were particularly significant.
One additional loophole, however, is that the law does not cover all the whistle-blowers who have significant evidence to disclose. The law doesn't cover intelligence agencies or people in the military. It offers only token protection for law enforcement. This is not consistent with international best practices.
The one point I didn't have a chance to make that I'd like to second from Ms. Gualtieri—with an exclamation point—is the need for a legitimate process as the foundation for modernizing and making over this law. A whistle-blower law that is just imposed by the experts will not have the necessary base of legitimacy for the rights to be affected. If there's not cultural acceptance and there's not a cultural revolution, the legal revolution will be irrelevant for our practical purposes.
I think a good contrast is some of the European countries that have made whistle-blower laws. Romania has a beautiful whistle-blower law on paper, but it was just dictated and shoved through their parliament, and it's been irrelevant in practice.
Serbia had a series of town hall meetings across the nation to get input from citizens. It had over a year's worth of summits with all stakeholders represented—media, labour, the chamber of commerce for corporations, prosecutors, the regulatory agencies, the parliament, and the law enforcement agencies—until there was a consensus on how to structure the rights most effectively so that they would have the most impact on their culture and society and would be the most compatible. I hope this hearing will be the start of that sort of ground-up process in Canada.