My remarks were in specific respect to recommendations I had made in a case report that I tabled with Parliament. That involved allegations of harassment in which I found that a deputy minister and a senior official had essentially gone around the existing procedures. That was the nature of the wrongdoing, so my recommendation for corrective action was that when harassment cases are brought against a senior official, departments should consider not dealing with that internally. That was to deal with the specific case of harassment, not necessarily all wrongdoing.
With respect to the internal and external options, I do think it's important that whistle-blowers have a choice. In the previous iteration of this legislation, whistle-blowers were required to exhaust internal options before coming to my office. Now they have the choice. I think the goal then becomes to ensure that whistle-blowers are able to make an informed choice about exercising their options. For example, if a whistle-blower does not go internally because he or she doesn't trust the department's internal system, that whistle-blower has the option to come to me.
I do have some concerns about shutting off options that are open to whistle-blowers. I'll note that according to my reading of Professor Brown's testimony, he was also in favour of maintaining the internal system to provide those options. I think it would be very useful to support the internal system to be clear as to what happens when someone goes internally and have some consistency perhaps among departments with respect to how they treat these whistle-blowers. I also note in our research paper the issue of having options is perceived as a positive thing as well.