Thank you.
My name's David Hutton and I'm a senior fellow with the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. I offered myself as a witness because I felt that my particular experience might enable me to offer a useful perspective.
As a young engineer, I led the quality assurance of large, complex computer systems by monitoring the development process, conducting independent testing and approving a final release. Later, as a management consultant, I led my own consulting practice for 20 years, conducting in-depth audits of the management systems of over 100 organizations around the world. For the past 17 years, I've been assisting public interest whistle-blowers and advocating better protection for them. Typically, these are honest employees who speak up about wrongdoing and are punished for doing so.
These three apparently quite different careers have something in common: a quest for truth and integrity so that organizations can deal with facts and reality, making them more successful and also serving the public interest.
I think one of the central questions facing this committee is what happened with respect to ArriveCAN, on a spectrum ranging from a reasonable outcome and value for money, given a fast-changing emergency situation, through contractors taking advantage of a difficult situation opportunistically but perhaps entirely legally, to, at the far end, corruption or collusion through which laws or codes of conduct were violated.
This is difficult to find out, especially if there are wrongdoers who will do their utmost to hide their misdeeds. Based on my experience and research, if we had even half-decent whistle-blower protection in this country, this committee would very likely soon have the answers.
Let me explain.
Given the cost of this project, hundreds of people must have been involved as public servants and contractors. If there was any wrongdoing, then some of them would certainly know. However, they have no safe way to provide this information to the committee or to the public, as there's no protection from career-ending reprisals for speaking up.
That's because Canada has literally the worst protection law in the world. It is supposed to protect about 400,000 public servants, but in 15 years of operation at a cost of more than $100 million, not a single whistle-blower has ever been protected.
This system also completely failed to detect the impending Phoenix pay disaster, even though hundreds of people knew about the problems. Let me share some relevant information about Phoenix as an instructive example.
With my background, you can understand that I was absolutely rivetted by that project. How was it possible that such bad software could be written and released, untested and without any fallback, into a mission-critical role where it would dispense billions of dollars and directly impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees?
I read the detailed reports that were available from many sources, but ended up with more questions than answers. I decided to conduct my own investigation, assisted by the Centre for Free Expression.
We set up secure channels of communication and called for insiders to share their experiences confidentially. A few responded, and now I have my answers, which I hope to publish in due course, though I need more sources to corroborate what I learned. This is difficult, because people are terrified to say anything, even those who are retired, years after the event.
My story illustrates two things. Number one, whistle-blowers are by far the best source of information to uncover any wrongdoing that may exist in an organization. Decades of research confirm this. Number two, without protection, very few people will dare to come forward with vital information. That's the situation that the committee finds itself in today.
This is a long-standing problem that affects the work of this committee and all oversight bodies. One obvious solution is to implement proper federal whistle-blower protection, as this committee unanimously recommended in 2017.
Because of its track record and mandate, this committee is uniquely placed to help solve this problem. If you succeed, this will help clarify the true status of many projects, from Phoenix to ArriveCAN.
Thank you.