Government Operations Committee on Dec. 8th, 2022

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

To your knowledge, how many of those 1,500 complaints were about information technology?

[David Hutton]

I couldn't give you that information. I'm sorry.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks.

Mr. Johns, we'll go over to you.

Before you start, though, I've just got a notice that bells will be at 5:27. We'll be able to get through most of the rounds, but when the bells go off, I'll ask for everyone's consent to finish off what will appear to be the final two and half minutes for the Bloc and the NDP.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Can we just give that consent now, Chair?

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That's perfect. Thanks.

Go ahead, Mr. Johns.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Hutton, if a public servant had blown the whistle on the procurement or development of the ArriveCAN app, how likely is it that the public or parliamentarians would be aware?

[David Hutton]

There's no obligation to tell the public or parliamentarians. The only person who gets to know immediately is the leader of the department. The individual isn't identified, but they are the person who is told.

If the Integrity Commissioner decides to conduct an investigation, which they usually don't, they must inform the head of the department. Everything is secret until the whole process has concluded, at which point there's a report to Parliament. As I said, this could take years.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I'm going to read a quick quote.

You wrote an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen back on October 19, entitled “Canada's whistleblowing system protects wrongdoers, not whistleblowers”, and you were writing about the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. I'm going to read a quote. It says:

When then-minister Pierre Poilievre introduced the legislation in 2006, he claimed repeatedly that it would offer “ironclad” protection and indeed it does—but for wrongdoers, not for the whistleblowers or the public.

It's time for our leaders to do what they have promised and what Canadians expect, by putting in place a system that will truly protect the public....

Can you talk about the costs on taxpayers, on workers, by the failure to address this serious issue?

[David Hutton]

Gosh, that's almost incalculable.

I would call to mind Phoenix and the $2.4 billion and counting—and it still doesn't work, by the way. That was a situation that was well known to hundreds of people, almost everyone who was directly involved in the project. There was a catchphrase, “Everything going well with Phoenix”, which was ironic and was in common use, yet I believe and have evidence that the Integrity Commissioner was given credible warnings about the management of that project, and there was no investigation.

There's $2.4 billion right there.

Now, the public service spends about a billion dollars every working day. I don't know how much of that is wasted or stolen, but it's probably significant. Anyone who's a professional fraud examiner will tell you that there's corruption everywhere. All organizations experience it, and it's just simply a matter of how quickly you can find it and detect it. We have no system for detecting that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

You wouldn't expect that in a government in a country like Canada. Certainly everyday people wouldn't expect that kind of corruption or failure.

Can you speak about ArriveCAN, Phoenix and how preventable these runaway costs could have been if we had a good whistle-blower system?

[David Hutton]

As I said, I've no inside information on ArriveCAN. I'm not making any judgments on what this committee may conclude about the project. What I am saying is that if there has been wrongdoing within it, this committee is not going to find out through the current mechanisms.

I'm not trying to compare Phoenix and ArriveCAN directly. There are simply some lessons to be learned about all IT work and all government work from looking at Phoenix.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

In the 2022 budget, the government committed $2.4 million over five years to the Treasury Board Secretariat to launch a review of the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. Do you think this new review should preclude the House of Commons from moving forward with amendments to the act in the interim to better protect whistle-blowers and the Canadian public?

[David Hutton]

No, absolutely not. I think the process of implementing this committee's recommendations and perhaps examining this new member's bill should go forward as urgently as possible.

That committee, if they want to, can look at further improvements that would take our whistle-blowing laws to the level of the European countries, for example, which we're far from. The recommendations the committee has provided are excellent, but there will still be significant room for improvement after that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Bill C-290 came up for debate on November 2. Do you think it's any coincidence that on October 30—three days before—the government announced that they'd be moving forward with a review of the act and gave three full business days to have representatives apply for two positions on the advisory committee it is striking as part of the review? This is after five years, and they had to do it. Do you believe this is proper engagement with the public sector unions and the Canadian public?

[David Hutton]

It does look odd, especially when you look at the pattern of very long delays when things are important, and then sudden action on something that I have said to me looks like a delaying tactic.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

You talked about the track record of the government in terms of enforcing the—I'm going back again to that article—“18 cases of wrongdoing in its 15 years of operation”. This is the PSIC. This was after receiving more than 1,500 disclosures of allegations of wrongdoing, and not one had been protected by the tribunal that was set up for this purpose. Can you speak a little bit more in detail about that?

[David Hutton]

The law is set up—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

In about 10 seconds, Mr. Hutton.

[David Hutton]

The law is set up to prevent whistle-blowers from ever getting a remedy because of.... It's a technical term. There are lots of problems, but there's no reverse onus at the tribunal. The employee has to prove that a reprisal was taken against them, and that's impossible. The burden of proof has to shift to the employer to show that the actions were not a reprisal.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Mr. Hutton.

Thank you, Mr. Johns.

We will go to Mrs. Block for five minutes, please.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank you both for being here today and for your testimony and just the wealth of knowledge and experience that you're bringing to this conversation.

I want to circle back to some comments that my colleague Mrs. Kusie made and that were followed up on by Mr. Croll. If forcing 10,000 Canadians into two weeks of quarantine under the threat of fines or jail is not mass wrongdoing, what would you define as mass wrongdoing?

[Alistair Croll]

First of all, I'm not a public health official and I'm not an ethicist. I believe the quote was about witnessing mass wrongdoings, such as the ArriveCAN app. I cannot speak to whether or not the ArriveCAN app was tied to any kind of quarantine or other public health practice, but I think that saying that we have mismanagement of government such as the ArriveCAN app seems prejudicial and I'm not speaking to the effects on citizens as part of travel.

I would say that very few people seem to be comparing the costs that we're talking about today to the costs of shutting down a border entirely, the costs of letting a virus burn through our population, or the costs of face-to-face interactions at a time when we had very little science on what was happening, but I can't speak to the matter of your question itself.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

You are aware of the reports on about 10,000 Canadians being forced into quarantine wrongly. You didn't hear those news reports?