Yes, and I've partly answered that question already.
Obviously whistle-blowing is not the answer to everything, but it's a tool that can act as a last resort when everything else has failed to expose things that are going wrong. It's not necessarily to do with deliberate wrongdoing—it can be just incompetence or whatever—but if there's public harm, then the employees involved are often the last resource you have available, and research also indicates that it is by far the most effective way of uncovering these situations.
The other mechanisms we have—the audits, the external reviews and so on—just don't work nearly as well and are actually quite ineffective unless they're complemented by whistle-blower protection.
I think it is one of the tools that we really badly need, and we're really at the back of the bus in Canada and far behind the rest of the world.