Yes. I'm obviously here about whistle-blowing. I always am.
I see the committee and anybody like this as being severely hampered in getting at information if people in the trenches—employees—are not able to safely come forward with what they know. It's an absolute disaster, and it has led to a lot of the problems we've seen in the past.
I think that in the long term, the committee should continue the excellent work it's done in the past of pushing for some kind of decent protection for whistle-blowers, and in both the public and the private sector, by the way. In the short term, I would consider having the committee set up its own mechanisms for people to come forward safely and give it information.
I'm not saying that there's a precedent for that in Canada. I'm not saying it would be trivial, but I think it's doable. I think that would open floodgates of information to you that would be very revealing.
I'll go on a little bit longer. One thing I learned over the 100 assignments that I led was that you really don't have the full picture until you've talked to the people in the trenches. As you work down through the levels conducting interviews, you would get different pictures at different levels. Those would, on the face, be contradictory, but it was really like walking around an object and seeing it from three dimensions. Once you'd interviewed all of the levels, you had a complete, three-dimensional picture of what was going on, which you could not get from any single viewpoint.
It's a very strong principle for me that if you're doing management consulting or running any type of organization, you need to understand what the people in the trenches believe and see and you need to have access to their knowledge and information.