Thank you.
Thank you to the committee for hearing us. I really appreciate it.
I have to confess that I feel very nervous today. I don't usually, and I think the reason is that there's so much at stake here. We have such a huge issue. I think the committee's beginning to realize that. We've heard some wonderful testimony, and I want to try to build on that.
I've been working in this field since before the PSDPA was introduced, and I've been studying, monitoring and reporting on this act for 17 years now. I've run a whistle-blowing charity for six years and operated a help-line, and I was contacted by more than 400 whistle-blowers. I soon realized that there was a very consistent pattern to the reprisals. Luc Sabourin's experience and Madam Dion's absolutely fit that pattern. You should not doubt a single word of anything they told you about what they experienced, because those experiences are absolutely typical.
Reprisals are, obviously, initiated by the wrongdoers, who are typically ruthless and determined to protect themselves. However, they are aided and abetted by management, who see their primary duty as protecting the organization's senior leaders and their reputations, so their instant knee-jerk reaction to most problems is simply to try to cover them up.
From the moment whistle-blowers begin to question what is going on, they are tagged as threats to the organization, as troublemakers to be dealt with, and all efforts are focused on destroying them to send a warning message to others. The consequence of failing to protect whistle-blowers is that we fail to protect ourselves, because the wrongdoers prosper, gain more power and go on to cause even more harm.
There are two examples that Ian and I are very familiar with. In both cases, incompetent management bungled an early project, but by silencing the whistle-blowers, they were able to cover up their errors and appear successful. They went on to be rewarded with greater responsibilities, which they also bungled, causing truly major disasters. I'm referring to the Phoenix pay project and the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. The trajectories are almost identical.
In both cases, the cover-up continued even after the major disaster. The organizations failed to understand properly what went wrong, and no one was held accountable. Consequently, the necessary corrective actions have still not been taken. They continue to blunder, and we continue to pay the price in various ways.
I think you already know that the PSDPA is an appallingly bad piece of legislation, but you may not realize how bad.
I've studied it, and the reports I've written, going way back to 2012, have identified more than 40 problems. We cannot possibly fix all of these, but we can intervene surgically to make it work better. Decades of experience has taught us that combatting corruption with the help of whistle-blowers requires a complete system of protection with well-defined components. It's like a car—we've heard that analogy already—which, at a minimum, needs about five components. There is an engine, a gearbox, a set of wheels, brakes and—what have I forgotten—a steering wheel. Which of these components can we dispense with? None of them. If any one of those is defective, the car is immobilized. It becomes a useless lump of metal.
In the same way, we have set out five categories in our criteria, describing the important components of a whistle-blowing system: freedom to blow the whistle without a whole lot of barriers, obstacles and traps so that people can raise the alarm; protection from reprisals from the moment people speak out; and redress for reprisals so that, if they do occur, they can obtain a remedy. Those are the three things that are necessary for the whistle-blower to do their job. The fourth category is protecting the public, and this requires stringent, independent and thorough investigations followed by corrective action that's actually put into place. The fifth one is, perhaps, not quite so obvious, but this is the measurements and information that allow you to see that the system is working because, without those, you have no means for monitoring or for determining what needs to be improved, so you're crippled there.
All of those five categories have to work for the system to work. In the case of the PSDPA, none of them work—none of them.
We have a challenge here to get them all working, and we can help you with that.
I'm going to suggest that Ian pick up the baton here.