Yes.
As a former senior public servant turned truth-teller on two occasions, one internal and one external, I'm here to offer my perspective on improving whistle-blower protections.
I joined Health Canada's drug regulation unit in 1980 and led the unit from 1988 to 1992 as Canada's senior physician responsible for prescription drug regulation. That is the authorization allowing clinical trials and market approvals for prescription medicines in Canada.
I enjoyed the worthwhile challenges of that work in that senior role, but I gradually began to realize that Health Canada's senior ranks at times put Canadian lives at risk needlessly to favour perceived political and industry advantage, contrary to the Food and Drugs Act, which is, of course, the citizen's bill of safety rights.
During one such event in 1991, I helped win a Federal Court case to remove a senior Health Canada officer who was overruling serious safety decisions on life-threatening drugs. Within six months, the same director was reinstated by the department by a new process, and my senior position was deleted from the org chart.
I prepared, then, to leave Health Canada, having won an international competition for a post at the World Health Organization. Such posts require our government's concurrence. Health Canada's deputy minister was happy to agree to my departure, but only in return for my silence in any future legal proceedings. I declined that gag order on safety, and forfeited a career-saving dream job.
Eventually, in 1996, when Health Canada failed to remove a dangerous cardiac drug from the market, I resigned and blew the whistle in a major CBC documentary revealing Health Canada's reliance on biased expert opinion from doctors with strong ties to the drug industry. That documentary prompted landmark work, showing unequivocally that ties to industry wrongly bias doctors' interpretation of pharmaceutical research. As a result, guidelines to manage medical conflict of interest were upgraded internationally, including at the FDA, but not at Health Canada.
In the aftermath of my resignation, I was blacklisted and didn't work for nearly four years. Instead, I used my voice, along with allies, to serve the public interest to ensure that citizens understood the extreme danger of a health department that, under the policy guise of deregulation, had turned off the alarm systems essential for the preservation of lives.
By 1998, those efforts bore fruit. Alarm bells were ringing across the country, with the exposure of multiple Health Canada mishaps, I suppose, but scandals, truly. It came at great personal cost to our family, with the death of my mother in 1999 due to all the turmoil and stress that our family was subjected to.
I'd like to spend a moment speaking briefly to the need for legislative change to the current legal practice.
Certainly, both cultural and legislative change are required parts of the solution we seek, but to me, legislative change is the essential key. To achieve respect for and protection of truth-tellers requires, first and foremost, legislative change in the form of sanctions on retaliation against whistle-blowers, as Tom has said just now.
Why do I say this? In my experience, we are dealing in Canada's public service with a pervasive long-standing adherence to the loyalty principle. By that I mean the deeply ingrained standard operating procedures of cover-up and deception, which automatically deploy, reflexively, to protect the image of the minister and the government at all costs. Do whatever it takes to cover up—up to and including lying, sadly—even if that puts Canadian lives at risk. Seek and destroy the truth-teller who jeopardizes the facade—