I wrote a piece many years ago about the protections that should be afforded to whistle-blowers who come forward to share, in the public interest, information that is in the public interest, but I have some difficulties with the construct that The Globe and Mail source is a whistle-blower.
He or she is being trumpeted on the front page of my former newspaper as a whistle-blower. Whistle-blowers generally step out of the shadows. They don't make accusations in the shadows; they step out of the shadows.
This individual is making some very serious allegations about individuals, organizations and parties, and I think it requires that person to step forward, like other whistle-blowers—courageous whistle-blowers—who have stepped out of the shadows and pointed an accusatory finger at the institutions they operated within and were prepared to publicly defend their accusations, their motivations, in a public forum. That's what true whistle-blowing is about.
The Globe source is not a whistle-blower. That person is still an anonymous source who's causing a great deal of chaos, in my view, and is not having to defend what they are doing and is not being questioned about their motivations, the sources of their information, the veracity of their information, how that information was corroborated—if it was corroborated at all—and whether or not they're embellishing or editing the information—to fit a certain narrative.
I think this is a real point of contention. When a newspaper provides a source with that kind of protection and then trumpets the person as a whistle-blower, I have a great deal of difficulty with that situation.