Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to deal with this very important subject about whistleblowing legislation. I am pleased also to see that the President of the Treasury Board on May 13 mentioned that he is still open to the idea of whistleblowing legislation. He is not convinced yet that it is necessary. I am pleased to see that he is open to the idea. Certainly as my colleague mentioned earlier, the Reform Party feels that any time we can open up government and open up the process we would be in favour of that.
Bill C-248, having to do with the rights of so-called whistleblowing, has been raised several times as private members' business in this House over the last decade or so. Unfortunately, it has not been raised by the government of day, past or present, and that is a shame.
There is a very old proverb I learned when I was a child. I know, Mr. Speaker, you will be interested in this one. I believe in it and I hope every member of the House subscribes to it as well. I try to follow it in my own life and it has done me nothing but good when I manage to follow it, even though it sometimes hurts. The simple old proverb goes like this: "Honesty is the best policy".
I have a question to ask members today. Is honesty really the best policy? If it is, and I believe that it is, we should develop institutions to protect honesty, to encourage honesty, to deter dishonesty and to even punish dishonesty when we find evidence of it.
In general, the Criminal Code and other statutes of Parliament require it, but very few provide an incentive for government organizations to be honest and not only honest but safe and frugal with taxpayers' dollars as well. I therefore agree with the intent of Bill C-248. It provides a mechanism for employees to demonstrate these qualities. It would help the government and the private sector to be honest by placing before it the possibility that dishonesty could be exposed.
Allow me to quote from an article in the Journal of Canadian Public Administration . It puts it well. It states:
There is solid evidence to show that, in the absence of an effective whistleblowing mechanism, employees have suffered emotional and physical turmoil in trying to deal with knowledge of fraud, conflicts of interest, rampant waste, pollution violations, and other illegal or unethical activities. Companies have a duty of care to provide such a mechanism to assist ethical employees.
Employees, who have real concerns and who make the wrongdoing public, suffer real problems in the workplace as a consequence. The Association of Mental Health in Maryland did a study on whistleblowers in the late 1980s found that 82 per cent of whistleblowers experienced harassment after exposing a wrongdoing, 60 per cent were fired from their jobs, 17 per cent eventually lost their homes and 10 per cent reported they had attempted suicide. So there are serious repercussions by not accepting the word of a whistleblower or by persecuting them afterwards.
Even with these problems, whistleblowing means savings for the American government. In 1980 the U.S. government began a hotline for the American public service. The government received 94,000 telephone calls in the first 10 years of operation, 1,100 calls were substantiated and $20 million was saved. The cost of the hotline was minuscule in comparison to those savings.
There are some dangers in this type of policy. It may be used irresponsibly by people who have their own axe to grind or people who are just plain disagreeable and want to cause trouble and headaches for honest employers by alleging things that simply are not true and then escape by hiding behind a law.
The idea I want to get across today is of controlled whistleblowing or a mechanism by which whistleblowing legislation can be passed that protects all parties involved. We must have the right to expose illegalities, the gross abuse of funds or a significant risk to public health or safety within limits that would protect employers and, in the case of Parliament, ministers of the crown and public service managers.
I want to suggest what might be part of an ideal act of Parliament. Then I want to compare that ideal with the bill before us. Ideal whistleblowing legislation should define the nature and limits of the activity that would be protected by such legislation specifying the gravity of wrongdoing to be exposed. I admit this would not be easy.
For instance, an employee may want to expose a fellow employee for being a couple of minutes late one morning because he is angry at him for some unknown reason. The law would have to be designed in such a way that it would be kept from degenerating into a sort of informer's paradise. The legislation probably would specify some type of internal process which must be followed before it would be legal to go through the public whistleblowing activity. It is only fair that an employer be able to clean up his act before getting tarred in the press.
Ideal legislation would specify public whistleblowing rather than leaked documents as well. Leaks are the curse of any minister's existence. If I was a minister I would not appreciate leaked documents either. However, whistleblowing legislation would not protect leaked documents unless it was one of those concerns that I mentioned earlier about gross misconduct or something. Public servants are expected to keep documents confidential at all times and that should continue under any legislation.
I like the idea of an employee coming forward in a forthright manner through proper protected channels if it is necessary to expose things.
Legislation should contain some kind of statute of limitation so that employees could not try to get revenge on certain people by exposing things that happened long after the employee has left the employer.
I also think the act must create an incentive system for legitimate whistleblowers. This is another difficult area and I do not claim to have all the answers. It is difficult enough for whistleblowers to come forward even with the protection that the President of the Treasury Board says is in place already. We see it is very difficult to get them to come forward.
The United States has the false claims act. Under it whistleblowers receive 25 per cent of the savings of any whistleblowing benefit they unearth. Over the first six years of the operation of the act, 407 lawsuits were filed and 37 were settled for a total of $147 million in savings. The average whistleblower received $400,000.
I have considerable hesitation in supporting this type of high priced incentive to whistleblowers. However, if this is referred to committee, the committee should investigate whether there
should be some sort of a monetary incentive or public recognition or some kind of paper recognition. Some sort of incentive should be investigated in committee to see if it has some validity on the Canadian scene.
There also needs to be legal protection for legitimate whistleblowers, including confidential advice for public servants and an appeal process for those who are harassed or fired. For that we need an independent body which would act as sort of a place of sober second thought. I am not going to suggest the Senate but we need something that would give an employee confidential advice on whether his or her concern constituted a legitimate exposure and so on.
This independent person or office, something like an ombudsman or an independent ethics counsellor-emphasis on the independent-would also act as a repository for the information that was revealed. Anyone could come and receive that information. It would be a very popular office indeed. I know many public servants have been in contact with me about the need for this legislation.
If it was done in this way it could be exposed in a non-partisan, orderly way that would protect the employee concerned and also protect the government or other employer by suppressing frivolous or mischievous claims such as the one I mentioned earlier about someone overstaying a coffee break or something.
Next we would need an appeal process where an employee who was being harassed or who was fired could go. We need something there. Investigations could be conducted and reparations made. However there would also have to be a companion law that would punish or somehow discipline an employee for publicly exposing things for which they have given an oath not to expose. For example, they would still have no right to expose confidential documents from the cabinet and so on. We have to make sure under this legislation that employees do not feel they have the right to expose what by necessity must be confidential.
How does Bill C-248 measure up? I have mentioned several things that could be fleshed out in the bill. I find the bill is like a shell. It has the skeleton of some very good ideas. It is not specific enough in many areas. For example, there are no limits specified as to the time of reporting, the gravity of the offence to be reported or even the kinds of things an employee could report.
We should investigate whether there should be an incentive system of some kind which is not mentioned in the bill. We should do something to encourage the natural inertia of the bill against whistleblowing and jump start it. Maybe some sort of incentive program would help to do that.
I am not convinced the Canadian Human Rights Commission is the best body to solve this problem. Canadian human rights is becoming a grab bag. It seems to be solving everything or it is expanding its role. Under Bill C-64 it has been asked also to expand its area of expertise into the employment equity issue.
I see a little problem with the Canadian Human Rights Commission becoming the catchall for all this. I wonder if rather than a human rights issue it could more properly be administered under the Department of Labour because this is typically an employee-employer type problem. We could change this to the Department of Labour because it would be best equipped to handle these types of employment related matters.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the bill contains no deterrents against destructive or frivolous whistleblowers, people who just want to pass the time of day and harass employers. We will need something there.
To conclude, the intent of Bill C-248 is noble. We agree with its general direction but it is like a shell that needs to be filled out. I appreciate the member's work in this area and I only feel disappointed the government did not present this legislation.
This situation is much like the access to information experience. There have been many private members' bills over the years that sought to improve access to information. Given the benefit of hindsight and the great amount of good the Access to Information Act has done, the Liberal government would be well advised to take this bill as an umbrella piece of legislation and work with it. I realize it would be taking a bit of a risk.
Once this type of legislation is worked over in committee and becomes law we will all wonder how we got by without it. It is a good idea. We on this side of the House look forward with anticipation when real whistleblowing legislation becomes a reality.