Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my colleague from Surrey Central for bringing this bill forward. The issue of the need to protect people in the public and private service who bring forward wrong-doing has long been an interest and passion of my colleague. I am pleased to be here today to support his bill.
Transparency and accountability in government, and in business, are two important elements of a healthy democracy. In fact, a healthy democracy requires citizens to practise transparency and accountability.
The practice of transparency and accountability requires sound legislation that would undergird our social institutions. I read a book a few years ago by a man who went with a group from North America to the Soviet Union. He was invited by the KGB. The reason the KGB invited the group was because it was composed of individuals who were leaders in the religious community and taught ethics.
The KGB said to the individuals that it was concerned that its society was falling apart because there was no practice of ethics, honesty and accountability. For example, a company would enter the country to develop resources. It would bring in equipment for drilling or other resource development, but the train cars carrying the equipment would be absolutely stripped bare before they would even get to the mining or drilling site.
The KGB said it could not induce foreign investors or foreign business people to do business in its country because contracts were not honoured. The group was told that it was needed to help put back some adherence to moral and ethical standards into that society.
Whether the book was accurate or not, I do not know, but I do know that the individual is well respected and that he gave a very compelling story of the situation of a society where transparency, accountability, honesty and ethical standards were not upheld.
This is not a small matter. It is a very important matter that goes right to the heart of our democracy because habitual rejection of transparency and accountability in public life systematically corrupts social institutions. The example I just gave is but one example.
Corrupted social institutions breed neglect, political indifference, defeatism, and mismanagement of human and social resources. People give up because they no longer trust or believe in the institutions that are working for them and their society.
At the end of the day dictatorship really is what coincides with habitual rejection of transparency and accountability within social institutions. Anything that can be done to emphasize and demonstrate to citizens and to society that the lack of accountability and the breeching of ethical standards will result in someone being held to account is very important. Time magazine in its December 22 edition unveiled Time 's persons of the year. Time chose whistleblowers and gave this account:
Sherron Watkins is the Enron vice president who wrote a letter to chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001 warning him that the company's methods of accounting were improper.
Coleen Rowley is the FBI staff attorney who caused a sensation in May with a memo to FBI Director...about how the bureau brushed off pleas from her...office that [an individual], who is now indicted as a Sept. 11 co-conspirator, was a man who must be investigated. One month later Cynthia Cooper exploded the bubble that was WorldCom when she informed its board that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses through...phony bookkeeping.
These women were not seeing themselves as heroes. The article continued:
They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly—which means...with [their] eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do. Their lives may not have been at stake, but...pretty much everything else on the line. Their jobs, their health, their privacy, their sanity—they risked all of them to bring us badly needed word of trouble inside crucial institutions. Democratic capitalism requires that people trust in the integrity of public and private institutions alike. As whistle-blowers, these three became fail-safe systems that did not fail. For believing—really believing—that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't, they have been chosen by TIME as its Persons of the Year for 2002.
The article further stated that:
...whistle-blowers don't have an easy time. Almost all say they would not do it again. If they aren't fired, they're cornered: isolated and made irrelevant. Eventually many suffer from alcoholism or depression...These were ordinary people...[and these three whistleblowers]...did not wait for higher authorities to do what needed to be done.
We heard the parliamentary secretary say that we do not need whistleblower legislation because there is a good policy and we accept the kind of whistleblowing that people might do. This is completely and utterly untrue. In fact the nervous hysterical laughter you hear, Mr. Speaker, probably comes from hundreds of cubicles in the public service today.
I received a letter from a man who says the following:
Since 2000 I was trying to alert the proper authorities about the huge security failures at our borders. At that time I was acting as a senior immigration officer. Following the capture and imprisonment of a smuggler, I was reprimanded. The result: I have been laid off.
That is in our public service. This is a case that has been in the newspapers. I met last night with a man who is an inspector who brought forward deficiencies in safety standards in certain transportation vehicles in our country. What happened? He was ignored, yet he persisted, and he was effectively and constructively dismissed.
One thing that happened to another person in the company who did the same thing was that this person was told, “You're going to be transferred right away. We don't know how long you will be there, probably a few weeks, maybe a few months and then you will be transferred somewhere else”. This is a man with a wife and kids who had been living in a particular province for all of his life. Yet he was told, “We don't want you any more. We are not going to fire you, but we are going to make your life so miserable that you have no choice”. This is happening in Canada.
Therefore, for the government to even pretend--especially with its record in the human resources development department, advertising contracts, cost overruns in the gun registry, and so many other things--to dare to stand up and say to public servants, civil servants, in this country, “Don't worry. If you see something that isn't working, that is wrong, you just come forward. We'll welcome that”, is a joke.
This legislation is absolutely necessary and critical not just for the short term, but because Canadians deserve a society where people can adhere to ethical standards and can speak up when they see those standards breached, and not be fearful.
Other examples have come forward from other members who have spoken where this is now happening in this country. I urge the House to support this legislation because it is critical for our democracy.