Mr. Speaker, I compliment the member for Surrey Central for bringing forward this important issue of providing protection from reprisal for public civil servants who have the decency to report what they view as wrongdoings in the public service.
It has been interesting to watch the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board, in his new role, dancing all around the issue and scrambling to find reasons not to support this worthy bill. I do not accept many of the excuses that have been put forward. I do not believe they stand as a good argument for not introducing whistleblowing protection.
How quickly people change when they get into government. I can read a quote from the Liberal approach to the public service which was printed in September 1993. I also would point out that the election was in October of that year. Just before the election, the Liberals said:
Public servants who blow the whistle on illegal or unethical behaviour should be protected.
A Liberal government will introduce whistle blowing legislation in the first session of a new Parliament.
A month later, realizing that it would be their government having the whistle blown on it, they reversed their position on whistle blowing completely. They were no longer interested in introducing legislation to protect public servants. Now they have a wishy-washy policy guideline, supposedly to protect civil servants, which, as we all know, does not work.
I will give a recent example of how it does not work. I know of a recent case of a woman who brought forward information to her employer, the federal government, because she felt there was wrongdoing in her workplace. She felt sure there was illegal activity going on in her workplace. Does anyone know where it was? It was in the Prime Minister's Office.
Louise Ross, who worked in the Prime Minister's Office as the assistant to the photographer, found out that the photographer was using House of Commons cameras, darkrooms, et cetera, to do private events, weddings, et cetera, for his own benefit. She went to her superior and said that she thought that was wrong. She said that her boss, the professional photographer for the House of Commons, was using government equipment for his own personal gain. Ms. Ross' superior thanked her very much for bringing that to his attention but then told her to clean out her desk because she was fired because she had the goodwill and the fortitude to live by her convictions and report this.
I can use her name because she is still fired. She lost her job because she came forward with information like that, which is the very reason that the member for Surrey Central introduced this bill. I should point out that I tried to introduce a similar bill in the previous Parliament and it went about as far as I predict the hon. member's bill will go.
We have had more high profile cases that have made the newspapers. We had the famous case of Dr. Chopra, a longtime Health Canada veterinary drug evaluator, who brought a matter of perceived wrongdoing in his workplace to the attention of his employers . He has been in the courts for years over this.
The bill the hon. member has put forward would provide a legislative mechanism whereby there would be a comfort for public servants so they could bring this information forward with anonymity and it would be dealt with and brought to the attention of the appropriate department heads or minister without any fear of reprisal or repercussion.
Some of those repercussions can be subtle. People are not always fired. Sometimes they are passed over for promotion because of an event like that or they are not given their vacation on the weeks for which they asked. Little things are keeping well-meaning public servants from coming forward with evidence of wrongdoing.
Perhaps the most famous example is the recent Groupaction sponsorships scandal where these money for nothing contracts were going to companies and no work was being produced. Public servants who were involved in the administration of these money for nothing deals came to us saying that they were forced to sign cheques for work they knew very well was never performed, or to sign a cheque for $100,000 for work that could not possibly be worth that amount of money. They were uncomfortable with it. They balked at it and questioned it but they were ordered to do it anyway.
Those people would like to come forward to clean up some of the scandal of the sponsorship contracts but they cannot. I cannot use their names for fear of jeopardizing their jobs. If there were a mechanism in place, they could go forward without fear of reprisal.
I would argue that the difference between my bill, Senator Kinsella's bill and the bill from the Conservative member from New Brunswick is that the agency should be the Auditor General. I respectfully put it forward as a possibility that the Auditor General could be the one to assess the complaint to ensure that it is not put forward in a vexatious or malicious way and to ensure that it is put forward in good faith. Once the Auditor General was satisfied that it was a good faith complaint, it would be investigated on the merits of the complaint and subsequent action would be taken. We all have respect for the independence of the Auditor General.
I lament the fact that we have been so slow to introduce this necessary legislation. It seems it is only parties in opposition that are fans of whistleblowing legislation. Yet other jurisdictions around the world, as the hon. member pointed out, have already implemented sensible whistle blowing legislation, not the least of which is the United States. Many state governments within the United States have very firmly established whistleblowing legislation.
We would argue that we should be leading by example in the public sector so that such measures are also introduced in the private sector. I think again of the Enron scandal in the United States. Had employees felt that they had a mechanism with which to report wrongdoing, perhaps a great deal of tragedy could have been avoided in that situation.
We have already got some form of whistleblowing legislation in terms of workplace safety and health. An employee cannot be disciplined for bringing forward information about unsafe working conditions. If a scaffold is faulty and the employee's fellow workers are working on the scaffold, the employee cannot be disciplined for putting a stop to the work of the employer, even if it is a public sector employer, the maintenance department of the House of Commons, for instance. No one can be disciplined for that.
We are simply saying we should extend that to other incidents of wrongdoing, whether it is a misuse of funds, out and out theft, breaking of laws, or in the case of the Prime Minister's Office, abusing the privilege of using government equipment for personal gain. Any of those issues should fall under the same category of whistleblower protection.
I should point out that my predecessor in the NDP, Jim Fulton, fought for this long and hard during the 1980s and got nowhere. At that time it was a Tory government that was resisting. It seems the ruling party never has any interest in introducing whistleblowing legislation because the civil servants would be reporting wrongdoings within that government's own administration and it would be embarrassing.
A good employer should welcome whistleblowing legislation. The government should embrace whistleblowing legislation if it is serious about running an efficient and transparent government operation.
With respect to those who oppose the concept of whistleblowing legislation, there is reason to believe that they are not comfortable with having their operation fully transparent. They should be openly embracing the idea of their employees coming forward to point out wrongdoing, providing it is not done in a vexatious or malicious manner.
An hon. member used the excuse of the common law tenet of loyalty to the employer which is archaic. It is medieval. It goes back to the servant-master relationship. The courts have upheld it from time to time, but rarely. It should not be used as an obstacle for this issue of basic fairness. This is the place where legislation is crafted, where legislation is made. We can decide to override and trump an archaic concept like the common law point of loyalty to the employer.