Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for giving me this opportunity to talk about whistleblowers. And what an evocative term that is. It would have been very important that the bill include mechanisms to protect these people.
At present, the oath of allegiance is often cited. One must be careful not to say too much; there is a cloud of secrecy surrounding all decisions, as if they were state secrets. At present, government employees who are given tasks which are against their personal ethics can do nothing about it, except resort to the brown envelope system. I am referring to the envelopes one can slide under someone's door to provide details about a given situation.
But why not do things in the open, transparently? For instance, why not allow employees who feel that their ethics are being compromised and that people are going too far to say so? Why not put in place the whistleblower protections necessary? Because they know what might happen to them if they blow the whistle and there is no protection in place. It may well spell the end of their career in the public service.
I think that the government has missed a great opportunity. Recently, there have been scandals where it might have been good for us, as a society, to have public servants say, “Look, what we are being asked to do is not right”. There has been much talk about the sponsorship scandal. There has also been the HRDC scandal, with the billion dollars that disappeared.
Had public servants been protected under a bill like this one, it would probably have saved the government and the taxpayers money. With transparency, the matters could have been resolved and the wrongdoing stopped before it was too late, as in the two scandals I just mentioned.
Once again, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois brought in amendments to try and define the concept of whistleblowing, so that problems could be dealt with quickly. Unfortunately, the federal government and the government members rejected these amendments out of hand.