Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-11, the whistleblower protection act, which like every other act tabled by this government has its failures and omissions. We will try and fix that. Unfortunately, we only have three hours of debate before it is hived off to committee.
As will be recalled, only a few minutes ago I rose on a point of order to see if I could ask a question of the Liberal member who spoke immediately before me. It seemed to me that she was reading a speech prepared by the Treasury Board, rather than giving the House her own observations on the bill.
We have had far too many speeches in this House prepared by the government bureaucrats behind the scenes. The government members come in here and present them as if it were their own ideas, which they are not.
I have not had the time that the bureaucrats at the Treasury Board have had to look at the legislation. I have had a quick look at it and I already see some problems with it. The Liberal member made some reference to the retroactivity in the bill, which goes back to February 10 or 11. That of course was the day the sponsorship scandal broke upon the land. It says that there will be no recourse or recriminations against anyone who discloses anything to a parliamentary committee on or after February 10 .
Members may recall that we had Mr. Cutler before the committee. His career had been sidelined and basically terminated, although he was still maintained in the public service. However, his capacity for promotions and advancement within the public service were completely stopped because he blew the whistle back in 1996 on the sponsorship program. Of course that had an audit. We know from the Gomery inquiry that the external independent auditors agreed with their employer, the Government of Canada, to water down the contents of their external independent audit so it would not look quite so bad as what they found it to be.
In addition, they were precluded from going to other sources to look at documents. If they had, they would have perhaps uncovered this whole rats nest of problems of the sponsorship scandal back in 1996. Because the government constrained them and then leaned on them to water down their report, we ended up with something that they subsequently claimed did not blow the whistle. However, Mr. Cutler's career was sidelined.
The public accounts committee in its second report this past spring said:
That a mediation process involving the Public Service Commission and the Public Service Integrity Officer be established to resolve matters relating to federal employees past or present who have allegedly suffered monetary loss or career damage as a consequence of having reported instances of wrongdoing with regard to the Sponsorship Program; and that the instances that have been judged to have merit be reported to the House.
As far as I am aware, the President of the Treasury Board is still obviously cogitating on this complex matter. I am not aware that he has reported to the House on the issue of Mr. Cutler who would not be covered by this legislation, although the government takes all kinds of credit for saying that it has backdated it, that all is well and that nobody needs to worry. However, Mr. Cutler's career has come to a crashing end and he has not been dealt with at this point in time. That issue needs to be resolved if the government is to have any integrity on this matter.
I said I have taken a quick look at the bill and I see some problems with it right off the bat. I have looked at clause 5 which says that the Treasury Board will establish a code of conduct for the government. Then it goes on to say that each deputy minister can have his or her own code of conduct. If a person is transferred from department A to department B, all of a sudden that person is working under a different code of conduct. We would have thought that it would not have been a big thing for the Government of Canada to say that integrity is integrity in this department and that department and indeed every department.
Why does every department have its own code of conduct? It is the same way perhaps that the government thinks there should be a code of conduct for MPs and a different one, with perhaps even lower standards, for cabinet ministers. These convoluted problems build complexity into the issue rather than make it simple, clean and obvious so that it will work.
I also have looked at clause 10, which says that each deputy minister and chief executive officer must establish internal procedures to deal with disclosure. In the next paragraph it say that if the department is big enough, the person can designate it to someone else. Then when we get down to subclause (4), we find out it negates paragraphs 1 and 2 by saying they do not apply if the chief executive or the deputy minister declares that it is not practical to do so. Complexity in these issues allows the government to wriggle around and say that it is complying with the legislation, when perhaps it is not complying with the legislation at all.
Again, on the sponsorship scandal, as we know the deputy minister, Mr. Ran Quail, said that he was kept out of the loop. He did not know what a middle manager in the far end of his department was doing. We never did get the answer at the public accounts committee as to why the organizational chart of his department showed at the far side the sponsorship program under the leadership of Chuck Guité. He was completely and absolutely independent from everybody else in the department.
We have this concept of checks and balances. If someone wants to get an invoice out of the Government of Canada, that person sends a request to somebody else who checks to see that the goods are received, which is confirmed by somebody else, and so on. Then when it seems to all work together, someone sends out the money. Mr. Guité was able to do that completely.
When Joy MacPhail, the deputy minister at Public Works, the successor to Ran Quail, was asked why the organizational chart was that way, she said that she did not have a clue, and she was the deputy minister. Mr. Quail did not have a clue what was going on either. We have a serious problem with deputy ministers coming to committees saying they do not know the answers when they are supposed to have them.
Then it turns out that the minister, Mr. Gagliano, was dealing with Mr. Guité, a middle manager, bypassing the deputy minister. All was well because these guys were getting along famously, as far as we can understand. Now we are finding out at the Gomery commission that a few other people around the department were not happy with what was going on. We were aware of this in the public accounts committee.
The issue is that these people were being intimidated. They were being told they could not blow the whistle. The political staff in the minister's office were all in cahoots, by the sounds of it, to engineer this $100 million disappearance of funds from the Government of Canada.
That brings me to clause 23. It says that the president of the Public Service Commission, who will be the person doing the investigations, cannot do an investigation if anybody else in government is doing one Superficially, one may say that is okay. However, everyone may recall the sponsorship program, which actually broke two years earlier, where $600,000 each was paid for three contracts and only one was received. The second one was just the same report with a new cover, and there was no third report.
The government referred that to the Auditor General. She reported that the situation was so bad. She was incensed and alarmed, and she said that she would to do a full audit. Because the Auditor General is involved, the public service commissioner is denied the right to be involved. It does not sound right to me.
This bill is full of holes. Now that the government does not have a majority in the House, I hope we will fix the problems with the legislation at committee.