Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this bill today. The Bloc's critic, the hon. member for Repentigny, has covered our party's position very well. Still, there are some additional elements that can be added for information purposes.
Perhaps we should look at the debate on this issue, the protection of whistleblowers in the public service, in the context of the sponsorship scandal we are now experiencing, for which a commission of inquiry has been established. The debate should be viewed in this context because public servants who might have wanted to denounce the situation could not do so. We saw this again in the testimony yesterday afternoon. Some people, who took their orders from former minister Gagliano and other ministers of the Liberal government that had organized this system, were very uncomfortable about blowing the whistle.
That such a bill, a second version of a previous bill, is now being considered is because there is a need to ensure that the government can no longer use its authority to blackmail public servants who want to do their work in good faith,and who want to report excesses like those we have seen in the sponsorship scandal.
The Bloc Quebecois thus agrees in principle with this bill as such, which gives the president of the Public Service Commission a third-party role, which applies protection against reprisals retroactively to February 10, 2004, and which prolongs the time limit for presenting complaints relating to reprisals. Certain improvements to the original bill had already been made several months ago, before the election.
Nevertheless, when the Bloc Quebecois analyzes this bill, it sees there are still major improvements to be made. Such improvements must be considered before we decide if we will vote for or against this bill when it comes back from the committee.
Fortunately, committees now have a majority of opposition members, because the principle of minority government—our current situation—has been applied. Therefore, opposition MPs will be in the majority. That will be a concrete example of each member having more influence. Since the minority government is a result of the sponsorship scandal, that is a concrete example of the action that should be taken. Let us hope that an acceptable bill will emerge from the committee.
The first recommendation for change that the Bloc Quebecois will put forward is to replace the president of the Public Service Commission by a third party acting as an officer of Parliament. In other words, we do not want the president of the Public Service Commission to be both judge and jury, receiving complaints while at the same time being the head of the public service as a whole. Should that be the case, we would find ourselves in the same situation we were in for years with the ethics counsellor, who reported to the Prime Minister and who would bend with the wind depending on what the Prime Minister said. The Prime Minister would start by making a decision, and then the PM-appointed ethics counsellor would come and say that the Prime Minister was right or that the Minister of Finance who became the Prime Minister was right.
It later turned out that several of these decisions were indefensible, that they were defended only because, essentially, the decisions were made for the man hired to make them by the one paying him to do so. We would not want this kind of situation to happen again under this legislation because, when a public servant decides to make a disclosure, this is not easy or gratuitous; this is an action that has public ramifications. We must make sure that public servants can trust the person to whom they make their complaints, so that we do not end up with no one making complaints because the person receiving them is both judge and jury. We have seen this before in other situations, and we want it to be corrected.
In addition, with respect to the need to exhaust other procedures, the Bloc Quebecois is very concerned about certain consequences. Bill C-11 says, and I quote:
- (1) The President of the Public Service Commission may refuse to deal with a disclosure if he or she is of the opinion that
(a) the public servant has failed to exhaust other procedures otherwise reasonably available;
This means that when someone makes a disclosure in good faith, it becomes public knowledge and the person is then told, “You may have a good case, but you should have gone through this or that process before doing this”, namely the disclosure. There is a danger that this clause might be interpreted as meaning that a whistleblower must have exhausted all procedures before the courts in order to be protected under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. This would negate the positive effects of this legislation.
It is as if the government had put the principle forward but set up all kinds of obstacles and roadblocks to prevent public servants from fulfilling their role regarding disclosures.
If the President of the Public Service Commission is acting as judge and jury, and if public servants must first exhaust all procedures other than those provided in this bill, this legislation will not have any effect. Even if we pass this bill, it will not achieve the results that the legislator had hoped for.
The Bloc Quebecois also wants another amendment. We wonder about the lack of transition measures that would allow a whistleblower to ask, for example, for a transfer or a paid leave. In the sponsorship scandal, if the public servants involved had made a disclosure without the existence of transition measures, the situation would soon have become unbearable for them.
When he testified before a public committee, former minister Gagliano said he had nothing to do with the whole thing, when, in fact, he was up to his neck in the transactions. In addition, the current Prime Minister claimed that he did not know about this scandal, when in fact his office intervened to obtain a $250,000 grant.
Certainly a public servant who had disclosed a situation like that ought to be allowed to change work locations to avoid any unpleasantness. This is another factor that can discourage disclosure, because people know that they will not have an easy time of things afterward.
We would also like to see a right to grievance adjudication to give unionized public servants recourse to it. Thus, it would be possible to restrict the number of procedures a public servant must undertake when faced with a disciplinary measure relating to a disclosure. This would eliminate cases of multiple proceedings, and was one of the recommendations in the Professional Institute of the Public Service's report of May 6, 2004.
These are amendments we feel are important. As far as the union role is concerned, I would add that we would like to see the legislation modified to specify that public sector employees have the right to be represented by their bargaining agent at all stages of the disclosure process.
We have already seen cases of employees coming before a government representative with insufficient knowledge of the procedures. We need only look at how disadvantaged people are when it comes to the Employment Insurance Act. The burden of proof lies with them, while on the other side there are investigators and other people paid to do this sort of thing. The pressure on the individual can be pretty heavy.
When a disclosure comes from union members, it would be important for them to be able to call upon a union representative to accompany them if they felt it appropriate and provide a helping hand with the process.
We would also like to see the legislation apply to the armed forces and the RCMP. There is no need to say much on this, since we have a very special situation in Canada with the sponsorship scandal. Investigations have been called for. The RCMP itself is involved in them, but we also know that the RCMP profited from this scandal through transfers of money. Funds were also transferred to ad agencies. As a result, the RCMP was both judge and accused. These agencies ought not, therefore, to be exempted from application of this legislation.
I think the sector they work in is very sensitive. There have been wrongdoings committed in the past by members of the administration and senior management, which should be disclosed. The same is true of the Canadian Forces.
Look at the saga of the submarines, which, unfortunately, ended in the death of an officer. Maybe if we had had proper legislation, we might have had disclosure, which would have stopped the problem before it began. The submarines could have been confined to port three or four years ago rather than after the accident and their seaworthiness checked before they set sail.
So, there is no reason for the RCMP or the Canadian Forces to be excluded from the application of this bill. The Bloc Quebecois hopes these amendments will be heard.
In the past when amendments were moved, it was hoped they would be passed. We debated the amendments in committee. As I was saying earlier, now, with this minority government, opposition members will make up the majority on each committee. Each member will have a greater role. These amendments will have a chance to be passed. I hope so.
I hope when this bill returns from committee that it will be changed significantly in keeping with the Bloc Quebecois position so that we can finally have a proper and effective Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act.
In the future, situations like the sponsorship scandal need to be eliminated at the source. We have to be able to nip the problem in the bud rather than go through something like what we are going through now. The integrity of the entire government and elected officials is compromised. Let us hope that bill will be amended along the lines of what the Bloc Quebecois proposes.