Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to stand and speak on this important topic. In general I support this legislation. I have some reservations about some of the details but that is always so. It is not likely even when we form government that every piece of legislation brought forward in every detail will have no imperfection or no room for improvement. I would like to point out a few of those things during the course of my discussion.
I have had an extraordinary privilege for the last almost 12 years now of observing government in action. I was one of those ordinary taxpayers. I was the single wage earner in our family. We made that choice. Even though I was making a very fine professional salary, we found it tough to make ends meet because of the huge amounts of taxes. That is one of the reasons I became involved in the political process.
From that perspective, all the time that I have been here it has been drilled into my mind even more in observing what happens around here, the absolute importance that all parliamentarians, all civil servants, all people who work for government, which is another way of saying that we are employed by and work for the people of this country, treat every dollar as a sacred trust. Maybe I should not use the word “sacred”, but it is an extremely important trust. I compare it to the trust that is placed in a lawyer when someone gives that lawyer money in order to proceed with a real estate transaction. That money is held in trust. That lawyer will lose his or her position, will be debarred if he or she in any way misuses or abuses the funds that are entrusted to him or her.
The same thing should be true for every civil servant, every parliamentarian, every senator, every individual who works for the public in this country. I hesitate to use my own convictions as the example, but it is one that came to mind because of what happened to me last week. I had to change my airplane flight and lo and behold the company, and I will not name the company because it is not nice to pick on Air Canada, would not let me change my flight to one day prior without paying over $1,000.
Even though I have been here for 12 years, I have tried very hard to not become “Ottawized” and think that because it is not my money, it does not matter. I am always concerned about that. I cannot spend money so flippantly that some poor taxpayer in my riding has earned. I went to a competitor, and I am not about to give any free advertising so I will not mention WestJet, but for about $500 I bought another ticket. By the way, Air Canada did let me change that ticket to a date further down the road. I moved that ticket to a future date which I will use and I used the WestJet ticket to take me to my riding. I had to set my alarm at 3 o'clock Alberta time in order to make the flight, but I did so, and on the way to the airport that morning, I thought, “I am doing what is right and I feel good about it”, even though I would have liked to have stayed in bed for a couple more hours.
I hesitate to use that as the example and yet I cannot resist saying that is the conviction that I have. The kinds of decisions we make with respect to how we are using the money given to us in trust should reflect the seriousness with which we guard that trust.
I am in favour of this legislation in principle, but I really wish that all civil servants at all levels would have a built-in moral compass, from the ministers, the deputy ministers, all the way down, as the parlance goes, to the people lower in the organization. I think the real important work is done by those who are at the bottom of the organizational chart. They are at the top, in my view, in terms of the importance of their tasks. They are the ones who are actually delivering the services for Canadians. I wish every one of the people in the organization would have a built-in moral compass that says that abusing, misusing and misspending public money is wrong and that they will not do it. That is what I would like to see.
However, as we always say, laws are not there for those who have this moral compass built in anyway. This is true for laws against murder. It makes no difference to me whether or not there is a law against murder. I am not going to murder anybody. To me it is wrong. I would refuse to murder someone even if I knew I could get away with it and no one would ever find out. I still would not do it. I wish every civil servant had the attitude that they would not do something that is wrong, whether or not there was a whistleblower in the wings. That would be the goal. We need to keep pressing toward that kind of standard in our country.
The rules are there for those who would break them. That is why we have rules against drunken driving. It is not because we want to restrict those who would not do it anyway because it is wrong. We have laws in order to stop those who do not have the common sense and the moral fortitude to make that decision themselves.
This whistleblower legislation in effect gives freedom to other people in organizations when they observe someone misusing public funds or in other ways misusing the public trust to bring it the attention of someone who has the ability to do something about it. That is probably a good measure because, unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there will always be those who abuse their privileges and the positions they hold. This is a way of counterbalancing it and I appreciate that.
I am very glad we live in a day and age in which with computer technology, the Internet, et cetera, there is so much more information available and so much more openness that is accessible, provided the information is put there by the authorities. I believe that exposure is one of the greatest motivations to doing what is right.
For those who wonder whether or not something should be done, if they ask themselves whether it became public and their family, friends and colleagues knew that they did it, that will often help them decide that they had better not do it.
Hopefully, the result of this will be not a whole flood of complaints made by whistleblowers, but rather that the amount of misuse of public funds will be reduced simply because there is this additional motivation to not break those rules.
I have a couple of concerns about this bill. My colleague opposite took the time to read from the bill. I was going to do that as well but I will not repeat it. We need to be aware of the wrongdoings as specified in clause 8 of the bill. My colleague read six points contained therein. Actually there are seven, the seventh one being that every one of the six is a violation if a person counsels someone to do the wrong thing. He read those and I think they are a good starting point.
We need to recognize that there is probably no codification that would cover all the bases. We have to make sure that we build within this legislation the positive part of the culture which says that because in principle we are doing this, therefore the abuses will cease.
I was going to say I had the privilege but it was not a privilege, it was more of a punishment to be on the committee that investigated Mr. Radwanski. It was, very frankly, a dreadful thing. I remember when the investigation was going on and whistleblowers from within his organization came forward to our parliamentary committee, a reporter said to me, “You must be really excited about this because this really helps you as a party”. My response to that reporter was, “No. This makes me incredibly sad. The fact that a person in public trust could do this and put in question his own reputation and the reputation of thousands of civil servants, to abuse the taxpayers' money and to so blatantly break the rules and think that he could get away with it, to me, that is a point of great sadness. It does not give me any pleasure at all”.
Without divulging any of the confidential proceedings that went on in that committee, I must confess there were a couple times when, even though I am a man and real men do not cry, I had tears running down my cheeks as I saw the tremendous depth of emotional turmoil that the witnesses were experiencing in drawing to our attention the wrongdoings that were going on. They were fearful for their jobs. They were fearful for their own futures. That is just not acceptable. They were people who wanted to do what is right.
We need to set up our rules and procedures in such a way that the people who want to do what is right feel comfortable and that those who want to do what is wrong are made incredibly uncomfortable. In this particular case, because of the lack of this kind of legislation, it was turned around. The person who was doing what was wrong, specifically the commissioner, felt very comfortable and at ease because he was in charge and if people broke a confidentiality of his department, he could call for their heads and cause them to lose their jobs.
I am so glad that our committee was able to respond to that. As far as I know, not one of the individuals who were involved in bringing this injustice to light and getting it corrected lost his or her job.
In that sense, I strongly support this legislation, because people who take that risk—and there is always a risk; even with this legislation there would be a risk—should not have to deal with the possibility of losing their jobs and having financial hardship imposed on them.
It is important for us to make sure that when this bill becomes law, and I trust that it will, we press for implementing the spirit of this law and not just the legalities of it.
In our present milieu in Canadian political history, we are at a low point. A number of Canadians have lost trust. This is demonstrated by the fact that fewer and fewer of them even bother to vote. It shows that we do need to do something.
Mr. Speaker, I will finish my speech after oral question period.