Search
Welcome!
You are not logged in.
Please register now to gain full access to this site and to receive our newsletter.
If you have already registered you can login here.
Newsletter
Latest News
Comments
You are not logged in.
Please register now to gain full access to this site and to receive our newsletter.
If you have already registered you can login here.
This piece highlights how US government whistleblowers suffer reprisals more frequently than 20 years ago. They are nine times more likely to be fired; six times more likely to be suspended; nearly five times more likely to receive a grade-level demotion; 2½ times as likely to be assigned to a different geographical region; and twice as likely to be denied a promotion.
They are also more likely to be shunned, harassed or transferred, to receive poor performance appraisals and to be forced to take a "fitness for duty" examination. Ever single type of retaliation is more prevalent now than in 1992.
This sinister trend is in spite of strong legislation, which has unfortunately been gutted by absurd precedent-setting decisions – taken by courts that seem to be in the pocket of the administration.
Nevertheless, US government whistleblowers are in a far better position than their Canadian counterparts. After five years of operation, the Canadian tribunal created to adjudicate on whistleblower complaints of reprisal has had only three cases referred to it by the Public Service Integrity Commissioner. And because of the deeply-flawed legislation that governs the tribunal, we believe that these whistleblowers have very little chance of prevailing.
David Hutton
The questionable use of stimulus funds should come as no surprise to anyone, given the virtual absence of controls to detect and prevent fraud – especially the lack of whistleblower protection.
In February 2008 FAIR predicted (in an article published in the Hill Times) that such problems would occur: Canada Needs Whistleblowers To Protect Stimulus Package
David Hutton
Like previous ACFE reports, this one again confirms the importance of whistleblowers to combat fraud. A remarkable 43% of the 1,388 frauds studied were initially detected by tips. That's more than from the next two methods combined – management reviews and internal audit (14% each). Detection by accident was the next most effective method at 7%.
More than half of these tips (51%) were from employees: the remainder were from customers, anonymous sources, suppliers and others. If one assumes that manyof the anonymous sources were employees (who have the most reason to seek anonymity), then about 60% of all tips were from internal whistleblowers.
The 2012 report, for the first time, also examines the impact of facilitating whistleblowing, and finds that it is dramatic: organizations that had hotlines detected 51% of frauds from tips, whle those without hotlines detected only 35%.
There is one question the study does not attempt to answer: given that whistleblowers are such a powerful weapon to combat fraud, why are so many governments and corporations fighting tooth and nail against whistleblower protection legislation?
David Hutton
This situation has a number of parallels with the ouster of Christiane Ouimet, the former Integrity Commissioner who retired in disgrace, her misconduct set out in a damning report by Auditor General Sheila Fraser.
In my observation, governments seem to have three main strategies for clipping the wings of agencies that might cause them trouble: 1) writing laws that render them toothless; 2) starving of them funding and resources to do the job properly; and 3) putting unsuitable people in charge. Both of these cases seem to be examples of the latter.
In both cases the government put in charge individuals who, it soon became apparent, were quite unsuitable. In both cases the appointees did not do their jobs properly, harassed subordinates, and chaos ensued as staff left in droves. And in both cases the appointees were protected from any serious repercussions. Ouimet got the softest landing imaginable for someone who in effect orchestrated a massive obstruction of justice – early retirement with a $500,000 payout – and now Chotalia too seems headed for a soft landing.
The supreme irony is that now one of these agencies is reportedly investigating the other. This may be good news for Chotalia. Unlike the Auditor General, the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner has a track record of finding nothing amiss: it has found only one case of wrongdoing in five years of operation, and only three cases of possible reprisal against whistleblowers.
Under this arrangement we are not expecting any more dramatic revelations about what has been going on at CHRT.
David Hutton
'Pink slime' in ground beef, mad cow disease, deadly antibiotic-resistant pathogens, melamine contamination: these are just some of the food safety hazards making headlines in the USA (and around the world). It is surprising that we hear so little of them in Canada, since we face the same risks: we eat the same food, produced by the same corporations using the same industrial practices. But Canada's oversight of the food industry is even weaker than in the USA.
It's not as if we haven't suffered our share of tragedies in Canada: 2,500 people were sickened and at least seven died from water tainted with e-Coli at Walkerton in 2000; and 57 people were sickened and 22 died in 2008 from meat contaminated with Listeria. Both tragedies occurred shortly after controversial cuts to the system of oversight, orchestrated by the same people – in Mike Harris's cabinet and then in Stephen Harper's. But these deaths have not slowed the government's headlong rush to abandon any responsibility for food safety.
If the government won't provide proper oversight of food safety, at least it should ensure that employees who see problems can raise the alarm without suffering reprisals. As FAIR testified to a Parliamentary committee in 2009:
Unless we create effective whistleblower protection for people working in the food industry – from the public servants who make policy and oversee the industry, to the managers and workers on the production lines – Canadians will continue to die needlessly because of avoidable failures within the food supply.
David Hutton
More articles about food safety
Even in the USA where they have effective laws to fight misconduct by all who hurt the government including the private sector (the False Claim Act being the best) whistleblowers have a lot to be worried about. It all stems from the fact that no one likes them.
Imagine you have the evidence and first-hand knowledge of misconduct that hurts us all and costs us sometimes billions in stolen money and other damages, you come forward to expose the crooks, they are prosecuted, punished usually financially (jail time rare even in USA) and you feel and know you did the right thing. But no one likes you. Not those who say they are honest and law abiding citizens, not those who are as crooked as the guilty party, not the government, not employers and their employees where you may want to work, not anyone who gets to know you blew the whistle.
Why is this? Are all those who don't like you thus disagreeing with your doing the right thing, on the side of the crooks? Do they agree with those who defraud, steal, lie, cheat etc. etc. even when they themselves would not do such things? Are we pre-wired for dishonesty in a way that either we do the dishonest things or we agree with it and turn the other way but blame those who are not like us and expose the dishonesty via whistleblowing?
So what is the poor, honest and brave whistleblower to do? In my opinion if you are one, go for it if the case is so big that you would come out with a huge reward from the USA government once the crooks are punished. Otherwise you may become a victim without any means of survival. Once you are successful, take the reward and walk away from those who "don't like you" and find a new life somewhere else. It always blows over in the end, and with your reward you will be free.
Unfortunately this is not the case in Canada, thus we practically have no whistleblowers in the private sector and only a few in the public sector. One can imagine the misconduct going on in this country when there is no interest on the part of government or law enforcement to proactively go after the crooks. Wrongdoers carry out their "business" with impunity and only rarely do we have some punished (usually symbolically) who become so careless that even our authorities -- as gutless and toothless they are -- must act..
How fortunate for the crooks and how sad for the rest of us. So next time you "don't like" the whistleblower, think of yourself as part of the problem and partner in crime that you yourself are not willing to do or have no guts to do but wish you had.
Having been through a similar ordeal, I can state first hand that these officials and pseudo processes only convene when they can manipulate the data. Mr. Boshra has done an outstanding job of exposing the lack of integrity that is the hallmark of so called "proper channels".
Having attempted to use whistleblower legislation in my own province, I would not recommend that other provinces hold out false hope of protection with new legislation. Unless there are significant differences to legislation passed elsewhere as outlined by FAIR, there would still be no protection for whistleblowers, and no meaningful consequences for wrong-doers.
In my view, a major limitation in this Ottawa Citizen article is that it provides little exposure and critical analysis of what, I believe, are lawyer Stéphane J. Lalonde possible motives for offering his advice in the manner described in this newspaper.
Anyone who buys into the notion that Lalonde did it only to "help us out" as the Clarence-Rockland municipal councilor Campeau is quoted as saying in that article, strikes me as been rather either naïve and gullible, or significantly misinformed in my view.
In my carefully considered view, factors motivating Lalonde to provide advice to a selected number of councilors, as described in the emails addressed by the Ottawa Citizen article, appear to my eyes heavily tainted by his significant self-serving personal and professional interests in having the municipal council execute his advice. Here are some facts underlying some of those possible motives:
These three legal proceedings confronting the personal and professional interests of lawyer Lalonde against the interests of the city of Clarence-Rockland were ongoing during the period he was providing his advice to selected members of city council in those emails described in the Ottawa Citizen article, and currently under investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police anti-rackets squad.
I believe that these three legal proceedings added to the cloud under which lawyer Lalonde resigned as a municipal councilor of Clarence-Rockland, go straight to the heart of the core factors which really motivated lawyer Lalonde to provide the advice described in the Ottawa Citizen article to selected municipal councilors, such as how to go about getting rid of the city's Chief administrative officer, Daniel Gatien. The word vengeance, pure and simple, comes immediately to my mind to describe what this was all about.
No, I just don't buy that lawyer Lalonde did it out of the goodness of his heart, freely, just to help some new members of the municipal council. In my view, he simply and adroitly used some of them (some quite willingly I reckon) to prosecute his ethically reprehensible agenda. And by gosh, did he ever achieve results, the most spectacular one being Gatien's departure last August.
The charges just laid by the RCMP are the result of a determined effort by a small team of SISO managers to expose misconduct by their bosses. By working together, compiling a mass of compelling evidence, and then sharing it with a trusted police force, they were able to trigger a successful 15-month investigation. They also contacted FAIR at a very early stage for information and advice.
There's a trial still to come, but the whistleblowers are delighted with the outcome thus far and full of praise for the officers that they dealt with from the RCMP and Hamilton Police.
This is a notable example of how 'official channels' can work when competent and trustworthy agencies make proper use of information from honest employees. Regrettably, successes like this one seem rare: in most of the cases that we learn about, the cover-up is successful and the whistleblowers are crushed and silenced. The outcome in Hamilton might have been very different if the alleged wrongdoers had been well-connnected members of the establishment.
As it is, the people of Hamilton have paid a high price, with needy immigrants being denied vital services and 150 SISO employees losing their jobs when the charity collapsed. If only proper laws existed in Canada to protect whistleblowers, they might have been able to act earlier and to stop the misconduct while there was still time to save SISO.
David Hutton
More articles about SISO