Whistleblower bill is fatally flawed: Expert

Louis Clark – November 14, 2005

The whistleblower-protection bill now under consideration in Canada's Parliament mirrors the American experience.

After a decade of scandals in the late 1970s, the U.S. Congress developed a law so flawed that over the next decade only four whistleblowers prevailed -- out of 2,000 federal employees who sought that law's promised but non-existent benefits.

Similarly, Bill C-11 is fatally flawed. It is hard to imagine many, or even any, Canadian whistleblowers finding much protection in it for their jobs and careers.

Whistleblowers need real, not phoney, protection. They need metal, not cardboard, shields to defend themselves against powerful, offended, defensive and perhaps corrupt bosses.

I have examined the bill and found the fatal flaws so extensive that it would be more accurate to call the legislation the Whistleblower Management and Dismissal Act. It tries to manage whistleblower's revelations, channelling them into some dark bureaucratic hole while offering managers a sword to slay the whistleblowers if they did not follow narrow rules about disclosure.

Except in a narrow set of circumstances, public servants who try to communicate through the media to taxpayers about wrongdoing within the government will find themselves at great peril if this bill becomes law.

Effective and critically important whistleblowing is almost always a public act that serves the public good. It is crucial to a democracy that leaders, both elected and unelected, get over their need to control and manipulate the disclosure of allegations about wrongdoing. Failure to protect whistleblowers will lead to the suppression of information that is vital for a nation.

The best test of legislative reforms is to consider whether they will improve the situation that gave rise to the impetus for change. An examination of the Adscam scandal would be instructive. It is hard to imagine how C-11 could possibly have exposed the scandal sooner, benefited the whistleblowers involved in any way, or put any significant impediments in the paths of all those who in some fashion participated in the corruption.

Louis Clark
President, Government Accountability Project (GAP)
Washington, DC

Ottawa Citizen, Letters

Editor's note: This letter refers to the whistleblower bill that was passed by the Liberal government just before the 2006 election. It never came into force, but was amended by the Conservatives' Federal Accountability Act (FAA). This also ignored the advice of whistleblowing experts like Louis Clark, resulting in deeply flawed legislation that was predicted to fail.