And the plain brown envelope, please
British Columbia is in dire need of a few good whistleblowers.
Doors locked. Responses to Access to Information requests blacked out or not received at all. Letters to MLAs unacknowledged or answered six months late. Media enquiries stymied by politco-speak or, "No comment; it's before the courts."
If the provincial government, its ministries and agencies are determined to keep doors and lips battened down, how else can we discover what plans are afoot before it's too late to steer the ships away from the rocks?
Citizens' only recourse appears to be the hope that old-style brown envelopes will continue to be slipped under the doors of those investigative journalists -- and their editors -- who have the courage to publish the contents.
Even that option seems dicey, when we realize that effective whistleblower protection is virtually non-existent.
Author David Hutton, a former management consultant to industry, is executive director of the Ottawa-based Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform (FAIR), which was convened to "protect whistleblowers who protect the public interest."
In a letter published Aug. 6 on the group's website, Hutton was unequivocal: "The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers and ensure that wrongdoing is exposed, is being used instead to obscure the nature and extent of wrongdoing and to protect the wrongdoers from being publicly identified."
Further, in an Aug. 26 email to me, Hutton wrote, "The PSDPA has been in operation for more than three years with a budget of $6 million, yet it has not yet found a single case of wrongdoing, or protected a single whistleblower from reprisals."
He went on to decry the federal act as being "deeply flawed" and "completely ineffective."
When asked how the Act protects the people of this province, Hutton confirmed my suspicion that the legislation would be of little benefit, either to citizens or to would-be whistleblowers, because although the legislation "applies throughout Canada," it only relates to "wrongdoing within the federal government."
Discouraging news because, even at the federal level, as Hutton points out on FAIR's website, ". . . when the Integrity Commissioner investigates and discovers wrongdoing, everything discovered during her investigations is shielded from Access to Information, not just for a few years or decades, but forever."
In practical terms, then, why would I even suggest that whistleblowers can be of any help in holding our government to account? It's because, in the face of Victoria's apparent determination to go its own way, the public's best interest be damned, I'm grasping at straws.
The need for effective whistleblower protection is urgent because the Campbell government is most comfortable when negotiating long-term agreements behind closed doors, only to spring them on us fait accompli, no public input required.
Negotiations for renewal of the 2012 RCMP contract are a prime example.
Beginning, perhaps, with the Clifford Olson case in the early 1980s, and continuing through the bungled communications of the Pickton investigation, the force's arrogance toward the Braidwood Commission, and other administrative blots on their escutcheon, the once-proud image of the RCMP has become severely tarnished.
The end-point of one of the lesser-known blots was recorded by Tonda MacCharles writing for theStar.com on June 20, 2007.
Under the headline High Cost of Whistle-blowing, MacCharles asked, "Was it all worth it?" and continued by quoting a special investigator: "It was (the whistleblowers') perseverance in tracking misdeeds in the force's pension fund that revealed a 'horribly broken' management culture out of step with the RCMP's own values of honesty and accountability."
Later that year she wrote, "The report . . . follows a litany of public image disasters suffered by the force . . . (resulting in) rank and file 'despair, disillusionment and anger with an organization that is failing them.'"
The same can be said of the recent events and officer-suspensions in British Columbia that led former Vancouver police officer, now District of North Vancouver Coun. Doug Mackay-Dunn to comment: "In terms of the RCMP contract, the main issue is this: Will the RCMP subordinate itself to the chief law enforcement officer of this province -- the attorney-general or the solicitor-general -- and submit to external value-for-money audits of their systems and processes?
"Will they commit to being 100 per cent accountable to the CLE, and not hide behind the traditional cloak of, "We are federal and not subject to provincial regulations, investigative processes or oversight."
Good points; but beyond a brief comment to the effect that the RCMP will be held accountable to provincial standards, has anyone in Victoria gone public with the position being taken in the negotiations?
This begs the B.C. question: Why are the people of this province allowing their provincial government to negotiate behind closed doors, a contract for more of the same?
Why do we not insist that the "rank and file" be released from the RCMP yoke and bring all municipal forces together as a co-ordinated provincial police force?
Arguably, however, our most urgent need for whistleblowers arises out of what the Campbell government is doing to the BC Hydro and Power Authority, one of only a handful of Crown corporations worthy of the title.
First of all, we should drop the pretence that Hydro has any "authority" whatsoever that does not derive out of the premier's office.
Of more concern, however, is the fact that, due to Campbell-style ideology, the corporation is being picked apart and forced to enter into long-term agreements with independent power producers -- contracts that well-nigh guarantee BC Hydro's economic demise.
According to an economic statement prepared for thecanadian.org by retired economist and management consultant Erik Andersen -- formerly with the Canadian Transport Commission -- there are five economic indicators that portend trouble ahead for the corporation.
At this point I confess I have little understanding of "E"conomics, but Andersen's indicators make sense at the practical level:
- the disturbing direction and speed of change of Hydro's operating net income;
- the corporation's debt-to-equity ratio;
- the trend of recorded demand for power;
- productivity factors; and, most of all,
- the questionable wisdom of expensive long-term contractual obligations which, at the behest of Victoria, Hydro has been forced to undertake to the benefit of private power producers.
Reading into Andersen's work and the critiques it has received from others, I believe that if Hydro survives at all it will be little more than a company that sends workers out to shinny up poles to fix power outages caused by winter storms.
The forever revenues so carefully strategized by former premier W.A.C. Bennett will be but a distant memory.
So to the would-be whistleblowers at E-Division headquarters, and to those over at Hydro-on-Burrard and at sub-stations around the province, there will never be a better time than now to slip me a neat brown envelope under the door.
Meanwhile, I can guarantee that the only special interests I have are these: legislation that protects the whistleblower not the wrongdoer; an accountable police force that British Columbians can respect; and an assurance that the public's power assets remain just that -- public for the common good.
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