A recent survey commissioned by the person responsible for protecting federal government whistleblowers, Public Sector Integrity Commissioner Joe Friday, has confirmed that still, after 15 years of operation, few know about his office and even fewer trust it. There are good reasons for this.
Although it is responsible for overseeing the entire federal public sector — with its approximately 400,000 employees spending about $1 billion per day — the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner (PSIC) rarely finds anything amiss. It has found only 18 cases of wrongdoing in its 15 years of operation, in spite of receiving more than 1,500 disclosures of alleged wrongdoing from whistleblowers.
Its track record on protecting whistleblowers is even worse. Although 500 whistleblowers have submitted formal complaints of reprisal, no one has ever been protected by the tribunal set up for this sole purpose — because PSIC almost always blocks them from accessing the tribunal.
In 2021, an expert study of national whistleblower protection laws in about 50 countries concluded that Canada’s was the worst in the world. Our own research has revealed no fewer than 40 serious shortcomings and a complete absence of accepted best practices written into the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (PSDPA).
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