OTTAWA—The parliamentary committee studying Canada’s federal whistle blowing law for the past five months has unanimously called on the Trudeau government to make sweeping changes to the act.
The Government Operations Committee (OGGO) was carrying out a long-overdue review of the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (PSDPA) created by the Harper government in 2006 and touted as the “Mount Everest” of whistleblower protection.
The legally required review should have taken place in 2012, but in spite of the history of scandal and controversy surrounding this whistleblowing regime, the Conservative government declined to launch the review, which was finally initiated by the Liberal government this February—10 years after the law came into force.
Whistleblowing advocates had high hopes for the outcome, and for once we were not disappointed.
The OGGO committee: a job well done
Given this major task out of the blue and with an already heavy workload, the OGGO committee members, much to their credit, rolled up their sleeves and dug in. Besides hearing from the bureaucrats running the system, the committee called many other witnesses: real-life whistleblowers, unions whose members had tried to use the system, and legal experts from other jurisdictions that have much better whistleblower protection laws, like the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Ireland.
Committee members grasped very quickly that the current system is simply not working. When they heard testimony from...
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