OTTAWA – A public service director who made racist comments and who promoted an employee they were in a relationship with and a federal department’s internal integrity and security office that broke the government’s contracting rules.
Those are but two of the latest examples of wrongdoings discovered by the federal government in 2020-2021 year, according to its latest annual report on allegations and investigations into wrongdoing by public servants.
In that period, 123 public servants made 101 internal disclosures containing a total of 174 allegations of wrongdoing under the federal government’s whistleblower protection act. That is the lowest number in the last four years, which the Chief Human Resources Officer suspects may be a result of bureaucrats largely working from home and thus have less opportunities to observe and report issues.
During that period, another 30 investigations were closed leading to 12 allegations of wrongdoing being confirmed and 19 cases in which a department needed to bring in corrective measures to ensure the issues did not occur again.
A first case of confirmed wrongdoing involved an executive at Global Affairs Canada (GAC) who was accused by a whistleblower of “gross mismanagement” because of staffing “irregularities.”
The complaint also accused the executive of both repeatedly making inappropriate comments to employees, “some of which were of a sexual nature,” as well as engaging in systemic harassment...
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