A new policy to protect municipal whistleblowers will be headed back to staff to review whether those who wish to step forward about alleged wrongdoing should be given more time to file a report.
Wasaga Beach council’s co-ordinated committee voted 4-3 to refer the policy back to staff to determine whether a whistleblower should be given 10 days — as proposed by the human resources manager Denise Elen — or a longer period such as three to six months.
The decision to do so, however, comes even as the proponent of having a policy expressed objections to the creation of a document that he said was not as “robust” as it could be.
Coun. Joe Belanger attempted to put forward amendments to the policy that would give a whistleblower up to three years to file a complaint, as well as to turn over all complaints to a third-party professional.
“There are a number of areas of the report that do not satisfy what I believe is a robust whistleblower policy,” he said. “The policy … appears to be no more than a typical corporate complaint policy versus a robust whistleblower policy.”
An internal reporting system “does not make sense to me given that a whistleblower policy, by definition, is to allow employees who fear speaking out internally to speak out through a third-party independent process,” he said.
Elen said the option is still there to call in a third-party investigator. The...
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