In a WikiLeaks world, what’s the status of whistleblowing in Canada?

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Though it has been around for years, whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has made waves recently. Perhaps most notably, the site released more than 77,000 secret U.S. military documents in July, prompting the Pentagon to demand that the site’s editor-in-chief cancel any new postings. The uploading of a huge 1.4 gigabyte file called “Insurance” just added to the uproar.

ILSTV wondered what the status of whistleblowing in Canada is in a WikiLeaks world. We spoke to David Hutton, Executive Director of FAIR – or Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform – to find out.

David Hutton: Well, the status is rather, sadly, bad. If we compare ourselves with other countries, perhaps countries that we would normally compare ourselves with like the U.S. and the U.K., then we’re doing pretty badly.

Canadian whistleblowers are caught in a terrible bind because they may be forced, by example, by their conscious or their own professional ethics, by the professional organization to do the right thing and to report the wrongdoing but the mechanisms that should be there to protect them simply don’t exist or don’t work so they’re really setting themselves up for reprisal.

Now in spite of this and in spite of being very much aware of this, many people still do come forward and they often call us at some point in the process. I have to say that it’s very, very rare for anyone to prevail. What nearly always happens is they’re subjected to really vicious and calculated workplace reprisals which are designed to isolate them, to discredit them, to demoralize them, to get them out of the workplace by a combination of manufacturing of a poor performance record and causing them psychological harm so that in the end their doctor tells them that they can’t go back to work because it’s harming, it’s killing them.

David says that whistleblowers aren’t always the advocates-on-a-mission that they’re made out to be, and what they do does have meaning.

David Hutton: That’s one thing that Canadians should understand: that whistleblowers are nearly always just people who are trying to do their job honestly who find themselves in a spot where they’re stuck between doing the right thing and getting into a conflict with their management.

The other thing that people should understand is that this behaviour – this honest behaviour – is very important to all of us because research has shown that when it comes to detecting and exposing white collar crime, whistleblowers are the most effective source of information, even more important than management controls such as internal audits and so on. If we want to crack down on unethical behaviour or even crime or even just massive incompetence and waste in the federal public service or anywhere, then one of the first things you want to do is make sure that you really do a good job of protecting whistleblowers because they’re by far your best source of information and it’s also a very inexpensive way of combating corruption whereas most of the anti-corruption measures people would consider are quite expensive, with policing and audits and all of the management controls you have to put into place.

Looking for more information? See the Post Script entry “More on whistleblower protection in Canada – My conversation with David Hutton“.

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