It’s no wonder we have so few whistleblowers

Since the revelation last week of a Saskatchewan Health Authority “hush memo” directed at physicians, there’s been plenty of talk about the suppression of doctors’ concerns.

But much of the initial coverage — particularly in its focus on extending limited whistleblower protections to the health authority — has missed the broader point about the ability of workers and citizens alike to participate in an informed discussion about the decisions that matter most.

So let’s review the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s instructions and the government response, and how they fit within the principle of informed public decision-making.

The “hush memo” itself contained admonitions at least against the documentation of issues within meeting minutes, and arguably against the use of the access to information process itself. And it treated all communication with outside parties, including the Ministry of Health along with the media and regulatory bodies, as leading to “discordant messaging.”

When the memo was first revealed, Health Minister Jim Reiter offered the response that he didn’t see any issue whatsoever based on two means for physicians to report their concerns: his personally talking with doctors, and the availability of internal processes within health care organizations. In other words, the Sask. Party’s starting point was that any issues health professionals wanted to raise about patient safety should be kept in-house. They would then be treated primarily as a matter of brand management by the Saskatchewan Health Authority, or political issue management by Reiter himself.

It’s thus no surprise that the Saskatchewan Party was happy to focus on whistleblower status as an alternative to public disclosure.

Our narrow whistleblower protections specifically limit the response to a complaint to an investigation that takes place entirely outside the public view. Once the investigation is complete, the resulting report is generally limited to assessing a government institution’s compliance with existing policies. Moreover, the Public Interest Disclosure Commissioner is empowered to avoid any investigation related to public policy decision-making. So if the Moe government is making a conscious but destructive choice to underfund our health-care system or allocate its resources poorly, the whistleblower process is designed to prevent that type of choice from being reviewed — no matter how clear the danger to health and safety.

No wonder then that so few public employees have bothered to use the whistleblower process enshrined in law for more than eight years. In her recent annual report, the commissioner noted the “troubling” fact that her office had been contacted a total of 24 times with substantive disclosures — while government institutions’ internal designated officers have received only six disclosures over the same time period.

The inevitable conclusion is that the employees with access to the whistleblower regime have found it to be ineffective. So it represents a step backward for a new set of workers to be pushed in that direction — particularly when the theoretical ability to make a whistleblower complaint may be used as an excuse to crack down against more public discussion which actually has the potential to produce action.

Our health-care system — like our other public institutions — should be operated with the goal of serving the public at large. But that requires us to know what’s happening so as to be able to exercise our rights as citizens to speak, act and vote in the public interest.

We can’t do that effectively if the people working in our public institutions are prevented from revealing concerns merely because they don’t comply with the party line. And we should be extremely wary of a government that sees message control as more important than the public good.

Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005.

The ... conclusion is that the employees with access to the whistleblower regime have found it to be ineffective.