Whistleblower watchdog leashes itself

Mario Dion is the public sector integrity commissioner, responsible for the agency charged with protecting federal government whistleblowers. For the past six years the agency’s “desired strategic outcome” has been defined as follows:

“Wrongdoing in the federal public sector is detected, resolved and reported, while public servants are protected from reprisal, resulting in a greater integrity in the workplace.”

This statement defines what we should be getting for $7 million spent each year on the federal whistle-blower protection system. This has been in operation for six years, at a total cost of $37 million. It is supposed to protect 400,000 public servants, yet it has produced almost nothing: just four cases of wrongdoing found although hundreds of public servants have gone to the public integrity commission with allegations of misconduct.

Now commissioner Dion has lowered his sights by removing certain key words from his mandate: it no longer calls for the commission to detect wrongdoing nor to contribute to greater integrity in the public service. These changes are a backward step for an agency that is not performing.

I run a public interest charity that works to protect whistleblowers who protect the public interest. Our concerns about the commission’s strategy go back to the dark days when, under former integrity commissioner Christiane Ouimet, the agency found zero cases of wrongdoing in 3-1/2 years.

Eventually, auditor general Sheila Fraser issued a scathing report on Ouimet’s conduct, revealing that in addition to being an abusive manager and taking reprisals against her own staff, Ouimet was also failing to do her job.

We hoped to see a very different approach under Dion but have been disappointed in many ways. So in March 2012, when we found out the agency was developing its strategy, we offered our constructive suggestions.

In a nutshell, we made three proposals:

1. The plan should be designed to achieve the strategic outcomes. We view the agency’s current approach as a passive one — setting up bureaucratic procedures to do the minimum that law requires, without regard to whether this accomplishes anything in the real world. We suggested that, like any business plan, the commission’s plan should contain actions designed to achieve tangible outcomes.

2. The agency’s investigative capabilities should be greatly strengthened. We listed some of the weaknesses we saw in this area, based on what whistleblowers had been telling us, and suggested how to fix these. Six months later, on Sept. 21, 2012, a federal court judge handed down a ruling containing serious criticisms of the commission’s investigations, echoing our own.

3. The agency should establish measurements of performance that would show whether the whistle-blowing system is working. We suggested measurements that would include: satisfaction levels of clients; awareness of the commission among public servants and trust in the agency; and the perceived level of integrity of government departments as determined by an employee survey — as has been done in other jurisdictions.

In the current plan we see few if any of our suggestions implemented. Instead we see the mandate dumbed down to align with the status quo, undercutting the case for doing anything differently or better. Tellingly, there’s another item where Dion’s strategic plan is deficient. It’s called engagement of key stakeholders.

Remarkably, the commission’s advisory committee no longer has representation from any whistle-blower groups.

Dion summarily ejected our organization, the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform, for making public our criticisms of the agency’s investigations, reiterating concerns we had previously made privately. Two other public interest groups left in protest: Canadians for Accountability, the whistle-blowing group founded by Allan Cutler, and Democracy Watch.

How is Dion going to repair this void?

It cannot be done until his idea of “engagement” is modified to allow for meaningful dialogue that can influence his actions. As his most recent tweaks to his agency’s mandate illustrate, this isn’t happening at present.