| The sponsorship scandal has provoked many Albertans to call for more government transparency in Ottawa, but a recently released Parkland Institute report says there’s a lot more that has to be done here at home in protecting provincial whistleblowers.
"The provincial government has done nothing to act on their stated support for whistleblower protections," says Keith Archer, a University of Calgary political scientist and the author of the report, called From Rhetoric to Reality: Protecting Whistleblowers in Alberta.
"There’s this tension that exists between being loyal to your employer and serving in the public interest. To the extent that that tension exists, governments have to decide which side they’re on," says Archer, adding that the Alberta government is "well on the side of ensuring departmental loyalty" over public interest.
Currently the province has no whistleblower legislation in place. A Liberal MLA introduced a private members whistleblower protection bill in 1998, but the Progressive Conservative government voted it down saying they supported whistleblower protection but they didn’t like the bill’s design. They have not put forward legislation since.
Archer says Alberta’s citizens and media should take a serious look at preventing government scandal here at home instead of being so enamored with the sponsorship scandal.
"I think there’s a bit of a partisan dimension to this… Much of the attention in terms of government accountability is directed to Ottawa and it seems to me as though the media doesn’t provide much critical commentary on the government here," he says. "Not much has been said within the province about a government that doesn’t provide very solid or consistent protection for public servants."
A spokesperson for the premier says "we as a government never felt it was necessary to go as far as legislation."
Whistleblower legislation across the country is varied. The federal government has an internal disclosure policy, but critics say it isn’t effective because it doesn’t provide oversight that is sufficiently independent.
New Brunswick is the only province or territory with blanket legislation that covers all public sector employees, but it only covers explicit lawbreaking and not necessarily fiscal mismanagement or breaches of conduct.
Government employees in Alberta are to some extent bound to silence. According to the oath of office that provincial employees must take, an employee can’t, "without due authorization, disclose or make known any matter or thing which comes to my knowledge by reasons of my employment in the public service." The rules and process of reporting wrongdoing change from department to department, and Archer says the result is a "patchwork" system where employees often don’t know how to report things and whether or not they will lose their job if they do.
"It’s pretty complicated," he says. "For a citizen who’s considering making a disclosure when they see wrongdoing it’s actually very difficult to sort out exactly what the consequences could be."
Calgary Mountain View MLA David Swann says the government’s reluctance to protect whistleblowers indicates they have something to hide.
"I think it’s very clear this government is not interested in free speech, they’re not interested in people who challenge what they’re doing and they’re not transparent... It’s a closed government," Swann says.
Swann was fired from his job as the medical officer for the Palliser Health Region in 2002 when he vocally supported Canada’s ratification of the Kyoto Accord. Swann says he was acting in the public interest, and he fears that there are many like him who know things that should be made public but are afraid to speak for fear of losing their jobs.
"We don’t hear about these people," says Swann.
Archer says the long duration of the Progressive Conservative reign probably has something to do with the lack of whistleblower protection.
"When you have one-party dominance for such a long period of time, sometimes a mentality can develop within the government that ‘everyone agrees with us and we’re not doing anything wrong and therefore we don’t need to have extraordinary efforts to protect individuals,’" says Archer. |
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