Allan Cutler is a former public employee who blew the whistle on Adscam, and paid a price for it. He currently runs a pro-whistleblowing advocacy organization called Canadians for Accountability.
Cutler and his colleague Martin McGreal published an article two days ago expressing frustration with the workings of the Public Service Integrity Commission, with respect to a complainant, Charbel El-Helou, who had suffered employer retaliation for making his complaint. It appears that the PSIC let this man down badly, demonstrating both indifference and incompetence: a federal court judge’s ruling was scathing.
Some quick background. The PSIC was created in 2007, and proceeded to keep itself well-narcotized. Its first CEO, the lamentable Conservative-appointed apparatchik Christiane Ouimet, oversaw an office that did not uphold a single one of the 228 complaints submitted. A petty tyrant in her domain, and utterly ineffectual in her role (or, perhaps, very effective indeed from a Conservative point of view), she was put out to pasture greened with more than half a million of your dollars and mine, after the public embarrassment proved too much even for Stephen Harper.
The hapless Ouimet was soon replaced by the biddable Dion in 2010. He’s a friendly who doesn’t make waves, and he just proved that afresh this week.
By a very odd coincidence indeed, a day before Cutler and McGreal’s article appeared, Dion gave the bum’s rush to another whistleblowing advocacy organization, the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform (FAIR). FAIR had had the effrontery to get a letter published in the Ottawa Citizen decrying the PSIC’s continuing failure to act on its mandate. Here is Dion’s insufferably arrogant response.
Let’s be clear here. PSIC supposedly exists to probe the complaints of whistleblowers and protect them from retaliation. Then the whistle is blown on the agency itself by an organization whose mandate is to defend whistleblowing. And PSIC immediately retaliates.
Not one of PCIC’s better moments. But, come to think of it, has it ever had any?
