Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We seem to be living in the age of the whistleblower, and you notice I didn’t say noisemaker, because all too often we have some of those people too. But the true whistleblowers, people who uncover fraud, mismanagement, government surveillance, you name it, are making waves worldwide. Some publish their findings on WikiLeaks, YouTube, or even use their own blogs.
So far we don’t have any Edward Snowdens in the Northwest Territories, but maybe we should consider that it could happen. Do we want to have an environment where whistleblowers in the Territories are treated like criminals on the run for courageously informing the public? I hope not.
Many people see whistleblowers as heroes who go against the grain, taking great personal risk to protect public safety, stop corruption or safeguard peoples’ rights. To some extent, our government has taken a step towards protecting potential whistleblowers from within and avoid media attention itself. I am referring to the 22-page agreement of the Union of Northern Workers on Safe Disclosure of Information.
For those of you who are not familiar, this agreement sets up a process employees can use if they see wrongdoing that goes unchecked. If all goes well, problems are corrected and employees are protected from reprisals. But the agreement does not cover releases of information directly to the media or to the public.
It appears that the UNW agreement and the discussion paper tabled in 2007 was merely a stopgap measure instead of introducing full-blown legislation to protect whistleblowers. Even then, provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan had laws protecting whistleblowers in both public and private sectors.
I am wondering if we are falling behind the times. Information is sometimes so hard to come by, as I illustrated many times with MLAs having limited access to information in this Chamber, and some days I wake up half expecting an enterprising hacker or a researcher to have set up NWTLeaks to deal with our problems. If they do, I hope we have a law protecting legitimate whistleblowers.
It is clear more is needed to be done in this area than the mere UNW Safe Disclosure Program. Whistleblowers need the protection to report legitimate wrongdoings, and noisemakers need to be filtered from doing wrong unto others.
At the appropriate time I will have questions for the Minister of Justice on this topic. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
