A mild-mannered public servant is repeatedly asked by senior bureaucrats to approve mis-appropriations of taxpayer dollars and cover up government wrong-doing.  While bureaucrats are hardly known to be mavericks, the public servant refuses, documents the malfeasance, and complains to senior departmental officials.  In response, the department circles the wagons, threatening the employee with suggestions of insubordination, marginalizing the employee's career prospects, and even calling into question the employee's mental fitness.

Is this Allan Cutler, the whistleblower who testified earlier this month about the sponsorship scandal?  Could be.  But it could also be Joanna Gualtieri, who exposed $2 billion in mis-spending at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade's bureau of physical resources.  When Gualtieri raised concerns throughout the 1990s that the department was violating its own guidelines for procuring property for diplomats abroad, she was ridiculed, harassed and repeatedly prevented from doing her job.  The government even tried to re-assign her to more benign tasks, but she successfully fought to get her job back.

Or maybe it's Margaret Haydon and Shiv Chopra, the Health Canada scientists who spoke out after they were forced to approve growth hormone for cows they felt was unsafe.  Health Canada imposed a gag order on the two until they took the department to court.  They successfully argued they had a constitutional right to speak if they have concerns about public safety.

The stories are depressingly similar, and it is beyond doubt that for every vindicated whistleblower we hear about, there are dozens, probably hundreds, for which senior management's standard operating procedure of whistleblower intimidation succeeds in shutting them up.  Whistleblowers' lives are made difficult or even ruined, public service morale plummets, and taxpayer dollars are wasted and the public interest abused.

Cutler himself says he would not have come forward were it not for Paul Martin's under-the-gun promise that whistleblowers in the sponsorship scandal will be protected.  But what happens when the public and media spotlight turns away from the scandal, as it inevitably will? 

Fortunately, pressure from unions and interest groups, task force reports, and the criticisms of the government's first whistleblower protection officer, Edward Keyserlingk, have finally cornered the federal Liberals into introducing a whistleblower protection bill (Bill C-25) more than a decade after Jean Chrétien first promised such a law.

Whistleblowers are true public servants, in the finest sense, and they deserve protection.  But beyond this rationale, the mere existence of effective whistleblower protection would have a cleansing effect on government.  Allan Cutler showed that $100 million doesn't go missing without people noticing.  As long as those people can be coerced into playing along, politicians and managers can use taxpayer dollars for their own personal or partisan gain.  Effective whistleblower protection provides a shield against coercion, and the bad actors know this.  Without coercion at their disposal, they risk being exposed.  Sunshine, it is said, is an excellent disinfectant.

However, the new whistleblower bill lacks key elements that would make it effective.  First, it fails to cover all government employees.  Political staff, including cabinet ministers' assistants, are excluded from the Act, despite the fact (or likely because of the fact) that they are often uniquely placed to expose political meddling.

Second, the bill does not allow public employees to blow the whistle any time they witness wrongdoing, instead requiring employees to exhaust a department's internal process for dealing with wrongdoing before complaining to the whistleblower protection agency.  Such internal processes can take years, during which time the employee may have to endure harassment or even firing.  Eventually, the employee may be vindicated, but the point of whistleblower protection is to remove the cloud of fear caused by harassment that prevents whistleblowers from coming forward.

Third, the bill must give the protection agency the power to order a clean-up of wrongdoing and levy meaningful penalties, such as fines or suspensions, against those who break the rules.

Finally, under U.S. law, whistleblowers who expose fraud in government contracting are rewarded financially if their disclosure results in significant savings for taxpayers.  As a result of this law, taxpayers are able to recover more than $1 billion a year from fraudulent contractors.  (Before the law was brought in, these savings were a mere $27 million a year.)  The Canadian law should similarly reward all whistleblowing that results in the significant saving of public dollars.

MPs have the chance to amend the new whistleblower bill, and they should take this opportunity to strengthen it.  Canada has waited a long time for a law that protects those who expose corruption.  Ensuring that the law is effective is vital for Canada's whistleblowers, not to mention the rest of us.