Federal Employees Say Fear of Reprisal Their Top Concern With Reporting Wrongdoing: Report

The West Block of Parliament Hill is pictured through the window of the Sir John A Macdonald building in Ottawa on May 11, 2022. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Federal employees are increasingly unlikely to report wrongdoing committed within the federal public sector out of fear of reprisal, says a report prepared for the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner (PSIC).

“Not only is fear of reprisals the top concern associated with reporting a wrongdoing, it is also a real concern according to nearly all participants,” said the report, titled “Exploring The Culture Of Whistleblowing And The Fear Of Reprisal In The Federal Public Sector,” published on March 25.

“The reality is that the workplace culture is dominated by an attitude that no one should ‘rock the boat,’” it noted.

The report’s findings, first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, were drawn from questionnaires with employees from unnamed federal departments and agencies, conducted via nine online focus groups between March 3-10.

Five focus groups were conducted with non-management employees and four groups with executives and managers. PSIC paid Phoenix Strategic Perspectives Inc. $68,108.59 to conduct the research on its behalf.

‘Virtue Signalling’

The report noted that the attitude of federal employees toward whistleblowing in the public service has changed over time, with an increasing trend toward hesitancy.

“In describing how their attitude has changed, participants described themselves as having ‘become less naïve’, ‘more pessimistic’, ‘more cynical’, ‘more jaded’, ‘less bright-eyed’, and ‘more disillusioned’ about the process of reporting wrongdoing,” the report said.

“Some described themselves as having become ‘more reluctant’, ‘more cautious’, and ‘more sceptical’ about reporting a wrongdoing, or more likely to consider whether something is worth reporting given the negative impact this could have on their career.”

Though participants said there is much more “awareness-raising and education,” regarding whistleblowing in the workplace, as well as official measures or procedures in place to support it, many complained that such efforts amounted to “virtue signalling.”

“Many held the view that such changes amount to ‘virtue signalling’ or ‘window dressing’ as opposed to constituting real cultural change in the acceptability of whistleblowing in the workplace environment,” the report said.

In 2017, Parliament passed the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (PSDPA) granting the integrity commissioner the authority to investigate allegations of reprisal against federal employees who report wrongdoings committed in the federal public sector.

The act applies to most federal departments and agencies, including parent Crown corporations and the RCMP, covering about 400,000 public servants.

However, the act “does not apply to elected officials or their staff,” and “employees of the House of Commons and the Senate are excluded,” said PSIC on its website.

Risks

Typical reprisals in the federal public sector, according to the report, range from “having one’s reputation tarnished by being labelled as someone who can’t be trusted,” to “being shunned by other employees,” sustaining “stunted career development,” or “being taken off projects or not assigned to special projects.”

“It was suggested that reprisals are usually not so brazen or blatant as to involve outright termination, but that this cannot be excluded as a possibility because reprisals might include looking for reasons to terminate a whistleblower,” the report said.

The report comes five years after the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates concluded in their 2017 report that the PSDPA “does not sufficiently protect whistleblowers from reprisals as most of them face significant financial, professional and health-related consequences.”

The committee’s report, titled “Strengthening The Protection Of Public Interest Within the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act” is a joint effort by members of federal political parties, to recommend ways to protect whistleblowers who disclose wrongdoing. Cabinet has not acted on the recommendations.