An article published in The Hill Times by former Health Canada whistle-blower Dr. Michele Brill-Edwards, former Foreign Affairs whistle-blower Brian McAdam, and David Hutton, executive director of FAIR, said effective whistleblower protection laws might have prompted someone from inside the food safety system to step forward.
“Our contention is that, regardless of other failures in the food safety system, this tragedy might have been averted by warnings from people working within the system – if only we had effective laws to protect truth-tellers. This is not a fanciful notion, but one that is supported by studies of numerous previous disasters,” the activists wrote.
They go on to cite examples in which employees had foreseen tragedies but their warnings fell on deaf ears, such as the explosion of the Challenger Shuttle in 1986 and the sinking of the P&O car ferry Herald Free Enterprise in 1987, which claimed 193 lives.
“Like many other tragedies, these were predicted but not prevented. Each could have been averted had employees been able to raise their concerns effectively beforehand,” they said.
As a result of these tragedies, there is now strong whistleblower legislation in the United Kingdom and the United States.
However, this is not the case in Canada, where the tainted blood scandal — “the worst public health disaster in Canadian history” — and the E.coli outbreak in Walkerton’s water claimed numerous lives.
In the current listeriosis outbreak, the activists said that that at least three opportunities to prevent it may have been lost:
- The public could have learned about the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s controversial “secret plan” to reduce food safety standards before they were approved;
- The public could have learned about the many concerns expressed by CFIA inspectors in the field even before the implementation of “this bad policy decision”;
- The thousands of company employees working on the food production lines – “who are the first to know when management is cutting corners or taking risks” — could have spoken out about any concerns.
“But none of this happened and we were kept in the dark because Canadian employees are fearful of raising concerns with their own senior management, and are terrified of going public – with very good reason, ” they said.
As an example, Brill-Edwards, McAdam and Hutton pointed to the fate of Luc Pomerleau, the union steward who discovered CFIA’s plans to reduce food safety standards. After Pomerleau alerted some union colleagues, he was instantly fired.
They also said that the new Public Service Integrity Commissioner, whose job is to protect whistleblowers in the public service, has found neither a single instance of wrongdoing nor a single case of reprisal against a whistleblower in her first year of operation.
“It’s time for our politicians to deliver on their past election promises and to get serious about protecting the brave souls who risk all to reveal the truth. The lives saved may be yours or your loved ones.”