The Hill Times presents the third of an eight-part series titled, “The Whistleblowers.” We wanted to find out from some of the country’s best-known government whistleblowers if their actions have actually made a difference to government policy today and if, given the personal costs to their lives, would do it again. 

Almost 10 years after the federal Liberal government’s sponsorship scandal and subsequent attempts to legislate whistleblower protection in Canada, very little has improved, says Allan Cutler, a key figure in exposing bid-rigging and political interference in advertising procurement contracts at Public Works, better known as the Liberal Sponsorship Scandal.

“Are more people willing to speak out? Yes. Has the situation improved? Debatable. In Canada, people are more aware about what whistleblowing is about, but you still face being destroyed. I know people in the federal system who have been fired because they blew the whistle. This is after the sponsorship scandal, this is after I’ve testified,” Mr. Cutler told The Hill Times recently. “They come to me, they talk to me. I continue to get referrals. It all deals with government corruption. I made a statement recently. I said it’s one of two things. I said it’s either worse or there’s more of it, but then I thought about it—maybe it’s both. But I would not say that it’s better.”

Mr. Cutler founded the Canadians for Accountability in June 2008 to help educate Canadians about whistleblowing and to promote a culture of integrity in the public service after he faced reprisals and harassment for trying to do the right thing at Public Works and Government Services Canada in 1996 as a procurement officer. As the bureaucrat responsible for negotiating the terms and prices of government advertising contracts, he tried to raise his concerns about bid-rigging and political interference in the sponsorship program.

Between 1994 and 1996 he said he refused to go along with improper practices at Public Works such as backdating contracts, payments for no work, and breaking Treasury Board rules and regulations.

He was sidelined, blew the whistle in 2004 and later left the government in 2004.

“It was contracts being awarded to firms for no work. We were told to increase the rates we were paying to firms because they wanted to pay them more, not because the firms wanted more, backdating documents which you’re supposed to go through a legal proceeding to ratify, but, ‘No, no, just issue the contract as if it was given two months ago,’” he said.

“It was everything against what I knew was the right thing to do and the legal thing to do. I’m not talking just about policy, this was more than policy, and this was breaking the law. Giving money to somebody for nothing—that’s breaking the law. I had no choice in my opinion because of the nature of who I am,” he told The Hill Times. “It wasn’t a hard decision. The decision was made very quickly to just refuse to sign documents.”

At the time, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien’s government, rattled by Quebec separatism and the Parti Québécois government, created the Canadian federal advertising sponsorship program through Public Works and Government Services Canada aimed at raising awareness in Quebec of the federal government’s contributions to Quebec’s industries and cultures. The program ran from 1996 to 2004, but its administration was broadly corrupted. Ad firms with close ties to Liberals organizers and fundraisers were paid for little or no work and those firms donated money back to the Liberal Party.

High-ranking bureaucrats and Liberal Party political players were later implicated in the scandal, which also led to the defeat of the Liberal government in the 2006 election.

Mr. Cutler said he started by trying to fix a problem, at first talking to his managers about what he was seeing, but getting nowhere. He had refused to sign document after document, he said, all the while keeping records which nobody knew about.

“At one point in time, there was a million dollars worth given to a firm for virtually nothing, and after I reviewed the documents, they told me to destroy them. What I always said to people is that I always made certain to follow orders. So I photocopied them and then destroyed the originals,” he said. “If questioned, I followed the orders. They never said, ‘Don’t photocopy,’ they said, ‘Destroy.’ And I followed my orders strictly. I knew those records were important to keep because they demonstrated something. But still, they told me to do it so I followed my conscience. If there was no photocopier, I would’ve just kept the originals because they were too important to destroy.”

What made him go public and in essence “blow the whistle” was a meeting he had with Mario Parent, coordinator of advertising and sponsorship branch at Public Works, in which Mr. Parent told him that Chuck Guité’s, director of the sponsorship program, “was getting fed up” with his refusal to sign the contracts and that he was “going to have to pay for it.”

Mr. Cutler took it seriously. “That was a personal threat. That was a trigger that moved me. There could have been other things—it could have been sooner, it could’ve been later but the issue he was talking to me about was something worth about $23,000, really small. I was refusing to sign almost million dollar documents, so on a 20-odd thousand dollar one, is where this threat came. It doesn’t make sense. I said enough is enough,” he said.

With the help of his union, he went to internal audit to make a formal complaint.

“We went to internal audit, and they said, ‘Oh, we’ll keep your name confidential.’ Ha, there was no one else who had the information I had so there was no confidentiality and anonymity that could even be perceived or given to start with,” Mr. Cutler said.

“They did guarantee that they would protect me, that I would not suffer negative consequences. They would ensure that. So I went there, started the process and all hell broke loose.”

He said a day after he gave internal audit the documents he had, he was called into Mr. Guité’s office.

“He told me that there had been some discussion for some months—which turned out to be false, by the way, when they checked my records—and my position was going to be declared surplus, meaning I was being fired,” Mr. Cutler said. “All of a sudden, the instructions came out that I was to get no work. I was not involved with any file, previous, new, I had zero work. And that went on for three months. And, of course, everyone in the office knew I was deep in the shit, so nobody would talk to me. Try going to work for three months with nothing to do. Internal audit did not support me and get me out of there. They were supposed to have gotten me out of that situation in three weeks. Three months later, I was still there.”

He said he was ostracized at work and back then there was no internet to surf to keep occupied, so he spent his days counting the minutes and playing chess in his head. He said that he had a friend he used to drive into work with and they would play chess by calling out moves in the car with no board.

“I can’t do it now, but at that time, I could go into a game about 10 or 15 moves and keep it in my head. At that point it would break down, because the two of us could do it and we’d start getting into a dispute over where the pieces actually were, so we’d lose it eventually,” he said. “I was able to sit there and play an imaginative chess game. You just find a way to get through the day.”

Mr. Cutler said he didn’t want to give management any reason to reflect badly on him so he deleted the games on his computer and he didn’t talk on the phone for personal matters.

He also couldn’t read any books or magazines except for training manuals related to his work. “You look at your watch and say, ‘Oh, there’s another three minutes gone.’ You know you can’t come in late because they’ll watch for you, you can’t leave early, you can’t take long lunches, so you have to be at your desk, even if there was nothing to do,” he said.

“No one in the office is really talking to you because they’re all afraid that they’re going to be in the same position as you’re in. That’s where it was. I survived.”

He said that those closest to him know he is more of a “relaxed type of individual” but during this time, Mr. Cutler went on stress medication for the first and only time in his life. “It helped me get through the day.”

His complaint prompted a departmental audit of the advertising and public opinion division in 1996. By the time it was underway, later that year, Mr. Cutler was transferred to the technical and special services division of Public Works. “When they audited all my documents, they were asking me questions and I said, ‘I’ll let the documents speak for themselves.’ Their own internal notes said that everything I gave them was valid,” he said.

In 2004, auditor general Sheila Fraser reported on the sponsorship program, aimed at promoting the federal government in Quebec after the 1995 referendum on separation, in her annual report. She found that Public Works paid more than $100-million to various communications agencies that produced little to no work of value to Canadians. Officials “broke just about every rule in the book” when it came to awarding contracts, a large portion of which went to Groupaction.

Her report also showed that the RCMP, VIA Rail, the Old Port of Montreal, the Business Development Bank of Canada and Canada Post played a role in transferring money through questionable means.

Then-Liberal prime minister Paul Martin called a public inquiry into the scandal and appointed Justice John Gomery to head it up. After a one-year inquiry and $14-million, Mr. Gomery found there was “partisan political involvement in the administration of the Sponsorship Program; insufficient oversight by senior public servants; deliberate actions taken to avoid compliance with federal legislation and policies; a culture of entitlement among political officials and public servants involved with Sponsorship initiatives; and the refusal of Ministers, senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office and public servants to acknowledge any responsibility for the mismanagement that had occurred.”

Mr. Guité was convicted on five counts of fraud in 2006.

At the time he was blowing the whistle, Mr. Cutler said, he didn’t feel like he was making any difference, but after the Gomery Commission, he found his actions helped prove that something serious was going on.

“I was blowing the whistle in ’96 and I was dead-ended in the job for years afterwards, but I had all my records. When the Gomery Inquiry and when the sponsorship scandal blew up, I had the records, I had the documents. The auditor general at that time was looking for documents from about ’97 onwards and I went and said, I have ’94 to ’96, are you interested? I had all the important documents. [Jean] Lafleur [former CEO of Lafleur Communication Marketing Inc.] was actually convicted on my documents.”

Mr. Lafleur pleaded guilty to 28 counts of fraud in April 2007 for giving 76 falsified invoices to Mr. Guité. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison and ordered to pay back $1.6-million to the federal government.

In his report, Mr. Gomery also concluded that Mr. Cutler was penalized for his whistleblowing and Mr. Parent and others adopted a complacent attitude to the mismanagement of the program likely because they did not want to suffer the same reprisals as him.

In 2006, Mr. Cutler ran for the Conservative Party in the riding of Ottawa South, Ont. The party was running on a campaign of accountability and transparency and promised to introduce a Federal Accountability Act, which contained whistleblower protection provisions. Incumbent Liberal MP David McGuinty defeated him in the election. Since then, Mr. Cutler has criticized the Conservatives for not bringing in stronger legislation and not practising what they preach.

“I’m on record of having said that a weak law is better than no law and a person I was talking to said no law is better because no law leaves a void rather than telling you what you have to do. I will put a caveat on that,” he said.

“If you have an integrity commissioner who wants to make the law work, it can be made to work, but you have to have the will to do so. You can’t say, ‘No I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ Then they really don’t do anything.  If you really want something to work, even weak legislation can be made to work. But you’ve got to have that will, that push behind it.”

It starts at the top, he said.

Mr. Cutler said the government needs to implement a culture that actually protects whistleblowers and does not automatically move to punish them when they speak out. The burden of proof should also rest on management and not the whistleblower, he said.

Despite the lack of protection in his own case, Mr. Cutler said he would have no choice but to blow the whistle again.

“Would I do it again knowing the consequences? Yes. Would I have the same consequences? No. I learned a lot. I know a lot and I would know how to fight back better,” he said, noting that he would’ve gone to the media first and exposed it sooner rather than giving management the benefit of the doubt that they wanted things to improve and were trying to fix it internally.

He said he would have also threatened a lawsuit over how he was treated at work.

“But I didn’t know better at the time. You’re living through a situation, in hindsight we can all improve,” he said. “You have a choice to give up or to keep fighting. … If you stop trying to improve, you’re going to see things get worse. Are things getting better? I think there’s a slow, slow, improvement. I don’t think there’s a lot of improvement, but there’s more sensitivity to the need to have integrity. There’s a long way to go, but if we don’t keep speaking out, if we don’t keep trying to push the subject, we’ll never succeed and actually it will get worse.”