'It can be a way to find out about misconduct which may historically go unreported'
Legislation alone will not turn things around in terms of whistleblowing and correcting wrongdoing.
“If it did, we would not see reprisals continue to rise, which is what has happened in the U.S.” says Pamela Forward, president and executive director of the Whistleblowing Canada Research Society in Vancouver, which is holding a virtual conference on May 27 and 28.
Canada has one of the lowest-ranked levels of whistleblowing protection in the world, according to the International Bar Association (IBA), she says, and “the laws around this such as the federal Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act only covers public servants and are inadequate. The provincial laws are the same as they are modeled after the Federal law and only cover public servants for the most part. There is no legislated protection for workers in the private or non-profit sectors either federally or provincially other than parts of employment laws.”
Why set up a whistleblowing line
For organizations, the advantages are numerous and the most obvious one is to root out potentially illegal and damaging behaviour.
“[It] helps organizations become aware of and hopefully manage illegal or fraudulent activity or maybe more generally workplace misconduct. It can be a way to find out about misconduct which may historically go unreported largely because the whistleblowing line obviously gives complainants the opportunity to bring forward issues, hopefully without the fear of negative repercussions,” says Richelle Pollard, partner in employment and labour law at KPMG Law in Toronto.
Setting up a line is also a good device for HR, she says.
“From a workplace cultural perspective, what a whistleblowing line does is it instills confidence, both internally and externally to the market, and ultimately portrays good management or good governance practices that the company cares about illegal or fraudulent conduct or workplace misconduct and wants to handle it appropriately.
“The messaging is that they want to foster an open workplace culture, and that they take any allegations of misconduct, fraudulent activity or workplace misconduct seriously and to ensure that they maintain the best integrity, or the most integrity in the workplace that they can.”
Many Canadian employees fear being “outed” as a whistleblower, along with retaliation and losing their job, according to a 2019 survey.
First steps
But how should companies undertake such a process? As with many things, change begins at the top, according to Forward.
“The most important thing to setting up any kind of a whistleblowing channel, mechanism, whatever you want to call it, is leadership and leadership commitment, visible commitment because if that’s not there, employees get those cues: if there’s a big gap between what the leader says and what a leader does, employees get that cue pretty fast because they can see who is rewarded and who is punished, and so there will be no trust.”
Before the mechanism is put into operation, education is critically important, she says.
“The first function is advice and training for a whistleblower and training for your employees in general about the system and how it works. You talk about it, and you include it in your orientation sessions; you have regular sessions, you have signs up on bulletin boards and so on so there’s dissemination of information.”
That training should also extend to senior leaders, says Forward.
“All managers including the leader… should all have developed skills in conflict resolution and communication skills because people are in crisis when they believe they found something wrong like fraud or other things that happen in organizations and they need managers who are going to deal with them to understand, for example, how to de-escalate somebody; so they need to have listening skills, as well as encouraging people to speak up.”
Ensure the complaint process is abundantly obvious, says Pollard, or it won’t work.
“You want to ensure that the scope of the activity that is reportable and that the processes used for reporting misconduct using the line are clearly outlined, ideally in a policy, so that everyone knows what steps that they need to take in order to make the complaint. Because you’re going to undermine the purpose of a whistleblowing line if the process isn’t understood or if, for example, it becomes overly complicated to file a complaint.”
As well, it should be “user-friendly” in its operation, she says.
Another success factor? Ethics ambassadors, says Pollard. Both SNC-Lavalin and Volkswagen, which suffered through high-profile scandals in recent years, have set up specially trained ethics ambassadors.
“They have a compliance officer in each unit, so that they’re easily accessible to employees for consultation, if a question comes up, there’s an ethical dilemma, there’s somebody they can consult with.”
Almost all Canadian employees feel it is their responsibility to speak up when they see wrongdoing in the workplace. And 40 per cent have witnessed wrongdoing in the workplace
