Sylvie Therrien considers herself a “bit of a rebel” — someone who doesn’t like being told to keep quiet when she disagrees or feels an injustice is being committed.

So when she was asked to help the government squeeze EI payouts, she refused to quietly play along.

Claiming she was forced by her employer to meet aggressive savings quotas aimed at reducing employment insurance benefits paid to some Canadians in 2013, the EI fraud investigator blew the whistle. And as a result, she lost her job with the federal public service.

In February of that year she leaked information to Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper showing that she and her colleagues in Service Canada’s Vancouver office, as well as others doing similar work in the department’s western region, were expected to find up to $45,000 each in monthly savings — up to $540,000 each per year.

Her information set off a firestorm in the House of Commons as the NDP and Liberals accused the Conservatives of a witch hunt against EI recipients.

The Conservative government denied the claims, but quickly backtracked, saying the dollar amounts were objectives or “targets” rather than rigid quotas.

Amid the controversy Therrien, now 56, gained nationwide notoriety.

She received a whistleblower award from a national non-profit group in 2014. Later that year, she was aggressively courted to run for the federal Liberal party.

But nearly three years after coming forward, she’s struggling to pay her bills and fears she may soon have to file for bankruptcy. She has taken a huge financial hit from losing her full-time job. And the divorced single mother (her son has graduated from university) worries she’ll have no savings to support herself when she retires.

As a federal investigator, Therrien made more than $60,000 annually. Now she’s working on call as an education assistant for the francophone school board in B.C.; last year she earned about $25,000.

When she had her job, she rented her own two-bedroom apartment in the city. Now, she shares a small home with a friend.

Therrien lost her job after Service Canada accused her of breaching her employee code of conduct. Service Canada says she wasn’t authorized to divulge protected information, policies and guidelines, or other administrative details to the media or public.

“It was a big shock, being suspended without pay and then losing my job afterward,” she says. “I felt powerless, and in a way betrayed by the system.”

Some members of the public praised her for speaking out, while others criticized her and defended the quotas, saying Therrien’s job was to stamp out fraud, so she should have kept quiet — or simply quit.

She’s hopeful the Trudeau government will sympathize with her case, but she says her story highlights the toll whistleblowers can face for daring to criticize their employers publicly.

In both highly publicized and lesser-known cases, whistleblowers are often held up as champions in popular culture, though the personal price they pay is often heavy.

Examples include Allan Cutler, who exposed elements of the sponsorship scandal that dogged former prime minister Jean Chrétien and had to endure second-guessing, heightened scrutiny and enormous emotional strain.

South of the border there was Edward Snowden, now in hiding in Russia after releasing a trove of top-secret files showing the U.S. spying on world leaders and its own citizens. And former army private Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for exposing military and political information including details about civilian deaths in Iraq.

For Therrien, the moral battle is also personal.

“I need a way to survive, some compensation for what I’ve lost,” she says in a phone interview from her home, her voice taking on a defiant tone. “Some justice.”

Uphill battles

Sylvie Therrien had no idea about the turn her life would take when she made her move.

Life wasn’t easy for her growing up. Born in Montreal, she lived in foster homes until her late teens, and she recalls struggling with painful thoughts that no one cared about her.

“I wasn’t wanted … and that’s how I was treated,” she says, adding she also faced grinding poverty during this period.

When she was a very young girl she dreamed of being a missionary in Africa taking care of orphans, and in her teenage years she wanted to be a foreign correspondent, writing about people suffering in poor countries.

“I’ve always wanted to help people, to make a difference in some way,” she says.

At age 23, she and a boyfriend backpacked in and around India, including Kolkata, where Therrien visited Mother Teresa’s mission.

Injustice — “the little guy being victimized” as Therrien describes it — bothers her to this day.

“I know what it’s like not to have a voice.”

Her friend Janice Savage, who has known Therrien since they were next-door neighbours 20 years ago, describes her as very interested in her community and world issues. “She also goes out of her way to help others,” Savage says.

With a university degree in psychology followed by teaching certification, Therrien has held various jobs including substitute teacher, special education assistant and a teacher of French as a second language.

She got hired by Service Canada in Prince George, B.C., as a program officer. There she administered funds that went to groups helping unemployed young people find work and providing recreational activities for seniors, among others.

She was transferred to Vancouver after that position was eliminated. Her troubles began at the beginning of 2013, shortly after she started work in the Vancouver office as a fraud investigator.

In her new role probing fraud, she worked with about 15 others who had the same responsibilities. The pressure on investigators to achieve savings by scouring for EI fraud quickly became apparent, Therrien says. Rather than “good morning,” the first thing out of one supervisor’s mouth every day was a question to Therrien about how much money she’d been able to save the department.

Therrien says she was often locking horns with superiors who seemed desperate to remove clients from EI or claw back their benefits.

She was told to search harder for lies or inconsistencies on recipients’ claims, and to scour for proof that clients weren’t looking hard enough for a job, she says. Therrien says one manager told her she was too sensitive to do integrity investigations and yelled at her about her performance.

She estimates that during her short time as a fraud investigator, very few EI recipients she dealt with — perhaps 3 per cent of them — were actually cheating.

“The rest are mistakes, genuine little mistakes when filling out their claims … I did not see real big, bad unemployed people out there,” she says. “I saw mostly people that wanted to work, to be productive and contribute to society. It is a myth, this age of the unemployed happy lifestyle.”

While agreeing that the government should stamp out any EI fraud, she feels her bosses were often creating reasons to disallow or cut benefits, which she calls “morally reprehensible” and contrary to public servants’ code of values and ethics.

Blowing the whistle

Therrien leaked a story to Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper, which was published on Feb. 1, 2013. The article, which didn’t name her, said workers in Service Canada’s western division were having their performance measured by how much money they could save through cutting benefits to recipients. A source in the story said there’s “a lot of pressure to cut people” and to find faults in their applications for benefits.

Later that month, the EI story hit Parliament, where the Conservative government — after initially denying giving civil servants quotas — admitted having “targets” or “performance objectives” for EI savings. The NDP and Liberals accused the government of treating the unemployed like criminals.

The government defended the savings process, saying EI fraud was rampant. Human resources minister Diane Finley said investigators blocked half a billion dollars in ineligible payments. (The actual amount of fraudulent claims for 2012-13 was $160 million, according to documents from Public Accounts.)

“If the opposition stops us rooting out EI fraudsters, the only people who lose are Canadians who follow the rules,” Finley said.

By early spring, Therrien’s managers and supervisors were strongly hinting that they suspected she was responsible for the leaks. During one meeting with Therrien and other employees, a senior manager shouted, “I hate whistleblowers!” while looking at Therrien.

Therrien received a letter on May 13 of that year from Andy Netzel, a Service Canada manager, informing her she was being suspended without pay and was under investigation for breaching government communications policy. Among the allegations was that she divulged protected documents to the public, media, family or friends. The letter said she presented a “reasonably serious and immediate risk” to the agency.

Two days later, she was interrogated by a senior integrity official from Ottawa about her involvement in the leaking of information. On the advice of a lawyer she spoke to at the time, Therrien didn’t admit to the allegations.

On Oct. 15, 2013, while on stress leave, Therrien received a termination letter from Service Canada informing her that her reliability status — a condition of her employment — had been revoked. The letter stated she had the right to grieve the decision, which she later did. Since she was fired with cause, Therrien was no longer eligible for EI.

In an interview nine days after her firing,Service Canada told the Star its employees “do not face consequences for missing so-called quotas,” and that the objective-setting process for finding savings had been in place for decades.

The agency said rather than going public, Therrien should have first brought her concerns to the federal integrity commissioner.

Therrien said she didn’t know about that process and, after complaining to her managers, she felt going public was her only choice.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Lauded for courage, lured by Liberals

Throughout all of this, Sylvie Therrien became somewhat of a celebrity.

In late December 2013, after her termination, a Quebec advocacy group for the unemployed, Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses, gave her $47,000 in funds it raised on her behalf. More than 800 donors contributed.

Therrien displayed exceptional courage in speaking out against the “arbitrary” way Service Canada went after EI recipients, says Pierre Céré, the group’s spokesperson.

Then in March 2014, Canadians for Accountability, a non-profit group founded by whistleblowers, honoured Therrien. The organization, whose goals are to support those who speak out and to educate the public about the importance of doing so, recognized Therrien with its annual Golden Whistle award. According to founder Ian Bron, she fit the “classic definition of a whistleblower.”

“She basically attacked a secret policy,” says Bron, who paid a personal price after complaining about Transport Canada policies and regulations in 2006.

“If a policy is unethical and leads to harmful outcomes for Canadians, then it should be investigated,” Bron says, referring to EI fraud tracking.

Therrien “was very courageous in the way she stuck to it.”

Intrigued by her elevated profile, both the NDP and Liberals approached her in the summer of 2014 with the idea of running in the federal election the following year.

She met several times with Pablo Rodriguez, Quebec co-chair for the Liberals’ 2015 election campaign and the candidate for Honoré-Mercier, a seat he now holds. Rodriguez is close to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, having run the Quebec wing of his leadership campaign.

According to Therrien, Rodriguez told her in a July 2014 meeting that she’d make a great candidate, and that she should run in La Pointe-de-l’Île against the Bloc Québécois’s Mario Beaulieu. Therrien told Rodriguez she saw little chance of success in the Montreal riding, as the Bloc has a strong presence there and Beaulieu (who went on to win) is popular.

Therrien met Trudeau that month for more than an hour at Trudeau’s Montreal office.

He applauded her bravery in the quota case. She explained why it was a bad idea to run in La Pointe-de-l’Île. Trudeau said he understood and that he’d look into a riding switch, she says.

The next day, when she called Rodriguez, he told her he was no longer involved in recruiting her.

According to Therrien, Rodriguez was very angry she’d gone over his head and pressed her case with Trudeau for a different riding. Her dealings with the Liberals abruptly ended.

In an interview, Rodriguez confirmed he spoke to Therrien at the time but said details are confidential. In a statement to the Star, Olivier Duchesneau, a PMO spokesperson, declined to comment specifically on her statements as her dismissal case is before the federal labour board.

Therrien harbours no ill will toward the Liberal party. But she still wonders why she was dropped as a potential candidate. She wonders if she fell out of favour for discussing the riding issue with Trudeau after being told not to, or whether the party simply felt she was a loose cannon or too inexperienced.

In the meantime, there is the matter of making a living. Therrien is currently before the Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board pursuing a grievance against Service Canada, seeking financial compensation for her firing and to have it overturned.

She’s being represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, a union for federal workers.

“PSAC has always fought to protect the rights of workers who disclose wrongdoing in the public service,” says PSAC national president Robyn Benson, who wouldn’t comment directly on Therrien’s case.

When they witness unethical practices, public sector workers “should be able to sound the alarm without fear of reprisal. We must ensure that disclosure of wrongdoing is encouraged, respected and protected,” Benson adds in a statement.

Therrien’s lawyer, David Yazbeck, says her former employer has to prove it had the right to terminate her. Among the arguments her lawyer is making at the grievance hearings is that the process leading to the revocation of Therrien’s reliability status was flawed.

“They did not give her sufficient notice of the allegations against her, or an opportunity to respond to them,” he says.

Therrien remains hopeful. Since taking office, Trudeau has lifted the muzzle on scientists who were prevented by the Conservatives from speaking publicly, and he has promised more transparency.

“The government is committed to addressing the issue of whistleblowers to determine whether the safeguards are sufficient,” says Duchesneau, the PMO spokesperson.

Maybe that’s a sign Therrien will get some justice in her case.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says. “I was following my conscience.”

The price they paid

A few other prominent cases of people who went public with damaging stories:

Allan Cutler

The former Public Works employee leaked a story to the media in February 2004 that advertising contracts for the federal Sponsorship Program were being funnelled to communication and ad firms friendly with the federal Liberals. It was soon discovered more than $100 million was paid to the companies in commissions and fees. Cutler was threatened, demoted and monitored, and his role in exposing the scandal caused health problems including extreme stress. He was vindicated by the 2006 Gomery Commission.

Edward Snowden

A hero to some people, though the U.S. has labelled him a criminal. The former National Security Agency contractor leaked thousands of documents to journalists in June 2013 that revealed the American government’s covert monitoring of other countries and their leaders. The information he released also revealed how the U.S. and other western governments routinely harvest their citizens’ digital data. He has been living in hiding, currently in Russia.

Yuliya Stepanova

In November 2015, Russia’s international athletes were suspended from competing after Stepanova and her husband blew the whistle on widespread doping among coaches and athletes in that country. The runner alleged up to 99 per cent of the Russian Olympic team uses banned substances, and that it has been covered up by Russian sporting officials, drug labs and the International Association of Athletics Federations. Stepanova is in hiding with her husband, and the two have been branded as traitors by athletes, coaches and others in Russia’s athletic system.

Ian Bron

Bron lost his marriage and his health suffered after he spoke out about Transport Canada. Before leaving his job as chief of marine and aviation security regulations, he wrote a lengthy report in 2006 that claimed there were gaps in policies that made marine enforcement harder for Canada, and made this country more vulnerable to unscrupulous ship operators. Transport Canada denied the claims, but later set up a working group to do an extensive review of security regulations surrounding marine transportation. Bron was accused of releasing secret materials, but the department later cleared him.

Read more about: