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As other countries promote the value of public-interest whistleblowing, Canada remains a feudal fiefdom. This is the real scandal.

As other countries promote the value of public-interest whistleblowing, Canada remains a feudal fiefdom. This is the real scandal.

No political party in Canada has ever committed to a sustained and consistent campaign to protect whistleblowers: the Wilson-Rayboulds and Philpotts of the world. In this regard, Liberals and Conservatives are, always have been, just different names on the same coin, mutually and complicitly understanding that power is at risk when people are free to speak about wrongdoing and violations of public trust. While Andrew Scheer may appear in this scandal to be the more ennobled of the two, based on his effusive calls for Wilson-Raybould to be free to speak, history reveals both parties’ track records of stonewalling and hiding truth. From Jean Chrétien to Stephen Harper and through to Trudeau, all promised transparency, all practised secrecy. All promised whistleblower protection, all embraced restrictive and oppressive anti-free speech regimes.

Worse still, they made integrity the signature piece of their electoral platforms. Hope given, hope crushed, oppresses more than hope never given. Too often Canada masquerades as the gatekeeper of enlightened, free-speech democracy, when reality is darkly different.

Today, Trudeau and his “team” are working hard to characterize the expulsion of Wilson-Raybould and Philpott as a breakdown in “trust.” But the sin of these two women was not about acts of disloyalty but about committing the truth. The birthplace of scandal is not in environments of respectful and open dissent but in dark corridors of power and secret phone calls and communications. This scandal is not that Wilson-Raybould taped Wernick’s gut-heaving proselytizing but, rather, what Wernick was trying to achieve, and might very well have achieved but for the smoking-gun of that recorded conversation.