Massive military spending needs protection from abuse and fraud
This is the appropriate time for the government to beef up oversight and accountability mechanisms, not weaken them.
By David Hutton
“For want of a nail the shoe was lost…
TORONTO—While it may be appropriate that the Carney government is committing Canada to massive, sustained expenses on modern military equipment, given what’s happening in our world, it is completely inappropriate that in doing so the federal government is crippling one of the few mechanisms that we have to ensure that this money is not spent foolishly, misused, or even stolen.
I’m referring to the recent lettter from our federal whistleblower protection watchdog, Public Sector Integrity Commissioner Harriet Solloway, revealing that her operations are at risk of collapse due to chronic underfunding and escalating demand for its services by federal whistleblowers coming forward.
Solloway, whose budget was already ludicrously inadequate for an agency with its responsibilities, has been asking for about $20-million to deal with a flood of extra cases, but has been denied, and is now also subject to government’s across-the-board public service cuts of 15 per cent.
How much is $20-million in government circles? Compare this sum with the Canadian defence budget of roughly $30-billion: PSIC’s request represents about 0.07 per cent—less than one-thousandth.
Why is this agency so important? Decades of research has consistently shown that tips from employees (whistleblowers) are by far the most effective way of detecting wrongdoing in organizations—about three times more effective than internal audit, and 10 times more effective than external audit. Crippling this inexpensive and effective anti-corruption mechanism is like a bank trying to cut costs by dispensing with the locks on its vaults.
The commissioner’s work in protecting whistleblowers who come forward is hampered by this country’s terribly weak whistleblower protection law, making it all the more important that her agency has the money to offer as much protection as is possible under the legislation. Canada’s rich history of scandals—often not properly investigated or dealt with—give us a clue about our future with an inadequately funded Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner:
- Lack of scrutiny of emergency spending. Much of the emergency spending triggered by the COVID pandemic was later found to be have been wasted, for example, buying personal protective equipment at inflated prices. Why would secret emergency spending on military kit fare any better?
- Failure to detect or halt massive procurement fraud. The ballooning cost of the ArriveCan app—from $80,000 to $59-million—proved to be just the latest example of a deceptive procurement scheme that had been in operation for 13 years, with the three firms involved receiving more than $1-billion in contracts.
- Incompetent and dishonest government procurement of technology. The Phoenix payroll system—initially predicted to cost about $300-million—failed completely, not only harming countless public servants, but also costing the taxpayer $5.1-billion and counting—and 10 years after the rollout it still doesn’t work properly. This fiasco was not an accident, but the result of senior public servants covering up known problems for years even as whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm.
The bottom line is that, while embarking on a massive expansion of military spending, weakening oversight and accountability mechanisms is insane—especially given this country’s track record of repeated failures caused by unwarranted secrecy, incompetence, dishonesty and outright fraud. This massive expenditure needs to be very carefully monitored to ensure that the vitally important military systems work and that we get value for money.
This is the appropriate time for the government to beef up oversight and accountability mechanisms, not weaken them. A top priority must be properly funding the agency that protects honest public servants from losing their careers and their livelihood when they speak up about errors and wrongdoing that harm the public purse and the public interest.
David Hutton is a senior fellow at the Centre for Free Expression at the Toronto Metropolitan University.