Bootprints on the soul
Photograph of illustration that accompanied Bootprints, photo copyright Molly A. K. Shinhat
Douglas Marshall is describing the relief some of his colleagues felt after a report released last fall by Auditor General Sheila Fraser confirmed and exposed endemic wrongdoing in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. He says it freed people from thinking: Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm not dealing with the workplace properly. Or maybe I'm just mad.
“They saw their doctors,” Marshall adds, outlining how some staff responded before the report was released. “They got help from outside. They took medication. Some went on sick leave.” Soberly dressed, down to his discreetly patterned maroon tie, forty-six year old Marshall, an Osgoode Law School graduate, served as a union representative at OPC during former Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski’s tenure. Last fall Fraser’s damning report accused Radwanski and his inner circle of abuse of power, gross mismanagement and profligate misspending. Fraser said Radwanski effectively conducted a “reign of terror.”
The vindication likely brought some satisfaction to the anonymous whistleblowers who came forward—but it’s hard to know, since none would talk, even off the record. Their fear and hesitation, even now, underline how difficult it is for people with legitimate doubts about their employer’s behaviour to find a safe public forum in which to air them. And no wonder. Whistleblowing is a lonely pursuit. It requires vast reserves of courage and relentless stamina. It carries the risk of reprisals, marginalization and humiliation. It limits careers and earning power. Its impact seeps into family life, often damaging personal relationships.
Yet, despite all this, there are always those prepared to stand up. Last fall, less than forty-eight hours after delivering her first child, Zachary, by Caesarian section, Joanna Gualtieri found herself on the talk-show circuit giving a two-hour radio interview on whistleblowing. We meet in a Starbucks to chat. A hair clip barely contains her curly brown mane, and she's wearing casual clothes.
“Sometimes I say to myself, you know, this isn’t right. I’m really depriving Zachary of my time. So [I’m] constantly asking myself, ‘am I doing the right thing?’” Gualtieri says. “I feel vulnerable and very much at the mercy of a system that is holding all the power. I feel that I don’t have the privilege of picking or choosing the time to be heard. When the opportunity arises, I feel I have to take it.” With the support of her husband Serge, she adds, she can continue her activism.
About ten years ago Gualtieri, a lawyer then working for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International trade (DFAIT), raised questions about mismanagement of overseas real estate allegedly costing taxpayers nearly $2 billion. She cited evidence she says she had that diplomatic staff had overspent on “grandiose and luxurious accommodations.” Her reward, she says, was retaliatory harassment, emotional abuse and isolation within the department. She took her case to court six years ago. At press time, the case was finally to be heard by the Ontario Superior Court.
On unpaid leave for eight years now, Gualtieri doesn't see herself as a crusader. “I was naïve, and I was a true believer that this can’t happen here,” she says. Time means nothing to her employer, she continues, but for her, the ordeal has meant ten or eleven years. Ultimately, she feels, it’s the loss of time that is the greatest cost. “I’ll have a career as an activist, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get back on my feet with a job,” she says, “I think they have taken me out—and that’s just the way.” Gualtieri’s ordeal led her in 1998 to establish the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform (FAIR), a not-for-profit advocacy and support group for other federal public servants trying to expose government waste and corruption. A lawyer and five former civil servants make up the core group.
Repeatedly she returns to how debilitating and exhausting the experience has been. “We can punish the wrongdoer all we want,” Gualtieri says, “But what does that do to make whole again the person whose life has been completely destroyed, as my life was to a great extent.” She even delayed getting married. “You don’t do things that a couple would normally do, like eat a decent meal together or see a movie,” she says. “Your intimate life is sacrificed. You’re basically just surviving at times. So the whole interaction—having any energy to be fully involved in a relationship—is simply not possible.” For some moments, Gualtieri can’t speak. “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have done it. It’s been too costly. It’s just been too costly.”
Those who defend whistleblowers often find themselves facing a paradox: How do you achieve justice in conditions culturally designed to suppress it? “If I’m presenting unrealistic expectations or encouraging people to get involved in litigation that has very little chance of success, then I’m part of the problem,” says Sean McGee, an Ottawa lawyer who has defended whistleblowers. David Yazbeck a lawyer who has represented several prominent whistleblowers connected to the public service agrees. Feeling overwhelmed by the organization is something Yazbeck shares with his client. Organizations “can muster up enormous resources to try and squash you at every turn,” he says.
But he adds that there are three common elements in whistleblowing cases that make them particularly important. First there’s the matter of public interest - the right of citizens to know what’s going on in the offices of those who administer to Canadians. Second, there’s the issue of freedom of expression - a right guaranteed under the Canadian Charter. Third, there’s the problem of an organizational bias in favour of silence.
“I am extremely frustrated that the defendant—the employer—would question the loyalty [of those coming forward],” Yazbeck says. “I dare you to suggest that this employee has been disloyal because this employee who serves the public is letting the public know that there’s a problem here. Being able to say that is not only very energizing, it’s powerful. It’s a privilege to say that.”
Last September, whistleblower Cris Basudde, a doctor and drug evaluator at Health Canada’s Human Safety Division of the Veterinary Drugs Directorate, died in hospital while on sick leave. He was fifty-six. (Despite Basudde’s death, his counsel is still trying to pursue a human rights complaint against the department.) One colleague believes whistleblowing played a role in Basudde’s physical condition. “That would be a factor absolutely,” Dr. Shiv Chopra says. “Cris said that he was under extreme stress and couldn’t cope. He was vomiting at work.”
Seventy-year-old Chopra, a drug evaluator in the same directorate, joined the department in 1969. He did his Masters and Ph.D. in microbiology at McGill University in Montreal. In the late 1980s, he began to question what he said were racist human resource practices, as well as some food safety practices. The reprisals he alleges—isolation, suspensions without pay, bad evaluations, gag orders, no promotion, and possible dismissal—hardly cause a wrinkle in his brow. A follower of Hinduism and Sikhism—a self-proclaimed “activist-fatalist”—Chopra grew up in Punjab during the Indian peoples’ fight for independence from British rule. His round wire-frame glasses and small stature bring to mind one of his champions—Mahatma Gandhi.
Chopra went public alleging that administrators were trying to pressure evaluators to approve drugs—bovine growth hormone, for example—turning a blind eye to practices that could affect human health, such as using rendered animal parts in cattle feed. “You’re told that science actually is spirituality. It can also be corrupted,” says Chopra who has yet to lose a grievance or court case. “Science can be corrupted when it gets into the hands of biotechnology for profit. Then you can use science to lie.”
His wife Nirmala Chopra, a microbiologist, had her own whistleblowing experience. While working at Health Canada in the late 1980s, she raised concerns about silicone breast implants. Following a serious car accident in 1989, she took extended medical leave. When it ran out, she was told no job had been held for her. She took medical retirement in 1993. “We would end up fighting because she didn’t know what to do or where to explode,” Chopra says, “[so] she was exploding at me.
“You get shunned,” he adds, speaking of his own experience. “People are afraid of you at work.” Even family members and people in his community have found it difficult to be supportive, he says. “Often they’ll say, ‘You’re imagining this—or even if you’re not, it’s time to quit and move on.’ There are tensions. My family can feel neglected. And even though it began with my wife, there are times when she gets tired of this. She has gone on with her life—how come I cannot? But it’s my upbringing, my duty - it’s my job. That job is under oath. The reason I keep blowing the whistle is because I’m concerned about food safety. I eat this food. My children eat it, and my grandchildren eat it.”
A licensed clinical social worker who holds a Ph.D.—and a whistleblower himself—Don Soeken works with people exposing employers’ wrongdoing. He found his own credibility questioned when he testified once before the U.S. Congress about fitness-for-duty examinations given to U.S. federal employees. He says the testing targeted whistleblowers, leaving them with no employment opportunities because they’d “been found crazy by the federal government.” After the experience, he created Integrity International, a non-profit organization to support others who dare to come forward. “I still have anger,” Soeken says, “I try to get back what I lost, and I’ve almost accomplished that. There are people who don’t have the strength. So they fall back on the victim role. They can’t get out of it.” Near his home in Laurel, Maryland, he has set up Whistlestop Farm, a refuge for whistleblowers. Over the years, he estimates he’s worked with about five hundred.
With his wife, nursing professor Karen Soeken, he conducted an anecdotal survey of eighty-seven whistleblowers in 1987. In the study, they found whistleblowers can be divided into two groups—absolutists and utilitarians. “The absolutists will not budge on a point. They’ll stay with it until hell freezes over,” he says. “Utilitarians believe that the most good should go to the most people. The ones who get stuck [in their predicament] and can’t get out of it are the absolutists.” Regardless of the category, though, martyrdom is often the price, he adds.
He describes the effect on whistleblowers as two pronged. “It’s an assault on their spirituality, their philosophy—whatever it is that drives them in their day-to-day life. It’s like they’ve been struck hard over the head. Telling the truth is dangerous.” The second assault is the toll on whistleblowers’ mental and physical health. “Their families sometimes accuse them of being difficult—why didn’t they just go along with the program and do what they were told? So they’ve got depression.” Physical problems often follow, he adds, and their impact can range from minor to fatal.
Management professor Janet Near is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychological effects of whistleblowing—a subject rarely tackled by academia. Near teaches organizational design and change and is the Coleman Chair of Management at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In 1992, with her colleague Marcia Miceli of Georgetown University, she co-wrote Blowing the Whistle: the Organizational and Legal Implications for Companies and Employees. The thousands of whistleblowers they studied shared some commonalities. Among the findings: Whistleblowers tend to be older, have more seniority, are very loyal and are in a position to see wrongdoing. Usually they’re well-educated, male, highly paid, and in supervisory roles.
If they think change is possible, employees are much more likely to expose abuses, she adds—but trying to do so is rarely straightforward. Eighty per cent of those the pair studied tried internal routes before going public. What happens is that the organization—particularly if it’s a private firm—is so embarrassed and upset about public exposure, Near says, “that it retaliates as a deterrent to others. It makes examples of whistleblowers.” What’s more, whistleblowing often requires reporting to many different people, and facing a different response or retaliation every time. “It’s just like getting on a treadmill and never being able to get off. That’s what really throws them. The experience goes on and on and on. They don’t anticipate how difficult it’s going to be.”
“It’s not that organizations are evil. Mistakes will be made. The organization may not intend to do anything evil and still end up doing evil.” The root problem, Near maintains, is cultural.
“Western organizations are organised as bureaucracies,” she explains, “and in bureaucracies the basic idea is that it’s the people at the top who get to make decisions. They don’t want to be questioned by people down below,” especially if there are other qualified candidates available.
People who blow the whistle about big wrongdoing in a prominent organization, Near adds, becomes so prominent that it becomes extremely hard for them to find another job in the same field. She cites, as an example, Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco executive who took on his employer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation and whose story is told in the movie The Insider. Wigand was instrumental in helping disclose evidence that tobacco companies were making cigarettes stronger and more addictive. He helped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration get thousands of pages of explicit evidence that cigarettes were essentially drug delivery devices. But it cost Wigand everything, including his family and his job.
People like Wigand “come to this idealistically, hoping to make change,” Near says. “But you know he’s never going to work again in the same kind of job. He just isn’t. It doesn’t occur to whistleblowers that the democracy that we have as citizens does not extend to the workplace. They’re devastated by that because they haven’t expected it.”
Joanna Gualtieri can attest to the devastation. “I’m an old first time mother. Really, it looked like this experience had foreclosed my fertility years,” she says. “That sounds very dramatic, but it’s not. It’s the reality.”
Published in Ottawa City Magazine, April/May 2004
“They saw their doctors,” Marshall adds, outlining how some staff responded before the report was released. “They got help from outside. They took medication. Some went on sick leave.” Soberly dressed, down to his discreetly patterned maroon tie, forty-six year old Marshall, an Osgoode Law School graduate, served as a union representative at OPC during former Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski’s tenure. Last fall Fraser’s damning report accused Radwanski and his inner circle of abuse of power, gross mismanagement and profligate misspending. Fraser said Radwanski effectively conducted a “reign of terror.”
The vindication likely brought some satisfaction to the anonymous whistleblowers who came forward—but it’s hard to know, since none would talk, even off the record. Their fear and hesitation, even now, underline how difficult it is for people with legitimate doubts about their employer’s behaviour to find a safe public forum in which to air them. And no wonder. Whistleblowing is a lonely pursuit. It requires vast reserves of courage and relentless stamina. It carries the risk of reprisals, marginalization and humiliation. It limits careers and earning power. Its impact seeps into family life, often damaging personal relationships.
Yet, despite all this, there are always those prepared to stand up. Last fall, less than forty-eight hours after delivering her first child, Zachary, by Caesarian section, Joanna Gualtieri found herself on the talk-show circuit giving a two-hour radio interview on whistleblowing. We meet in a Starbucks to chat. A hair clip barely contains her curly brown mane, and she's wearing casual clothes.
“Sometimes I say to myself, you know, this isn’t right. I’m really depriving Zachary of my time. So [I’m] constantly asking myself, ‘am I doing the right thing?’” Gualtieri says. “I feel vulnerable and very much at the mercy of a system that is holding all the power. I feel that I don’t have the privilege of picking or choosing the time to be heard. When the opportunity arises, I feel I have to take it.” With the support of her husband Serge, she adds, she can continue her activism.
About ten years ago Gualtieri, a lawyer then working for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International trade (DFAIT), raised questions about mismanagement of overseas real estate allegedly costing taxpayers nearly $2 billion. She cited evidence she says she had that diplomatic staff had overspent on “grandiose and luxurious accommodations.” Her reward, she says, was retaliatory harassment, emotional abuse and isolation within the department. She took her case to court six years ago. At press time, the case was finally to be heard by the Ontario Superior Court.
On unpaid leave for eight years now, Gualtieri doesn't see herself as a crusader. “I was naïve, and I was a true believer that this can’t happen here,” she says. Time means nothing to her employer, she continues, but for her, the ordeal has meant ten or eleven years. Ultimately, she feels, it’s the loss of time that is the greatest cost. “I’ll have a career as an activist, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get back on my feet with a job,” she says, “I think they have taken me out—and that’s just the way.” Gualtieri’s ordeal led her in 1998 to establish the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform (FAIR), a not-for-profit advocacy and support group for other federal public servants trying to expose government waste and corruption. A lawyer and five former civil servants make up the core group.
Repeatedly she returns to how debilitating and exhausting the experience has been. “We can punish the wrongdoer all we want,” Gualtieri says, “But what does that do to make whole again the person whose life has been completely destroyed, as my life was to a great extent.” She even delayed getting married. “You don’t do things that a couple would normally do, like eat a decent meal together or see a movie,” she says. “Your intimate life is sacrificed. You’re basically just surviving at times. So the whole interaction—having any energy to be fully involved in a relationship—is simply not possible.” For some moments, Gualtieri can’t speak. “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have done it. It’s been too costly. It’s just been too costly.”
Those who defend whistleblowers often find themselves facing a paradox: How do you achieve justice in conditions culturally designed to suppress it? “If I’m presenting unrealistic expectations or encouraging people to get involved in litigation that has very little chance of success, then I’m part of the problem,” says Sean McGee, an Ottawa lawyer who has defended whistleblowers. David Yazbeck a lawyer who has represented several prominent whistleblowers connected to the public service agrees. Feeling overwhelmed by the organization is something Yazbeck shares with his client. Organizations “can muster up enormous resources to try and squash you at every turn,” he says.
But he adds that there are three common elements in whistleblowing cases that make them particularly important. First there’s the matter of public interest - the right of citizens to know what’s going on in the offices of those who administer to Canadians. Second, there’s the issue of freedom of expression - a right guaranteed under the Canadian Charter. Third, there’s the problem of an organizational bias in favour of silence.
“I am extremely frustrated that the defendant—the employer—would question the loyalty [of those coming forward],” Yazbeck says. “I dare you to suggest that this employee has been disloyal because this employee who serves the public is letting the public know that there’s a problem here. Being able to say that is not only very energizing, it’s powerful. It’s a privilege to say that.”
Last September, whistleblower Cris Basudde, a doctor and drug evaluator at Health Canada’s Human Safety Division of the Veterinary Drugs Directorate, died in hospital while on sick leave. He was fifty-six. (Despite Basudde’s death, his counsel is still trying to pursue a human rights complaint against the department.) One colleague believes whistleblowing played a role in Basudde’s physical condition. “That would be a factor absolutely,” Dr. Shiv Chopra says. “Cris said that he was under extreme stress and couldn’t cope. He was vomiting at work.”
Seventy-year-old Chopra, a drug evaluator in the same directorate, joined the department in 1969. He did his Masters and Ph.D. in microbiology at McGill University in Montreal. In the late 1980s, he began to question what he said were racist human resource practices, as well as some food safety practices. The reprisals he alleges—isolation, suspensions without pay, bad evaluations, gag orders, no promotion, and possible dismissal—hardly cause a wrinkle in his brow. A follower of Hinduism and Sikhism—a self-proclaimed “activist-fatalist”—Chopra grew up in Punjab during the Indian peoples’ fight for independence from British rule. His round wire-frame glasses and small stature bring to mind one of his champions—Mahatma Gandhi.
Chopra went public alleging that administrators were trying to pressure evaluators to approve drugs—bovine growth hormone, for example—turning a blind eye to practices that could affect human health, such as using rendered animal parts in cattle feed. “You’re told that science actually is spirituality. It can also be corrupted,” says Chopra who has yet to lose a grievance or court case. “Science can be corrupted when it gets into the hands of biotechnology for profit. Then you can use science to lie.”
His wife Nirmala Chopra, a microbiologist, had her own whistleblowing experience. While working at Health Canada in the late 1980s, she raised concerns about silicone breast implants. Following a serious car accident in 1989, she took extended medical leave. When it ran out, she was told no job had been held for her. She took medical retirement in 1993. “We would end up fighting because she didn’t know what to do or where to explode,” Chopra says, “[so] she was exploding at me.
“You get shunned,” he adds, speaking of his own experience. “People are afraid of you at work.” Even family members and people in his community have found it difficult to be supportive, he says. “Often they’ll say, ‘You’re imagining this—or even if you’re not, it’s time to quit and move on.’ There are tensions. My family can feel neglected. And even though it began with my wife, there are times when she gets tired of this. She has gone on with her life—how come I cannot? But it’s my upbringing, my duty - it’s my job. That job is under oath. The reason I keep blowing the whistle is because I’m concerned about food safety. I eat this food. My children eat it, and my grandchildren eat it.”
A licensed clinical social worker who holds a Ph.D.—and a whistleblower himself—Don Soeken works with people exposing employers’ wrongdoing. He found his own credibility questioned when he testified once before the U.S. Congress about fitness-for-duty examinations given to U.S. federal employees. He says the testing targeted whistleblowers, leaving them with no employment opportunities because they’d “been found crazy by the federal government.” After the experience, he created Integrity International, a non-profit organization to support others who dare to come forward. “I still have anger,” Soeken says, “I try to get back what I lost, and I’ve almost accomplished that. There are people who don’t have the strength. So they fall back on the victim role. They can’t get out of it.” Near his home in Laurel, Maryland, he has set up Whistlestop Farm, a refuge for whistleblowers. Over the years, he estimates he’s worked with about five hundred.
With his wife, nursing professor Karen Soeken, he conducted an anecdotal survey of eighty-seven whistleblowers in 1987. In the study, they found whistleblowers can be divided into two groups—absolutists and utilitarians. “The absolutists will not budge on a point. They’ll stay with it until hell freezes over,” he says. “Utilitarians believe that the most good should go to the most people. The ones who get stuck [in their predicament] and can’t get out of it are the absolutists.” Regardless of the category, though, martyrdom is often the price, he adds.
He describes the effect on whistleblowers as two pronged. “It’s an assault on their spirituality, their philosophy—whatever it is that drives them in their day-to-day life. It’s like they’ve been struck hard over the head. Telling the truth is dangerous.” The second assault is the toll on whistleblowers’ mental and physical health. “Their families sometimes accuse them of being difficult—why didn’t they just go along with the program and do what they were told? So they’ve got depression.” Physical problems often follow, he adds, and their impact can range from minor to fatal.
Management professor Janet Near is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychological effects of whistleblowing—a subject rarely tackled by academia. Near teaches organizational design and change and is the Coleman Chair of Management at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In 1992, with her colleague Marcia Miceli of Georgetown University, she co-wrote Blowing the Whistle: the Organizational and Legal Implications for Companies and Employees. The thousands of whistleblowers they studied shared some commonalities. Among the findings: Whistleblowers tend to be older, have more seniority, are very loyal and are in a position to see wrongdoing. Usually they’re well-educated, male, highly paid, and in supervisory roles.
If they think change is possible, employees are much more likely to expose abuses, she adds—but trying to do so is rarely straightforward. Eighty per cent of those the pair studied tried internal routes before going public. What happens is that the organization—particularly if it’s a private firm—is so embarrassed and upset about public exposure, Near says, “that it retaliates as a deterrent to others. It makes examples of whistleblowers.” What’s more, whistleblowing often requires reporting to many different people, and facing a different response or retaliation every time. “It’s just like getting on a treadmill and never being able to get off. That’s what really throws them. The experience goes on and on and on. They don’t anticipate how difficult it’s going to be.”
“It’s not that organizations are evil. Mistakes will be made. The organization may not intend to do anything evil and still end up doing evil.” The root problem, Near maintains, is cultural.
“Western organizations are organised as bureaucracies,” she explains, “and in bureaucracies the basic idea is that it’s the people at the top who get to make decisions. They don’t want to be questioned by people down below,” especially if there are other qualified candidates available.
People who blow the whistle about big wrongdoing in a prominent organization, Near adds, becomes so prominent that it becomes extremely hard for them to find another job in the same field. She cites, as an example, Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco executive who took on his employer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation and whose story is told in the movie The Insider. Wigand was instrumental in helping disclose evidence that tobacco companies were making cigarettes stronger and more addictive. He helped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration get thousands of pages of explicit evidence that cigarettes were essentially drug delivery devices. But it cost Wigand everything, including his family and his job.
People like Wigand “come to this idealistically, hoping to make change,” Near says. “But you know he’s never going to work again in the same kind of job. He just isn’t. It doesn’t occur to whistleblowers that the democracy that we have as citizens does not extend to the workplace. They’re devastated by that because they haven’t expected it.”
Joanna Gualtieri can attest to the devastation. “I’m an old first time mother. Really, it looked like this experience had foreclosed my fertility years,” she says. “That sounds very dramatic, but it’s not. It’s the reality.”
Published in Ottawa City Magazine, April/May 2004
