After a year of work, Alberta’s all-party ethics committee made recommendations to the whistleblower protection law and has asked to extend its mandate until next March.
The committee was tasked with reviewing four pieces of legislation in one year but the group only got through one piece, the Public Interest Disclosure (Whistleblower Protection) Act, before their mandate expired.
“I think we all realized that having four pieces of legislation was a humongous task,” said Marie Renaud, MLA for St. Albert. She was one of two local MLAs on the committee which also included Glenn van Dijken, MLA for Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock.
MLAs say that typically a committee will review one piece of legislation a year, but this committee was tasked with four.
The committee was able to complete recommendations to the whistleblower protection act by proposing the expansion of the role of the commissioner and protecting more public sector workers.
Under the recommendations, the commissioner’s office would expand to protect workers at seniors homes.
“We just felt that it is one of those areas where they are publicly funded but we had no ability to look in there,” said Ted Miles, director for the office of the public interest commissioner. “We thought that it would be in the public interest that we have the ability should a whistleblower come forward to look into those issues — being a vulnerable sector of society.”
The MLAs chose to limit recommendations to contractors working for the government but did not want to expand to the private sector.
“There was not really an appetite for legislating and regulating from a government side of things into private companies,” said van Dijken.
After completing recommendations to the whistleblower act, the all-party group started reviewing the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act but were not able to complete the work due to time constraints and infighting.
The committee started reviewing the act and had good discussion regarding third party advertising but would need more time to tackle the issue, Renaud said.
“Without the regulations that we talked about it would really continue to be the wild west of politics,” Renaud said. “I think its important for people to know who is financing what message and that’s not really what happens right now.”
Tempers flared during the review of the financing act between members of the government and opposition when discussing limits to donations and campaign spending.
The opposition accused the government of trying to use its majority to push through legislation that would favour the NDP party. The government accused the opposition members of trying to filibuster the process to prevent reducing the limits to election donations.
The fighting came to a peak when opposition member Richard Starke accused Chair, Jessica Littlewood, of trying to broker back room deals.
Despite the disagreements, the group asked for an extension to its mandate until March 2017 to complete the work it was originally tasked with.
Van Dijken says that if the majority government doesn’t grant the extension it will “possibly signal some abuse of their power.” A decision to extend the mandate would show government willingness to work in committees.
The legislative assembly will vote in November to decide on whether to extend the committee’s mandate or to scrap the project.
