Meet Joe Friday: investigator, art collector, Canada’s new integrity commissioner

Joe Friday is at home in his new office. It could be because he’s brought some pieces of home to work, as most bureaucrats do, but his home, and these pieces, are anything but typical. Most senior bureaucrats wouldn’t count themselves among the country’s top art collectors, nor have many been the subject of a master’s thesis invoking French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Joe Friday was confirmed last month as Canada’s new public sector integrity commissioner, a position he had held on an interim basis since the start of the year. He waited for the position to become permanent before moving into the office, art and all. But as he occupies the top job in the beleaguered Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, there are plenty of critics who say he isn’t the right person to turn it around. The commissioner, an officer of Parliament, is responsible for investigating wrongdoing in the public sector and helping to protect whistleblowers from reprisals. Sitting in his seventh-floor office on Queen Street, his sartorial —clear, round-framed glasses, polka dotted tie—befitting his taste for conceptual art, Mr. Friday, who moonlights as chair of the Carleton University Art Gallery, is just as eager to talk about his art collection, which The Globe and Mail called “the most significant private holding of contemporary art in the Ottawa area,” as his new responsibilities. “I find it to be a very interesting counterpart to my day job,” he says. “I think many of the same impulses and ideas that drove my legal career are related to my work here, in terms of carefully looking, thinking, analyzing, sifting, testing, and then making a decision based on a fully informed practice. I’m a relatively rigorous collector in that I think long and hard, and I probably drive gallery owners absolutely nuts.” His collection, housed in the two-bedroom Sandy Hill heritage home he shares with his partner, includes a piece by Brian Jungen, famous for making aboriginal masks out of Nike Air Jordans. His office has works by Steven Shearer, who represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, Vancouver artist Ian Wallace, and a piece by John Massey called Three Eyes. That one he thought twice about bringing in, he said, because it has a “surveillance look” to it, but it’s ultimately about perspective, how it can be affected and manipulated, which he says is important to the work he’s doing. His first big job will be to change how his office is perceived. Created in 2007, the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner has been embroiled in controversy in its short existence and critics of Mr. Friday’s nomination said someone without a history in the office or from outside the public service altogether is needed for it to be effective. The first commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, retired abruptly in 2010. Her office investigated seven of the 228 cases brought before it and found no instances of wrongdoing or of reprisals for reporting wrongdoing. Then-auditor general Sheila Fraser found Ms. Ouimet “failed to properly perform her mandate,” that she berated and marginalized her staff and did little to help federal employees who complained to her office. Mario Dion took over but announced his resignation for “personal reasons” last summer, partway through a seven-year term set to expire in 2018. Mr. Friday joined the office in 2008, where he served as general counsel under Ms. Ouimet before taking on the deputy commissioner role in 2011. He put his name in for the top job when it became available. Allan Cutler, president of whistleblower advocates Canadians for Accountability who applied for the commissioner position, was critical of the process, saying Mr. Friday was the desired candidate from the start. Mr. Friday said an outside headhunter was hired to gauge interest for the position from the private sector, and he has first-hand knowledge of one potential candidate who was approached—his partner, Grant Jameson, counsel at Norton Rose Fulbright in Ottawa. “The only thing I said was, ‘If you think you can do the job, I dare you to apply. I invite you to apply.’ He did not apply,” Mr. Friday said, laughing. As he takes on the head position, critics of the office say his appointment comes with his predecessors’ baggage. Last year, Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that Mr. Dion and Mr. Friday were guilty of “gross mismanagement” in their handling of two whistleblower complaints that originated during Ms. Ouimet’s tenure and were handled with excessive delay. “Given all the problems, if he really was an integrity commissioner, I think he would have blown the whistle himself,” said Duff Conacher, founder of Democracy Watch. Mr. Friday said he participated in the previous auditor general’s audit of the office’s practices under Ms. Ouimet, giving confidential testimony that he’s not going to share. When he appeared before a Parliamentary committee to discuss that report—an appearance critics say was his chance to speak out against the office’s practices—he said he wasn’t the one to respond to the findings against the commissioner. “They were very clear findings that only she could respond to and either defend, accept, deny, but respond to as she saw fit,” he said. “I certainly shared all of the information, all of the observations, both negative and positive that I had, with the auditor general during the course of the investigation. I provided relatively extensive testimony, which is confidential. I also can say that I had no difficulty in speaking frankly to either of the previous commissioners.” Ian Bron, a former naval officer and a director of Canadians for Accountability, said someone “not solidly locked into the Ottawa bureaucratic community” is needed in the role. NDP MP Mathieu Ravignat (Pontiac, Que.) raised similar concerns when Mr. Friday appeared before the House Operations Committee last month. David Hutton, who served as executive director for six years of whistleblower group FAIR (Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform), said the public service culture works against someone steeped in it from being an effective watchdog. “People don’t progress in the public service as bureaucrats unless they very quickly realize that their main job is to protect the higher-ups, to protect the senior bureaucrats, and protect the minister above all,” he told The Hill Times last month. Mr. Friday said he thought “long and hard” about his association with the office before applying for the job and eventually decided that his experience there, both positive and negative, would be useful in helping to rebuild it. “My independence is something I take extremely seriously,” he said. He considers his 22 years in the public service—15 at Justice and seven in the Commissioner’s Office—as an asset, allowing him to understand the machinery and culture. The commissioner job, which comes with a seven-year mandate and an opportunity for renewal, will be his last in the public service, he said, because reintegrating into other departments would be difficult. Robert Shepherd, associate professor at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration, said the track record of protecting whistleblowers in Canada “is not very good at all.” He isn’t impressed by the office’s 10 reports tabled under Mr. Dion, saying there wasn’t anything substantive in them. “Which is why nobody, if you are a whistleblower, you certainly aren’t going to the integrity commissioner. There’s no point,” he said. Mr. Friday disagreed, saying that four of the reports identified the senior executive in the organization. He acknowledges it’s important to stand by the office’s record to some extent in order to change the perception of it: first by making it clear what it does and doesn’t do, so whistleblowers know what to expect; then by doing work that demonstrates it can be trusted. The number of disclosures has also been an issue. House Operations Committee chair and NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.) asked last month about the small number of complaints given the 400,000 workers covered under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. The office’s most recent annual report, covering the 2013-14 fiscal year, shows the number of disclosures it received declined to 84 from 113 the previous year. When he stepped down last summer, Mr. Dion told The Ottawa Citizen that he expected the number to drop to about 50 this year, saying he didn’t think it was possible that there were so few cases of people witnessing wrongdoing in such a large workforce. Mr. Bron and Mr. Cutler maintain that the falling number of complaints has to do with the perception that the office is not a safe place to report wrongdoing. The office currently has 17 investigations underway, Mr. Friday said. Public servants have the option of disclosing wrongdoing internally to a supervisor or the senior officer responsible for internal disclosure, or of coming to the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner’s Office. “We weren’t created to replace that management function,” Mr. Friday said. “A number of cases, particularly with labour relations issues, I hope are being dealt with at an appropriate level of management.” The number of internal disclosures also isn’t very high: 182 in 2013-14, according to the Treasury Board’s report on the act. Part of the office’s work, Mr. Friday said, will be to advance a positive perception of whistleblowing, a practice that isn’t “normalized” yet in the public service, and to make it less difficult. “I think it’s unfortunate in the extreme that people who come forward suffer as a result of it,” he said when asked about the stories of the personal toll on whistleblowers The Hill Times highlighted in a series last year. “Certainly my goal would be to remove some of the stigma to encourage people to come forward but also to demonstrate that when you do come forward that you are protected. It’s extremely disappointing, and a challenge for the system and also a challenge for our regime and a challenge for this office as well to try to address that.” As for his relationship with FAIR and Canadians For Accountability, Mr. Friday said he respects dissenting voices. Mr. Hutton was removed from the office’s advisory committee in 2012 because Mr. Dion felt he was undermining its work with public criticism, and Canadians For Accountability left in protest. “I never say no,” Mr. Friday said when asked if he would reach out to those groups. “We’re looking for a collaborative outlook and criticism is welcome. Constructive criticism is always welcome.” His main focus, though, is increasing union representation on the advisory committee to get public servants’ perspectives through them, he said. Amending the act could also help the office. A statutory five-year review is now three years late. Mr. Conacher has been calling for the review for years and has considered taking the government to court to force one. Prof. Shepherd said the problems with the office now have more to do with the legislation than with the new commissioner. “I think Mr. Friday’s a very capable guy. He’s got a very long history, understands the file extremely well, much more than most. You kind of want that personality in there that really understands the extent of the mandate and the authorities and what it can reasonably do with the office,” he said. “The problem here is the authorities aren’t very much and the ability to do anything with that office is very, very limited under the legislation they have. It’s not the person; it’s really the conditions within which the office operates. They’re very narrowly defined.” Mr. Friday said the act is generally working but that he’s preparing a list of changes to put before Parliament when a review finally begins. He wants to respect the Parliamentary review process, he said, but he did share a few of the changes he’ll be seeking. One is to empower the office to obtain information from outside the public sector so that retired public servants could still be investigated. Another is to clarify the act’s confidentially provisions so that they “expressly” apply to all stages of the office’s work and not just after an investigation has been initiated. The office already operates this way, he said, but he would like to “have it out in the world as something I could point to” as another “clear confirmation of protection” for those coming forward. He would also like the office to provide some kind of interim financial protection for reprisal complainants, for example for someone who lost his job after coming forward, pending the outcome of the complaint. mburgess@hilltimes.com The Hill Times

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