Government trying to 'bully' public servants, accused leaker says
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hauled from the workplace in handcuffs without being charged
unprecidented treatment while other cases are treated differently at exactly the same time
this has harrassment suit written all over it and the Attorney General is probably pretty pissed about it because bookshop boy is going to have pro bono coming out the ying yang.
unprecidented treatment while other cases are treated differently at exactly the same time
this has harrassment suit written all over it and the Attorney General is probably pretty pissed about it because bookshop boy is going to have pro bono coming out the ying yang.
I can hear the world's smallest violin playing just for this guy right now.
From reading on a few other sites, several former and present public servants have said that they had to sign confidentiality agreements to get the job, and that a possible punishment for violation of confidentiality is arrest. If this guy signed one, then he should face to consequences like an adult.
He also gave out sensitive information that was going to affect the market value of a great number of publicly traded companies. Not that for sure, but it is a possibility that the information could have been passed on privately before the whole public leak, and that's what the investigation was about.
And all that he had happend was to be shamed in front of his former co-workers and spend a couple hours talking to the cops. Boo Hoo. He went out of his way to try and embarass someone, got embarassed back. And just imagine what would have been his fate if he were in one of numerous other countries where they judge first and ask questions later.
Also, everyone needs to stop calling this guy a whistleblower. He wasn't exposing any type of criminal or unethical behaviour which he had knowledge of that was being covered up. This guy has a clear agenda, which is further evidenced by his band's album title, blogs on the band's myspace and photo on their myspace page of an airplane headed towards the parliament buildings. You think that if the NDP(or whatever party he supports) was in government, he would be leaking information...HELL NO. I also wonder about the NDP supporting this guy considering the accolades shown on the band's myspace, or did they not bother to see what kind of person he was before defending him quickly to try and score points. My guess is he's looking for his attempt at political martyrdom (at least in his mind it is) or he's just trying to score some attention for his band...because upon listening to their songs on myspace, it's pretty clear that they need all the attention they can get and wherever it can come from, whatever distracts people from realizing their music is terrible. And I happen to like a lot of punk bands, but these guys just plain suck.
Also, after his little sob session in front of the cameras, it was clear that this guy couldn't stand still for a period longer than 3 seconds or read even one sentence out loud properly from a prepared speech. I couldn't help but wonder how he got a job there in the first place. Hopefully he's an outlier on the lower end of the spectrum for what we can expect out of a public servant.
From reading on a few other sites, several former and present public servants have said that they had to sign confidentiality agreements to get the job, and that a possible punishment for violation of confidentiality is arrest. If this guy signed one, then he should face to consequences like an adult.
He also gave out sensitive information that was going to affect the market value of a great number of publicly traded companies. Not that for sure, but it is a possibility that the information could have been passed on privately before the whole public leak, and that's what the investigation was about.
And all that he had happend was to be shamed in front of his former co-workers and spend a couple hours talking to the cops. Boo Hoo. He went out of his way to try and embarass someone, got embarassed back. And just imagine what would have been his fate if he were in one of numerous other countries where they judge first and ask questions later.
Also, everyone needs to stop calling this guy a whistleblower. He wasn't exposing any type of criminal or unethical behaviour which he had knowledge of that was being covered up. This guy has a clear agenda, which is further evidenced by his band's album title, blogs on the band's myspace and photo on their myspace page of an airplane headed towards the parliament buildings. You think that if the NDP(or whatever party he supports) was in government, he would be leaking information...HELL NO. I also wonder about the NDP supporting this guy considering the accolades shown on the band's myspace, or did they not bother to see what kind of person he was before defending him quickly to try and score points. My guess is he's looking for his attempt at political martyrdom (at least in his mind it is) or he's just trying to score some attention for his band...because upon listening to their songs on myspace, it's pretty clear that they need all the attention they can get and wherever it can come from, whatever distracts people from realizing their music is terrible. And I happen to like a lot of punk bands, but these guys just plain suck.
Also, after his little sob session in front of the cameras, it was clear that this guy couldn't stand still for a period longer than 3 seconds or read even one sentence out loud properly from a prepared speech. I couldn't help but wonder how he got a job there in the first place. Hopefully he's an outlier on the lower end of the spectrum for what we can expect out of a public servant.
I thought you were on the money. Although arrest may be a possible consequence for breaking the non-disclosure agreement, precedence has been to simply fire the person. This was even brought up in the house of commons. The government was asked what was so special about this case in particular that they had to go the extra mile to arrest the guy, the answer: nothing, mind your own business.
I fail to see what is so confidential about a report on a plan they were about to unveil. It is more like a poker analogy, this guy told you what was in our hand, so we want him kicked out. If its such a great plan, (or hand) people simply would have folded over in acquiescence of the apparent greatness. The government is just sore at people being able to call their bluff.
I fail to see what is so confidential about a report on a plan they were about to unveil. It is more like a poker analogy, this guy told you what was in our hand, so we want him kicked out. If its such a great plan, (or hand) people simply would have folded over in acquiescence of the apparent greatness. The government is just sore at people being able to call their bluff.
I'd agree that handcuffing him and arresting him without charge is over the top, but as far as I can tell from what I've seen on the news and read in the papers, he's a moronic little punk who thinks the rules don't apply to him. He's a self-described anarchist drummer in a punk band called The Suicide Pilots. On the band's web site there's a cartoon of a plane flying over the Parliament buildings. Not the kind of person I'd want to share office space with. As Rex Murphy pointed out in his Saturday column in the Globe&Mail, he seemed to be labouring under the delusion that his views on the Kyoto Accord carry greater weight than those of the Minister and the government he's presumably serving, and that he has both the right and the authority as a public servant to contest public policy. He's wrong. Public servants don't get to choose which policies of the government they're going to implement, their personal views on them are completely irrelevant to the process. If he's that unhappy with the government's environmental policies and wants to work against them, the honourable thing to do, before you do anything else, is resign.
But I don't believe he knows anything about honour.
But I don't believe he knows anything about honour.
In the parlance its called condonation. If the Minister and/or Deputy Minister intended to change the manner in which employees were treated for infractions it was incumbent on them to announce the new policy BEFORE bookshop boy broke the rules.
The essence of harrassment is being treated differently from others in the same situation so add to that Baird had the nerve to stand before the cameras and say that leaks won't be tolerated when everybody and his dog knows damn well he was the idiot that faxed his own speech to Liberal headquarters. What the hell he was using an unencrytped fax machine for when his inner circle is bound to be on Blackberry aside, the double standard it demonstrates is in itself degrading enough to merit action.
and being a dork doesn't exlude you from the right to file a lawsuit you can win. oddly enough, neither does being guilty.
Isn't honor that pesky thing that gets you killed in a fight to the death?
If the government had a secret plan to torture prisoners, wouldn't this "honor" keep you from letting the public know the truth? What distinguishes a true whistle blower from a false one, if not beliefs?
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No, that's stupidity. I'm using it to mean adherence to what is right according to commonly accepted standards of behaviour. As a public servant, this Jeff Monaghan is supposed to be neutral and non-political in that role. He was neither, and in fact he strikes me as just a self-indulgent, self-appointed angry young man.
The nature of what's getting the whistle blown on it. The government's environmental policies may be shallow, short-sighted, wrong-headed, ill-informed, misguided, totally barfed-out, unworkable, mega-stupid, and whatever else Monaghan tried to suggest they are, but they're not wrong in any ethical or moral sense, or any other sense that would justify calling what he's alleged to have done "whistle blowing." I agree completely with Rex Murphy as he expressed himself in Saturday's Globe&Mail: "Contrary to Mr. Monaghan, the public service isn't a freelance association of self-proclaimed Gandhi's who get to go all-crusader when one of their pet peeves doesn't show up formulated as they would like to see it in cabinet papers." Monaghan's a fool.
As a definition, that is entirely unworkable. Nobody can claim to know with certainty what the commonly accepted standards of behaviour are, as by nature they are some sort of average.
In this case, you and I wouldn't even know about the government's environmental policy if this document hadn't been leaked. It was destined to be released at a closed meeting to a select few individuals and trickled through into the public by hand feeding propaganda to certain media figures. For something arguably so important as the environment, the public deserves to have far more knowledge than what the government planned to give us. It possibly would have taken an entire year to decode what the actual plan was, by which time the government might have sold it to the public with their populist propaganda. What the government was planning was manifestly a breach of public trust.
Has the government somehow lost ability to do their job by this breach of confidence taking place? Not one bit, and that is the only thing that can be used to justify confidentiality in the government. By focusing so much on the faults in Mr. Monaghan's character you overlook the intent of the government in keeping this document confidential, moreover the probative value of these character faults is of so little value that I wonder why they would be mentioned outside of a personal attack. Do you honestly think that it would be better for Canada if we did not know about the full implications of this environment plan and had to learn about it through the hand picked questions that the government would have answered at the release conference?
Yeah, I am not a big fan of the concept of honor. Personal integrity, I like. Honor leads to some bad decision making as you try to live up to some strange abstract ideal.
There is a defined code of ethics for public servants that describes the accepted standards of behaviour for them. I've had to sign it several times in my working life. Leaking government documents is a clear breach of them.
That's a separate issue. It is not for public servants to subvert the intentions of the government or gainsay its decisions, regardless of what they might think of them. That's a job for other Members of Parliament, news media, editorialists, the general public, anybody in fact *but* public servants.