Federal and provincial laws designed to protect whistleblowers are woefully inadequate, says an advocate who has worked for stronger whistleblower protection for over a decade. David Hutton, a senior fellow at Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression Whistleblowing Initiatives (CFEWI), says the federal Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (PSDPA) has numerous significant problems. “It’s just loaded with loopholes,” Hutton said in an interview. “It’s like a car that doesn’t have wheels and has no transmission, doesn’t have an engine, doesn’t have a gas tank—I mean, it’s completely useless.” He referred to the Washington, D.C.- based Government Accountability Project, the world’s leading NGO on whistleblower legislation, which sets out 20 criteria for analyzing the effectiveness of a country’s national law to protect whistleblowers. According to a CFEWI analysis, while modern democracies typically fulfill between 14 and 18 of these criteria, Canada meets only one—its PSDPA requires an independent review to be …