Yukon committee writes whistleblower report

After years of getting nowhere a Yukon all-party legislative committee has finished writing a report providing protection to whistleblowers within the territorial government.

If the report becomes law, it will protect Yukon government workers who expose gross mismanagement, dangerous activities or law-breaking within government from harassment and termination of employment.

"We're very pleased that the committee actually was able to submit a final draft, but we're not celebrating yet," said Liberal MLA Sandy Silver, who was on the committee.

"This was just the committee's proposal. This still has to go through the due process of becoming law, of becoming part of our legislative process."

The report was written by a committee made up of Liberal, Yukon, and New Democratic party MLAs.  It's based on whistleblower legislation already in place in the provinces.

Progress on the report was stalled for about a decade due to party infighting but Silver said the election of new MLAs during the last election helped break the log-jam.

"There was never any time during that committee's meetings and we've had several of them, quite a few, there was never a time where we went past just slight changes here and there, that type of thing, but there wasn't any bones of contention in the whole process and ultimately we, you know we checked our egos at the door and worked on a common process, and it worked," he said.