” True or false ? Can an employee comment or answer a journalist’s questions regarding a situation he has witnessed? The answer: “False,” says the Center de services scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Île, located in Montreal.
This question can be found on coasters that have been distributed to school staff members of the service centre.
“Any request for comment or interview from a journalist made to employees and stakeholders in the course of their duties must be directed to the management of their establishment, service or network, which will then refer to the communications services”, perhaps you can read on the side of the coasters.
“With the idea of supporting our employees on certain ethical issues, we have created a quiz whose scenarios are based on real decisions made by courts, the Civil Code of Quebec or our Communications Policy”, writes the spokesperson for the Pointe-de-l’Île service center, Valérie Biron, in an email to The Canadian Press.
“We believe it is our responsibility to protect our employees by keeping them informed of their obligations,” she adds.
It was Liberal MP Marwah Rizqy who raised the issue of coasters during a parliamentary committee on Thursday. She recalls the importance of sources in the field in the education network for her work as an MP.
“Me, one of the ways I understand what’s going on in the network is because the staff members who are in the field are pretty much our eyes and ears, and when there’s something absurd happens, they want to talk to us about it,” she explains in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We are witnessing a drift”
The professor at the Faculty of Law of Laval University, Louis-Philippe Lampron, sharply criticizes the initiative of the service center.
“To go there with a wall-to-wall ban seems to me very problematic from the point of view of legitimacy, because it harms the ability of people who are actors in the field to inform the population,” he said.
“For years, we have been witnessing a drift in the obligation of loyalty in the public sector,” adds the professor.
According to the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ), this kind of message goes against the spirit of the “Act to facilitate the disclosure of wrongdoings relating to public bodies”.
“Definitely, because the law aims precisely to facilitate whistleblowers, people who want to denounce unacceptable situations”, explains the president of the FPJQ, Michaël Nguyen.
This is not the interpretation of the Center de services scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Île.
“It is clear in our organization that any wrongdoing must be reported via the mechanisms provided for in the “Act to facilitate the disclosure of wrongdoings relating to public bodies”. We encourage our employees to do so through messages transmitted in our Info-employees”, assures Valérie Biron.
Coasters and posters with other messages were also distributed. It indicates, for example, that “the obligation of loyalty applies to all employees”, or that an employee must exercise judgment on social networks.
The Pointe-de-l’Île School Service Center employs more than 8,500 people and includes 41 elementary schools, seven secondary schools, three specialized schools and eight adult education centres.