Ontario public servants have never exactly run out of breath blowing the whistle on coworkers who misuse taxpayers’ money, but the province has a new law it hopes will coax them to speak up more often.

This is not a harsh assessment of the provincial employees. One proof is that the auditor general’s report is crammed with examples of huge abuse of public funds that lands with a thump on legislators’ desks every year and shocks taxpayers.

The latest showed officials in some children’s aid societies, which receive government money, driving expensive, top-of-the-line SUVs and having $2,000-a-year gym memberships on the public purse, while their organizations had insufficient funds to cope with the needs of children in care.

The head of a provincial electricity until, was discovered having some of his expenses paid through his secretary’s corporate credit card, which avoided routine scrutiny.

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of other public sector workers would have known of these and many other misuses the report revealed, but they failed to bring them to public attention and it was left to the auditor to make them known and stop them.

Opposition politicians quickly asked questions in the legislature, condemned the misuse and blamed the government, but no-one has asked why the public servants failed to alert the public.

The reasons politicians generally do not criticize public servants include that they have to work with them, there is an unwritten rule they should not attack public servants, because they do not have the same forum in which to fight back, and they are a huge bloc of voters.

This pattern also has been a familiar one over the past three decades, in which provincial auditors have produced aggressive, detailed reports that revealed widespread misuse.

Examples include showing that the far-right Progressive Conservative governments headed by premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves paid consultants fees that tripled in a few years to $662 million a year and helped them boast that they kept their promise to cut the civil service.

But there was a huge cost, because they paid the consultants three of four times as much as they paid public servants for the same work and even hired consultants to supervise consultants.

The province generously sent 7,110 welfare payments worth a total $1.2 million to people who were totally ineligible for them.

Doctors wrote reports on drivers with severe medical problems that could make them dangerous, but the province processed them so slowly that 30,000 of them still held their licenses and continued driving.

A government agency supposedly looking after money to provide crop insurance for farmers had a flutter on the bond market and lost $325,000.

The environment ministry was found to have a fleet of ships with captains and crews that rarely left their moorings and this prompted the minister of the day to announce “I’m going to sink my navy.”

Nearly 40,000 cheques residents sent the province to register vehicles or pay for minor offences bounced, but it did nothing to recover them

A New Democrat government had a job-creation program that spent $248,000 training 30 people on a seven-day course in how to apply for more government subsidies.

Public servants who knew about these failings should have felt it part of their jobs to expose them.

Some would have worried that they would be ignored or punished by their superiors, but they could at least have slipped information to an opposition party or news media anonymously in a plain brown envelope and some did, but only a few.

The new law approved by all parties before the legislature adjourned for Christmas prohibits anyone from taking reprisals against, or threatening or intimidating public servants who reveal wrongdoing.

It applies at this stage only to employees of the province and its agencies, not to the wider public service, which includes children’s aid societies.

The law is worthwhile because it gives protection to those who reveal abuse, but public servants can be blamed for missing many opportunities to speak up earlier.