A shell glob cannot tell you the size, owner, permissions, timestamps of a file. For that .. oh look! There's ls(1). Which, by the way, spits out whitespace it sees just fine, unless you specified -q or implied it with output to a tty. If some code can't handle the result, it's that code that is broken. Tip: the only really problematic character is a newline; if you think you could be seeing those, you can still deal with it programatically, but I use find(1).
In the meantime, I recommend you try deleting /bin/ls from your system and then filing bugs against everything that breaks.