In a national public-opinion survey conducted by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy (January 2015) we asked respondents to indicate on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being totally unimportant and 10 being very important) the importance they attached to the following:
• Whether candidates for public office are “knowledgeable.”
• Whether candidates possess certain “skills,” such as the ability to communicate, make decisions, etc.
• Whether candidates possess certain “character traits,” such as honesty, compassion, transparency, and integrity.
Predictably, character trumped knowledge and skills by a large margin. In fact, many respondents implied that they didn’t care how knowledgeable or skilful a political candidate or leader was; if they couldn’t be trusted because of character deficiencies, they shouldn’t be supported for public office.54
This survey also indicated that the those surveyed held a very low opinion of the ethical standards of Canada’s current political class, with 90 percent seeing elected officials as being more concerned with advancing their own interests (e.g., making money) than serving their constituents, and 55 percent considering elected officials to be unprincipled in general.
Another survey conducted around the same time by Ryerson University indicated that the unethical behaviours of politicians that respondents found most objectionable were the breaking of election promises (75 percent), the use of tax dollars to buy votes (55 percent), and the adoption of policies favouring particular interest groups, lobbyists, or family members solely to advance those interests and win their support (55 percent).55
Reliance on Ethical Codes
So how do we go about raising the ethical tone and standards of a nation or a society? More particularly, how do we go about raising the ethical tone of those in public service?
From ancient times down to the present, the most frequently utilized approach is to develop and enforce a code of ethics, with positive incentives for adherence, penalties for violations, and a system for monitoring and enforcing compliance.
For the people of Israel, from the days of their liberation from Egypt right down to Jesus’ day, it was the code of ethics embodied in the law of Moses and all the processes and institutions developed for its communication, expansion, and enforcement that constituted the traditional approach to securing ethical behaviour. Not dissimilarly, in our day we have seen the same approach taken, as evidenced by the plethora of ethical codes and compliance regimes adopted by many companies, professional organizations, and governments. In the case of the latter, codes of conduct for civil servants and elected officials may be enshrined in legislation and reinforced by the appointment of compliance officers and ethics commissioners.56 This was the situation that prevailed when my colleagues and I were first elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1993.
Insufficiencies of the Code of Ethics Approach
Unfortunately, the sad reality is that this approach by itself has generally proved to be insufficient in achieving the goal of securing consistently ethical behaviour on the part of those committed or subjected to it. For example, this insufficiency was demonstrated by the four-hundred-year experience of ancient Israel with the law of Moses, as recorded in the Old Testament, and the conclusion of the latter prophets that unless the law could be written on the tablets of the heart—that is, internalized—reliance on a code of ethics alone was insufficient to guarantee ethical behaviour.
My own experience as a Canadian parliamentarian from 1993 to 2002 has led me to conclude that reliance on an external code of ethics is an insufficient approach today as well. When the Chrétien government was elected in 1993 it introduced a code of ethics for parliamentarians and civil servants, accompanied by the appointment of an ethics commissioner and a tightening of laws and regulations governing lobbying and conflicts of interests. The government insisted that all of this would lead to a higher degree of ethical behaviour on the part of the administration and parliamentarians. But the sad reality was that the parliaments of which I was a part exhibited the following:
• A chronic inability to recognize moral and ethical issues when they arose, especially with respect to old practices sanctioned by time, routine, and habit.
• A persistent defaulting to “moral relativism” as an excuse for inaction when confronted with moral and ethical issues.
• An overreliance on ethical pragmatism and utilitarianism rather than code-based or “deontological” ethics when an ethical decision could not be avoided.
Insufficiencies Illustrated from My
Parliamentary Experience
The word parliament is derived from the French parler, meaning to speak. Communication is the essence of political and parliamentary discourse, and the principal ethical test of a communication is “Is it true?” This test can be applied to a speech, a news release, a ministerial statement, a party platform, a policy declaration, and so on, but when we do so in today’s world, what do we find? That of all our public communications it is political discourse that is so riddled with near truths, half-truths, outright lies, and political spin that the public has justifiably ceased to believe much of what politicians say.
Did the proclamation of a code of ethics for the 35th parliament of Canada change any of this? Did it increase the sensitivity of members as to whether what they were saying in debate or in committee or from a political platform met even the most elementary test of truthfulness? Not at all. Politicians, in general, simply do not see a moral or ethical aspect to our long-established habits of communication in the public arena, just as some business people see no moral issues in their long-established business practices and some media people see no moral issue in how they filter and present information and some bureaucrats see no moral issues in how they treat or mistreat people. Codes of ethics, no matter how well worded or communicated, seem insufficient to increase awareness of ethical issues or standards in areas where indifference, callousness, or habitual practices have blinded the practitioners to them.
To illustrate, let me cite just one bizarre incident that demonstrated for me how ineffective, in the final analysis, the Standing Orders of the House of Commons are in guaranteeing any degree of truthfulness in parliamentary debate. On this particular occasion a government member asserted that a certain opposition member was a “racist,” an assertion that I and others knew to be a lie.57 In the heated exchange that followed, the opposition member in question said so and labelled the first member a “liar.” The Speaker immediately ruled both members out of order and threatened them with expulsion from the chamber if they did not retract and apologize. In doing so, he was much more censorious of the second member than the first, giving the impression that the use of unparliamentary language—the word liar—was a much greater offence than the lie that provoked it. I later sought clarification from the Speaker, who ruefully confirmed that, as he interpreted the Standing Orders governing members’ conduct, the House is offended by the use of the word liar but not necessarily offended by the lie itself. Obviously there is a great need for upgrading the ethics of the House in regard to truth telling, but something much more than a code of ethics or amendments to the Standing Orders is required to achieve that objective.
At about the same time as this incident, several other issues involving serious violations of ethical standards were swirling about the head of the government. These included the alleged cover-up of the murder of a Somali civilian