There was a piece on the CBC site this weekend that irked me, and I’m not sure it was just the problematic headline – why our ethic rules aren’t keeping politicians out of trouble. It’s a ridiculous construction on the face of it – you can have all the laws you want, and it won’t stop people from contravening them out of malice or ignorance. After all, the Criminal Code hasn’t eliminated crime, so why would an ethics regime miraculously end all ethics violations by public office holders?

While the piece quotes an academic who says that part of the problem is that the rules regime tells politicians how they can’t act, but not how they should act, so much of it is based on judgment calls, and not everyone has good judgment. But more to the point, in the two prominent situations that we’ve seen in recent months – the Trudeau report about his vacation with the Aga Khan, and the LeBlanc report about whether his wife’s cousin counted sufficiently as “family” under the definition of the Act, is that both of these situations were based on the judgement of the Ethics Commissioners rather than what was in the legislation. Mary Dawson took it upon herself to judge how someone defines their relationship with the Aga Khan (who is akin to the Pope of the Ismaili Muslim faith), while Mario Dion took what has been called an overly broad interpretation so that LeBlanc is forced to treat one of his wife’s sixty first cousins as close when all evidence points to them being mere acquaintances (and this after Dion has publicly come out to state that he wants to be seen as tough and not a lapdog). I’m not sure how any of these situations points to how the rules are stopping politicians from staying out of trouble when the trouble they’re in is based on a single person’s choice of how to interpret those rules, in some cases in defiance of common sense.

I would also caution that we need to be careful about setting a regime that is too constrictive, because it becomes either a means of either becoming one of constant investigation for political score-settling, or a system where we have yet another Officer of Parliament who becomes the embodiment of “Mother, May I?” and we don’t let politicians exercise any judgment that we can hold them accountable for – and we can’t hold these commissioners to account for their judgment, even when it can be found to be dubious. (Also note that we also made the requirements for who can be Commissioner to be so restrictive that anyone qualified wouldn’t want the job, which is another problem in and of itself). The amount of energy we put into the penny ante “scandals” in Canadian politics, which are piddling in comparison to the kinds of gross violations that happen regularly in the US, or that did happen in the UK (moat cleaning, anyone?) makes you wonder about our preoccupations. Which isn’t to say that we should ignore them, but let’s treat them with the gravity that they deserve, and I’m not sure that any of the “scandals” we’ve seen in this parliament are worth the energy we’ve expended on lighting our hair on fire about them.

Good reads:

• Here are six things to keep an eye on as Parliament resumes today. First up on the Order Paper is the TPP enabling legislation.
• Here’s your latest NAFTA gossip.
• Export growth to the EU has been slow as everyone remains focused on NAFTA.
• Veterans Affairs is having a difficult time trying to come up with new Remembrance Day advertising that isn’t a guilt trip or a recruitment pitch.
• Meanwhile, lapsed funds in Veterans Affairs has the usual critics howling without understanding the processes or program spending that it relates to.
• Here’s a look at the government’s legal spending, given litigation around trade disputes and various other lawsuits they are defending against.
• Here is a look at which issues will likely start setting the pre-election narrative over the next year in Parliament.
• Maxime Bernier is also talking more private delivery of healthcare.
• Éric Grenier reminds us of another Conservative splinter party, the Reconstruction Party, and how it fared back in its day.
• My weekend column looked at why our bastardized leadership selection system, not our electoral system, is to blame for Doug Ford.

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