Conflict-of-Interest.net

In my home province of Quebec (Canada), there’s a move by the government to create an Ethics Commissioner for the National Assembly (provinicial parliament in English Canada), following a series of COI scandals that have rocked the provincial and municipal (e.g., Montreal) governments: Quebec will create ethics commissioner: Charest.

This raises an interesting question in my mind…why is it that in government, “ethics” so often has the feel of “police”? Clearly COI is an important ethical issue of politicians and government administrators, and I would hope that attention to COI (and other ethical issues) facing democratic political representatives would be a subject of concern. My worry is that attention to often goes to bureaucratic policing – in the form of “ethics officers” – and not to ethics education, or the development of effective and relevant policy that can actually guide behaviour…