A politician is judged by the electorate.

Seems like a simple enough concept, doesn't it? You make promises, you try to implement them, you show the results, the voters decide.

Short of committing a criminal act, that is the only judgment a politician need submit to.

So what good is an Ethics Commissioner? He is not a judge, at least not in the sense of handing out punishments. His role is to ensure that elected officials and their staff understand the rules for ethical behaviour (a concept that focuses almost entirely on private financial interests versus the public trust, according to the code), most importantly where conflicts of interest arise. It's a bit sad that we have to have someone explain those concepts, but an argument can be made that having one person provide a consistent interpretation (as long as it is a good one) is better than hundreds of different interpretations.

But even if someone is caught in a conflict of interest, the Commissioner can only recommend appropriate "sanctions", which aren't defined. Presumably such sanctions would be limited to requiring an MP to divest himself of a certain financial interest found to be causing a conflict of interest.

Even the implementation of those recommended sanctions is left up to the government, where a political decision is made concerning those sanctions.

But some people don't get it. They think the Ethics Commissioner is some sort of watchdog whose job it is to compel politicians to implement a particular policy or piece of legislation:

The lobby group Democracy Watch has launched a formal complaint with the federal Ethics Commissioner accusing the Conservative government of breaking election promises.

The same letter of complaint also repeats Democracy Watch's call for ethics commissioner Bernard Shapiro to resign for failing to vigorously enforce ethics rules.

Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch said Thursday that Bill C-2 - the federal Accountability Act - breaks or omits 13 specific promises made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the run-up to the Jan. 23 vote.

Breaking a promise is not an ethical lapse in the sense defined in the code. It is an ethical problem if the promise was broken because of a financial conflict that had not been disclosed. But it's the financial conflict, and not the promise, that is the concern of the Ethics Commissioner.

How to keep promises, in what order, and which to forgo altogether, are political decisions. Sometimes they are made for reasons of crass political expediency, and sometimes for very obvious pragmatic reasons. Sometimes it becomes clear that the promise was just dumb. Sometimes the promise is kept, but had to be modified in some manner, and people mistakenly think that the promise was not kept.

At the end of the day, though, these are issues of politics, not ethics, at least not in the sense defined by the code. The judgment lies with the voters, not with the Ethics Commissioner. Duff Conacher is way off base by trying to pull the Ethics Commissioner into this.

Oh, and by the way, he is also wasting his time. The Ethics Commissioner only responds to complaints from MPs, not from the public (see 72.08 of the enabling statute). I think Conacher knows this. I think he knows his "complaint" will go into the shredder. I think, though, he is doing this to get press attention. The funny thing is, he has a venue in which to make his concerns known. After second reading, the committee reviewing the bill will accept submissions from the public on how to improve the bill. It's part of how our democracy works. If he knows that his complaint is a waste of time, then Conacher is being a lot more cynical and a fair bit more duplicitous than I would have thought a member of Democracy Watch ought to be.

A final thought. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the scope of the Ethics Commissioner's mandate included evaluating proposed legislation and making decisions concerning how well that legislation conformed to prior statements made outside of the House of Commons (which statements? how far back in time? by whom? -- leave the practicalities out of this for the moment) that have been deemed to be "promises". Let's say also that the Ethics Commissioner could impose sanctions on legislators who have proposed legislation determined to be flawed by the Commissioner in order to prod for changes in the legislation. And let's also say that this one-man unelected pseudo-legislative-branch called the Ethics Commissioner could be set on the track of bad legislation not by an elected member of parliament but by a private citizen, elected by no one, representing only himself when he complains that he doesn't like the proposed bill. Doesn't that sound like something that undermines democracy? Doesn't that sound a process Democracy Watch would be very concerned about?

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