The responsibility crisis in Canada.

• Author: Axworthy, Thomas S.

Over the last two years the federal government's sponsorship programme has been the subject of a study by the Auditor General, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts and most recently by a Public Inquiry headed by Justice John Gomery. Central to all these studies have been questions of accountability and responsibility. This article argues that Canada needs to re-discover the ethic of responsibility. It also puts forth specific structural reforms for parliament, the public service, and the executive.

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One of the core problems that the 2003 report of the Auditor General, the hearings of the Public Accounts Committee, and the Gomery Commission of Inquiry into the sponsorship scandal has revealed is the absence of any notion of responsibility (1) from those in high positions. Testimony has unveiled that senior public officials ignored several internal complaints about irregularities in awarding ad contracts. Political staff whose job it is to advise ministers involved themselves in policy implementation, the traditional preserve of the public service. The Minister in charge of Public Works, Alfonso Gagliano, denied liability because he claimed that he lacked knowledge. The Deputy Minister of Public Works equally denied liability because he too lacked information. So the question obviously arises: if the Minister and Deputy Minister were not running the department, who was?

Parliamentary scholar, C.E.S. Franks, put his finger squarely on the problem in testimony to the Public Accounts Committee in May, 2004: "Not one of the many witnesses who came before the Committee, neither ex-ministers nor public servants, ever stated: yes, managing this program was my responsibility, and I am responsible and accountable for whatever went wrong with it." (2)

The pattern described by Franks to the Public Accounts Committee has generally been repeated in testimony to the Gomery Commission. One exception is former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who told the Commission: "I regret any mistakes that might have been made in the course of this program, or any other government program. As Prime Minister, I take ultimate responsibility for everything good and everything bad that happened in the government." (3) Another is David Dingwall, the former Minister of Public Works, who acknowledged that he crossed the line in 1995 when he insisted to his Deputy Minister Ron Quail that Chuck Guite, the epicenter of the crisis, be promoted to direct communications activities. (4) Neither Minister nor their staffs should interfere in the hiring process of public servants. But from the general performance of Ottawa decision-makers on recalling their roles in sponsorship, it is evident that we have a crisis of responsibility in Canada.

Organizations or collectives do not have moral responsibilities, the individuals within them do. Understanding the primacy of responsibility is the starting point of accountability. To respond is to answer. (5) Therefore, to be responsible is to be answerable. Government rests on the ethic that people in positions of power take responsibility for their actions. On responsibility and accountability we have both a moral and a structural problem. Morally we have had a retreat from responsibility. Restoring this ethical base must be the first priority. A starting point will be for parliament to debate the Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities. Structurally, we have allowed confusion to set in about the separate roles of public servants, ministers, and their personal political advisors. We need a clearly understood framework of responsibility and accountability that is endorsed both by the legislature and the executive. We do not need to wait for the report of the Gomery Commission to know that we have an immediate problem that badly needs fixing.

The Morality of Responsibility

Ethics are a system of moral standards or principles that could be accepted universally, that is, by anyone who did not know his or her personal characteristics such as social class, race, sex or nationality. According to Hans Kung, the world renowned moral philosopher, a global ethic is "nothing but the necessary minimum of common values, standards and basic attitudes." (6) Among that necessary minimum is the concept of human obligation or responsibility. Since the time of the Stoics we have known that as we develop our sense of responsibility we increase our internal freedom by fortifying our moral character.

With freedom of choice, including the choice to do right or wrong, a responsible moral character will ensure that the former will prevail. Therefore each of us develops moral codes of responsibility as lovers, spouses, parents or citizens. In Plato's Crito, Socrates says that conscience or the sense of responsibility "is what I seem to hear them saying just as a mystic seems to hear the strains of music, and the sound of their argument sings so loudly in my head that I cannot hear the other side." (7) Socrates, the Stoics, and the prophets all recognized that with freewill human beings battle internally and incessantly with the competing forces of light versus the power of darkness. As Montaigne wrote, "so marvelous is the power of conscience! It makes us betray, accuse, and fight ourselves, and in the absence of an outside witness, it brings us forward against ourselves." (8)

So, moral responsibility or conscience is vital to our development as human beings. We are only free if we are not a slave to evil. But it is equally central to our notions of political freedom. Freedom and responsibility are interdependent. Responsibility is a natural voluntary check on freedom. Just as an individual must have limits if we are to co-exist with our fellow human beings, so too, political freedom must be exercised within a framework of mutual obligation. No one has been more eloquent on this point than Edmund Burke in his 1791 letter to a member of the National Assembly of France:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in...