Lapsing Ethics

Now that is unfortunate. It is quite simply amazing how really bright people, those with experience behind them, a reputation they have earned for unerringly finding their way through the maze of human relations and selecting the right path that leads them to financial, social and political success, will still at times put a proverbial trigger to their heads and fire.

Examples abound. There is former U.S. vice-president Al Gore who campaigns tirelessly for the environment and whose personal lifestyle more than adequately makes his campaigns ring hollow. There is U.S. President Barack Obama who impulsively paints red lines that must never be crossed, and finds them dissolving when they've been impressively trampled. There is the estimable academic and political commentator, Tom Flanagan, who casually professed compassion for the compulsion of pornography, besmirching his reputation.

And there is the perfect example of a man who has attained a sterling reputation as the world's most famous cosmologist, a man whose mind remains dynamic with theoretical physics, leading the global community of scientists in his field while locked in a body that has a painfully diminished presence due to Lou Gehrig's disease, who has permitted his fine mind to be distracted by a decision whose morality is truly questionable. Stephen Hawking's decision to boycott attendance at a symposium in Israel on the future, to which he was invited as a guest speaker speaks negative volumes.

Far less luminous personalities, but yet individuals of high repute sitting in the Senate of Canada have brought obloquy on themselves for stooping so low as to unethically claim financial subsidies their situations do not merit, by subverting loosely-monitored, honour-dependent, economic guidelines. What has become even more scandalous than the senators' feral self-availing grasping is that one of them has unashamedly accepted a cash gift to buy himself out of his moral morass.

Much more serious than Senator Mike Duffy's lapse from irreproachable conduct befitting a sitting senator in the Senate Chamber of Canada, is that the chief of staff of the Prime Minister of Canada has seen fit to take it upon himself to generously and personally gift the Senator with the sum of $90,000 to enable him to pay back the funding he extracted under false pretenses from Senate expenses. Which is to say taxpayer-funded expenses.

Such benevolence has its place, but not in that place and not under those circumstances. That Mr. Duffy would willingly accept such largesse is understandable from someone who thought there was nothing amiss in extracting unearned funding from the public purse. But that a man of impeccable credentials as a political adviser to the Prime Minister, a Harvard-educated lawyer and philanthropist of renown moving in exalted executive circles would succumb to an impulse that was guaranteed by its nature to cast a dark shadow on the Prime Minister is beyond belief.

Ill-advised in the extreme, and just plain stupid for someone described as "a truly exceptional guy with remarkable talents", by a former prime minister. The situation simply doesn't pass the ethics smell-test, and has managed in its grubby presentation to besmirch both the gifter and the executive position he holds, along with the reputation of the man whose office he has brought into question.

Which brings us back again to the unfortunate revelations bringing public reproach on those whose public presence and reputation is in essence breached by their own inadvertent lapses in judgement.