Trouble is—as all the brouhaha shows—pretty much all that stuff is about judgement calls. Ford shows demonstrably horrible judgement everywhere you look, but because Council was kind, and the exact line vague, he skated on what everyone in authority has judged was a conflict. Giving the Ombudsman or Integrity Commissioner the power and funding to take offenders to Court, or run some tribunal of their own might help, but the tax-bills would up even more than Mr. Gravy's raising them.
Same sort of thing with election financing: You cannot make clean clear lines, although the tax-funded version of financing the Cons kiboshed so they could run their in-and-out scheme and all their other 'innovative' campaign operations and funding schemes, both Wright and Wrong was a decent start. The trouble is still that if policing is all that's keeping the pols honest; we have no Elections Police. We have only an afterthought office that again is unfunded, within Elections Canada, an agency whose mission statement rightly focusses on enabling the most voters the freest choice, not on surveillance, suspicion and restriction.
The thought that we need Super Police to keep our governors honest should scare the hell out of us. Who elects these guys?
Same sort of thing with election financing: You cannot make clean clear lines, although the tax-funded version of financing the Cons kiboshed so they could run their in-and-out scheme and all their other 'innovative' campaign operations and funding schemes, both Wright and Wrong was a decent start. The trouble is still that if policing is all that's keeping the pols honest; we have no Elections Police. We have only an afterthought office that again is unfunded, within Elections Canada, an agency whose mission statement rightly focusses on enabling the most voters the freest choice, not on surveillance, suspicion and restriction.
The thought that we need Super Police to keep our governors honest should scare the hell out of us. Who elects these guys?