Lack of Ethics

Nova Scotia MLA Trevor Zinck changed his plea this week to guilty; guilty of fraud that is. I can’t help wondering why he waited so long thus wasting even more of the tax payers money. But Trevor seems to have a different take on the situation anyway saying that he hoped to maintain his seat and feels that his accomplishments outweigh his mistakes.

Trevor is part of an elite group. Rob Ford, the embattled Toronto mayor has been in the news for his escapades almost every week for months. It was revealed this week that Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has been charging charities as much as 20 grand a pop for speaking engagements. Last week, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair blew through several stop signs pursued by a police cruiser with lights flashing. When he finally stopped and was approached by the officer, Mulcair is reported to have said, “Don’t you know who I am?” and then warned the officer that he would be in a lot of trouble. Later Thom said it was all just a ‘misunderstanding’. And then this week as well, interim mayor of Montreal, Michael Applebaum, who was brought in to clean up the corruption in the city, was arrested and is facing 14 charges including fraud and conspiracy.

I caught a very interesting interview on Canada AM yesterday morning. Veteran Montreal Gazette Columnist Henry Aubin who has covered the political scene in Montreal since the 1970s, as both a reporter and a columnist, was being interviewed about Applebaum’s arrest. When asked by Canada AM host Beverly Thomson what he made of the whole thing in terms of what it says, Henry responded with these words:

“It says that Montreal is deeply corrupt. It’s a pervasive syndrome. It doesn’t apply only to Montreal. It applies to the province’s third largest city Laval … where 21 out of 22 city councilors were found to have taken illegal money. It speaks to a broad sense of a lack of ethics … I’m not sure what the cause is. Perhaps the decline of the church has something to do with it. People don’t go to church anymore. They don’t learn ethics. Very often they come from dysfunctional families. Their parents don’t teach them ethics. They get their values from television and other popular media, so the traditional teaching of values has dissipated.”

His comments surprised me. I wasn’t expecting them. It’s not very often (understatement) that you hear anyone in the media willing to recognize the real reason for the disintegration of public life. One can argue that there was plenty of corruption long before the decline of the church in Quebec, or anywhere else, and surely there was. This kind of corruption is part of human nature. But, it is significant when you find someone in the secular media who is willing to admit that the present secular humanist society which we have been busy creating has in fact no foundation upon which to base, nor any real means of sustaining, any real ethical system. Expect things to get worse but don’t expect a whole lot of people to admit the real reason for it.

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”       2Tim 3:1-4