Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Conflict of Interest and Public Life
- Introduction
- PART I THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
- PART II CROSS-NATIONAL CASE STUDIES
- FIVE Conflict-of-Interest Legislation in the United States: Origins, Evolution, and Inter-Branch Differences
- SIX Conflict of Interest in Canada
- SEVEN Conflict of Interest in British Public Life
- EIGHT Conflict of Interest in Italy: The Case of a Media Tycoon Who Became Prime Minister (2001–2006)
- NINE Conclusion: Conflict-of-Interest Regulation in Its Institutional Context
- Bibliography
- Index
SIX - Conflict of Interest in Canada
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Conflict of Interest and Public Life
- Introduction
- PART I THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
- PART II CROSS-NATIONAL CASE STUDIES
- FIVE Conflict-of-Interest Legislation in the United States: Origins, Evolution, and Inter-Branch Differences
- SIX Conflict of Interest in Canada
- SEVEN Conflict of Interest in British Public Life
- EIGHT Conflict of Interest in Italy: The Case of a Media Tycoon Who Became Prime Minister (2001–2006)
- NINE Conclusion: Conflict-of-Interest Regulation in Its Institutional Context
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye once made a revealing observation about the differences between Canada and the United States. The United States, Frye said, was born in a war of independence against a European power and came to maturity in a civil war fought decades later. Canada, by contrast, was born in a civil war between two European powers and has been fighting a war of independence against the United States ever since. An admittedly harsh interpretation of Frye's observation would be the following: a country that first wins a war of independence and then fights a civil war goes through two processes of self-definition – in the first instance, by separating itself from an external power, and in the second, by putting an end to an internal contradiction. By contrast, a country that is born in a civil war and then fights a continuing war of independence thereafter runs a greater risk of becoming a congenital schizophrenic and a perpetual adolescent.
Whether or not schizophrenia and adolescence offer apt metaphors for Canada's political history as a whole (and they seem to be popular ones; see Stark 1992a, 158), they do capture its conflict-of-interest experience in particular. That experience is schizophrenic – it is of two minds – in the sense that Canada's historic institutions and its recent politics have come to present it with a twofold, mutually inverse understanding of conflict of interest. And Canada's conflict-of-interest regime is adolescent, or immature, in that it is substantially underdeveloped.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conflict of Interest and Public LifeCross-National Perspectives, pp. 125 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008