Canadian mayors don't appear to be having a good time of it lately, ethicswise. Montreal's mayor resigned, Toronto's mayor was dismissed by a judge, and now it looks like the conflict situations of Winnipeg's mayor will be his downfall if he runs for a fourth term, according to a Canadian Broadcasting Service (CBC) News article and poll yesterday.

When the economy is booming, local government corruption feeds off the sale of government land, development projects, and construction contracts. When the economy is doing poorly, there is usually less money floating around to fund corruption. But in bad times, local governments are willing to accept the help of companies and nonprofits, which might have (or appear to have) their own interests at stake in what they fund for local governments. This leads to another set of problems.

An example of the sort of thing that might happen can be found in a complaint that was filed with Philadelphia's ethics board yesterday by a group called Parents United for Public Education and the local NAACP branch. The complaint alleges that a foundation not only funded, but also entered into a separate contract with, a consulting firm hired by the city to make recommendations to its school district regarding issues ranging from financial planning to charter schools.

An eye-opening report was published this week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. The report was based on a survey of all the state's police departments regarding the filing of complaints. Although complaints filed by the public against police officers rarely involve conflicts of interest, some of the findings are relevant to government ethics.

Yesterday, at the annual conference of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL), the only association of state and local government ethics professionals, Judge Anthony Wilhoit was given the COGEL Award, which is given annually to someone who has "made a significant, demonstrable, and positive contribution to the fields of campaign finance, elections, ethics, freedom of information or lobbying for a significant period of time." As the executive director of the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission since 1997, Judge Wilhoit has certainly made a substantial contribution, although no more than dozens of other executive directors and other staff members of ethics-related bodies, not to mention legislators, good government organization leaders, and academics.

The reason that I am writing about this particular award selection is that COGEL has consistently refused, as an organization, to embrace and spread the most important values of government ethics (such as transparency and ethics program independence). And yet it annually takes a strong position on values when it permits a small committee (on which I sat last year) to select a COGEL Award winner. I believe that it is time to either stop giving out COGEL Awards or start having an organization-wide discussion of values to embrace and spread in a world that has little understanding of government ethics.

Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics laws relating to council members, includingOntario's Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, are set up led to an extreme penalty and an ugly situation.

In one of my blog posts on the ethics task force's second report, I identified areas that the ethics task force ignored. The first was the low limits on fines. The mayor, in his recommendations, did not recommend increasing them.

The second was the failure to include independent ("sister") agencies under the ethics program's jurisdiction. The mayor did mention sister agencies in his recommendations, but only to give the ethics board and the IGs the power to refer complaints about sister agency violations to the sister agencies. Independence does not mean independence from an independent ethics program. Why can't members of the same family eat at the same table?