Ethics Series Part I – Ethics Today: Why it Matters More than Ever
Monday, November 2 at 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST
This event will be broadcast online and is free and open to all – there is no login or registration required to tune in. Click here to watch the livestream.
This first session in our four-part Ethics Series, entitled Ethics Today: Why Moral Leadership Matters, will be on political ethics.
Political ethics applies moral judgements to both the ethics of process such as the rules office holders must follow and the ethics of policy which examine what are the value choices behind substantive decisions. A longstanding issue has been whether political ethics are different from those that guide life more generally. Machiavelli argued that the end justified the means and that all decision makers have “dirty hands”, others hold decision makers to even more stringent standards than apply to us generally such as the disclosure of information like tax returns which goes against the value of privacy. How to apply the core concept of responsibility to public policy is another dilemma since the sources of policy are numerous, so there is the issue of “many hands”, too. “Dirty hands” and “many hands” – things to ponder as we assess the state of political ethics in Canada.
Tom Axworthy, Chair of the Public Policy Program at Massey College, will host this conversation featuring Don Gibson, who has led ethics roundtables for the United Church for many years, Mary Dawson, former Ethics Commissioner for the Government of Canada, and Penny Collenette, former senior advisor to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
This event will be broadcast online and is free and open to all – there is no login or registration required to tune in. Click here to watch the livestream.
Penny Collenette, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Common Law, University of Ottawa, has enjoyed a unique career which has taken her from boardrooms to classrooms with a stop along the way at the John F. Kennedy School of Government where she was a Senior Fellow from 2004 -2006. She has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa since 2003 and for several years was also Executive in Residence at the Telfer Business School where she taught EMBA students. At the law school, she designed two new courses regarding Ethics and Whistleblowing as well as a course concerning International Business and Human Rights.
In her non academic career, she was Director of Appointments in the Prime Minister’s Office from 1993-1997. During her tenure, she helped to raise the number of female appointments to nearly 40 %, a large increase in numbers from previous governments. She was also Vice President of the Chairman’s Office, George Weston Ltd for nearly five years which taught her the inner workings of one of Canada’s largest companies. She has served on a number of boards including Holt Renfrew, the Toronto Board of Trade and as Vice Chair of the board of the United Nations Association of Canada.
Her volunteer work is extensive, mostly in the area of people living with disabilities and the promotion of women. She is currently one of the 60 Visionary Founders of the Prosperity Project, a new national not for profit, set up to mitigate the disproportional effect of Covid on women.
She is a Top 100 Women’s Champion and was named by Maclean’s magazine as one of Canada’s 50 most influential people. She was inducted into the Honour Roll of her UOttawa Common Law Faculty and in 2015, she was awarded the Order of Ontario for her work on governance and ethics.
Thomas S. Axworthy is Chair of Public Policy at Massey College, University of Toronto. He has had a distinguished career in government, academia, and philanthropy. He served as the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and he was a key strategist on repatriation of the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Axworthy was president and CEO of The Gordon Foundation, an institution known for its partnership with Northern indigenous leaders in helping to create the Arctic Council.
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