Honours need rules to ensure fairness
Politicians have given out hundreds of medals and pins this fall in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday, even though there’s no national program to do it.
So many that it’s hard to escape the worry that the politicians are up to something.
The Department of Canadian Heritage gave each member of Parliament 20 pins, made from reclaimed copper from the parliamentary roof, to distribute largely as they see fit.
It’s not quite an official honour, but that’s the idea.
Recipients included community association volunteers, religious leaders, politicians, political supporters and opponents, philanthropists and medical researchers.
Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod is angry that the federal government didn’t fund a mass national award and created her own. “Once in 150 years, I thought this was worth doing, bringing people together,” she said.
Spurred by the same impulse, the Senate had the Royal Canadian Mint strike 1,500 medals commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Senate’s first sitting. Each senator got a dozen, nominally for unsung community heroism, though 47 of them ended up in the hands of senators themselves.
We have unsung community volunteers and people who do more than they’re paid for, and part of a public leader’s job is to deliver recognition to those people. But being the person who gives out awards also reflects upon the giver. Associating yourself with good feelings, rewarding people who are already influential, and buoying the careers of people who already support you are all good politics. The balance is difficult.
But we could observe a couple of rules.
One might be that having public honours distributed wholly at the discretion of an elected politician is a bad practice. A degree of separation — Ottawa South MP David McGuinty seems to have found one by asking local organizations to name a recipient — is desirable.
This happened with the diamond jubilee medals in 2012, when worthy recipients got mixed into a sour brew of politicos, big donors and industrial lobbyists, all thanked equally for their services to Canada.
Another is that it’s unseemly to present people with a medal that has your own name on it unless you’ve paid for it yourself or you’re a senior royal — the latter only because of the tradition that the Crown is the font from which all legitimate public power flows in our constitutional monarchy.
The point should be to strive mightily to keep the focus on the honorees and avoid any hint of political vampirism. Not everyone’s pulled that off in Canada’s big year.