Article content continued

It isn’t only that it all adds up: thousands of civil servants, hundreds of MPs and senators, dozens of cabinet ministers, all treating the public purse in various ways and to varying degrees as their own. It’s the habit of mind it reveals. The civil servant who expenses $4,000 in meals in the space of two weeks — nearly $300 a day — is not just acting out of his own sense of entitlement, but the confident expectation that others will see it the same way. He is not, after all, stealing the money, or concealing his actions in any way. He filed for those expenses, because he believed they would be approved — as indeed they were.

That’s not an individual predilection. That’s cultural. As with the fracas over Mike Duffy’s expenses, as earlier with the Oda Ado (history’s first palindromic scandal), the problem is not so much with people breaking the rules as with the rules themselves. It is, on the one hand, that it did not occur to those who drafted the rules to prevent this sort of thing. And it is even more the mentality that whatever the rules allow is fair game.

This attitude belongs to no party or government. It is not even reserved to the public sector. It happens wherever and whenever people forget whose money it is. This is, it should be said, all too easy to do. The minister who is engaged in the daily business of persuading the public that her party stands for all that is right and should — no, must — be in government for that reason, will over time persuade herself of the same.