'Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants': Transparency as a tool of ethics regulation in Canada and France

As we are reminded by SC Justice Louis Brandeis' old aphorism, transparency - or publicity, as he termed it - has long been seen to be a key remedy to a number of "social ills". Over the last twenty years, this has certainly... [ view full abstract ]

As we are reminded by SC Justice Louis Brandeis' old aphorism, transparency - or publicity, as he termed it - has long been seen to be a key remedy to a number of "social ills". Over the last twenty years, this has certainly been true in the field of conflict of interest regulation in the public sector, where the scope and extent of private information disclosure by public officials have greatly increased in many countries. As countries faced pressures to tighten their ethics rules for public officials, many of them turned to transparency as a governance or policy tool susceptible to both improve compliance and enhance public confidence.

However, despite this growth in the use of transparency, there have been few studies that have examined how the precise nature of disclosure requirements vary across countries, the varying role that transparency plays in overall conflict of interest systems, or their potential impact on the governance of the public sector. The proposed paper will offer a first step along this comparative research project by comparing how Canada and France are using transparency requirements as a key component of their evolving ethics regimes.

Over the last ten years, Canada and France have both fundamentally changed how they regulate conflicts of interest involving public officials. In Canada, in the wake of the sponsorship scandal, legal and institutional reforms have led to further codification of conflict of interest rules and the introduction of third-party independent oversight through the Office of the Ethics Commissioner. In France, in the wake of a series of recent scandals, a wave of reforms also led to the introduction of new legal requirements and the creation of a new independent authority – la Haute autorité pour la transparence dans la vie publique – with substantial powers of oversight and control. While they both embodied a desire for greater transparency, these reforms also reveal different logics for involving independent authorities into the production of accountability for ethics violations and propose contrasting rationales for the use of transparency as an instrument of compliance and legitimation.

As the paper will argue, these cross-national differences can partly be attributed to the impact of their distinct legal and administrative traditions as well as the inherent logic of their constitutional framework. But the comparison will also highlight alternative ways of thinking about transparency as a tool of governance and an instrument of democratic legitimation, differences that raise distinctive possibilities for transparency's impact on the public sector.