Making greed mandatory
Since Conservative Leader David Alward proposed this measure in his party’s election platform a week ago, everyone, it seems, has weighed in on the issue (including, it must be said, yours truly). The ruling Grits, many charitable organizations and several students say it’s a bad idea. Now, the Tories have uncovered what appears to be an identical stipulation in a video on the Department of Education’s own web site.
As to this, Alward crows, “Their talking exactly about what we’ve been talking about over the last week and the hypocrisy from the ministers who have been out in front of this. . .It shows that they don’t know what’s going on within their own government.”
Not so, rejoins House Leader Greg Byrne. The Liberals haven’t explicitly made this an election plank. It’s just one of many concepts tossed out to “stimulate discussion” about the future of the province’s secondary school system. “There should be an opportunity for volunteerism,” he insists. “But there’s a distinction between that and mandatory volunteering. The Department of Education often consults on issues and the purpose of the video was just to consult people, to as a series of what-ifs.”
Frankly, though, if there is a distinction in this particular argument, I’m having a hard time parsing it. All of which points, perhaps, to the political perils of public engagement, a principal that both parties have enshrined in their own unctuous ways in recent months.
Still, whether or not Liberal officials knew about the video before they mouthed off against their rivals is beside the point (though, to be fair to them, it’s mighty hard to be hypocritical absent of facts, if, indeed, they were in this case). The point is whether mandatory volunteerism makes sense. Does it serve some measurable social utility? Does it achieve the desired results and produce a net benefit? It all depends on your definitions.
A few years ago, when professional baseball reeled under the weight of bad publicity (when has it not?), certain team owners devised a clever scheme to keep their most talented, and often least well-behaved, players on the straight and narrow. Rather than punish them for beating girlfriends, stealing cars and snorting cocaine, they paid them to stay clean. They cut them hefty cheques simply for doing the right thing.
In one sense – the corporate sense – the plan worked astonishingly well. Rap sheets disappeared overnight and the league enjoyed a period of relative public relations calm. But did it produce better human beings? In their post-career doldrums, many of these man-children returned to their wayward habits.
How, then, is mandatory volunteerism anything but another form of institutionalized bribery? It may generate some short-term good for organizations that desperately need assistance. But it doesn’t do much for the moral development of those who see a pay-off at the end of their sojourns – in this case, a high school diploma. Indeed, by injecting profit so crassly into the mix of motivations for helping others we breed an attitude of cynical entitlement.
But maybe that’s what our political leaders want for the next generation. Heaven knows, little else they’ve devised has worked. New Brunswick’s debt is insupportable. Energy costs are set to spiral upward. Our literacy and language scores trail most other jurisdictions in Canada. And we remain tethered to a system of federal hand-outs, which renders any hope of economic self-sufficiency in our children’s lifetimes illusory, at best.
In the post-bank-bail-out world, where so few take responsibility for their actions or for the conditions of their neighbours and communities, greed is good.
Why not make it mandatory?
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