Vancouver Sun, Wednesday Nov. 16 2011
By Maxwell Cameron
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Maxwell Cameron, the director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC, writes about the problem of getting good people to go into politics.
“The most important virtue in politics is what Aristotle called ‘practical wisdom,’” writes Cameron. “Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe define this as the moral will and skill to deliberate and act on what is right for one’s self and community, and to do so for the right reasons.”
“Our system is built on the principle of parliamentary supremacy,” he writes. “In practice we have a partyarchy – the rule of political parties at the expense of our constitutional order. We need politicians with the moral skill and will to restore balance to our parliamentary system.”
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