Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do appreciate it. I won't further that little side debate.
I do think that cognitive bias has come into play here. I've spoken to scholars for many years. I have studied this. Within organizational cultures, individuals and leaders can be subject to cognitive biases. This is a human thing. All of us experience these all the time when we have to make decisions.
I have another really great book here that I've read multiple times. I actually know the woman who wrote it. She's world-renowned. Her name is Mary Gentile. She wrote a book called Giving Voice to Values. It's about how you can speak up or speak your mind when you know what's right.
It's very interesting because her theory of ethics is that ethics are really something to be practised. It's not to say that you'll never make mistakes, but that ethics are a practice of decision-making. There's constant improvement, learning and evolution in becoming an ethical leader. It's not a “we are” or“ we aren't” type of thing. It's not a light switch type of thing.
This means that we have to understand that ethical leaders—even the most courageous and honourable ethical leaders, like our Prime Minister—are going to make the occasional misstep. I would argue that, within a global pandemic, when we are rolling out programs and working around the clock for Canadians....
I mean that. My eyes are red every day because I lose sleep over my dedication to Canadians. I'm not saying that other people here don't do the same. I think we all do that.
I don't think that you have to be perfect all of the time. There's some degree of understanding and compassion that I bring to this work. When our honourable members occasionally misstep, I don't then say that they're horrible people, or that they're cruel or corrupt. These headlines and these claims are just sensationalizing something that is absolutely untrue. I know it to be untrue based on my experience of the leadership within our party. I really feel that I have to speak out about this.
Not only are ethics about knowing consequences and performing our duties, they're also about our moral character and cultivating that. That's what Aristotle said. He put forward virtue ethics and talked about our moral character. We're constantly developing a moral character and expressing moral courage.
It's like a muscle that we're constantly practising. We can't expect ourselves to be perfect all of the time. It's not as clear-cut as whether you did it right or wrong, in many cases. There's a complexity to ethics that goes way beyond a simple kind of thinking that says, “you made a mistake, so you're out”.
These cognitive biases have been well documented and well researched. I'll mention just a few of them here. I think they're really relevant. In particular, I would suggest that we should all be aware of the fact that within a high-stress environment, within a very compressed timeframe and with a high degree of duty and responsibility, there's a high-pressure situation that lends itself to even more potential for cognitive bias to come into play. Suffice it to say that we're more prone, as human beings, to mistakes within our decision-making process within that high-stress environment.
I'm not making excuses. I'm just giving you the latest thinking in ethics. This is not me saying this. These are experts. I'm quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics. This is the world-renowned author, Mary Gentile. This is not really contestable stuff, in a sense. These are leading thinkers in the world on ethics.
Some of these cognitive biases are obedience to authority; social proof, which is similar to groupthink; a false consensus effect; and over-optimism. How about that one? I think we are definitely guilty of that. I'm certainly guilty of that. As an ethicist, I consider myself a person of high integrity, but I'm definitely subject to over-optimism. I definitely am. I can't deny it. It's a self-serving bias. There's a bias which says that as human beings we tend to underestimate the amount by which our personal interest has an impact on our decisions.
How do we as leaders counteract that? I would say that it's about the support system within the organizational cultures that we cultivate and that can help support us to identify those cognitive biases and make better decisions. In some cases, we need an opposing voice within the process, or the courage from public servants to say something that may be contrary to what they think their minister wants to hear.
Anyway, some of the other cognitive biases are framing, process and cognitive dissonance, which people have probably heard about, sunk costs and loss aversion, the tangible, the abstract and the time-delay traps. I could go into the these at length. Maybe I will later on, because I think they are really relevant for the given situation.
Essentially, you know, we can't blame individuals for actually falling prey to cognitive biases, because it's a human phenomenon. Research shows that all of us experience those biases. We should be saying that it's just hypocritical for us to always point the finger at our leaders and allow them to be smeared in the media when we ourselves are subject to the same criticisms. That includes the Conservatives, the Bloc, the NDP, all of the Liberal members and all of the Independent members. We're all ethical leaders who are striving to be more ethical. I couldn't feel more passionate about that statement and claim, and I believe it to be true within our caucus. I've seen it first-hand.
Let's talk about the character of our Prime Minister. Let's talk about how within this process.... Again, for conflict of interest, you have to put your own private interests ahead of your duties. In this particular situation, did the Prime Minister put his private interests ahead of the interests of youth? Absolutely not. He put youth first.
In terms of youth not having the supports they need, the consequences of this supposed controversy have put youth more at risk than the decision the government made to move forward with WE Charity. I would argue that the Prime Minister and cabinet still put their duty to Canadians and to youth ahead of any private interests. Again, they're still not guilty. No matter which way I look at it, they're not guilty of a conflict of interest, not an actual one—maybe a perceived one, maybe a created one—and this goes on and on.
This is my first term in politics. I'm celebrating my one-year anniversary here. I don't see anyone congratulating me, but thank you. I appreciate it. I'm learning so much. I really am learning a lot.