The title of Ian Greene and David P. Shugarman’s book reflects their refreshingly optimistic take on political ethics, a subject that often inspires only corrosive cynicism. This book is about fixing the ethical flaws in the Canadian political system, not wallowing in them or bemoaning their inevitability.

Greene and Shugarman, both political science professors at York University, devote the bulk of Honest Politics to an exhaustive catalogue of ethical causes célèbres across Canada over the last decade or so. There is plenty to cover, from British Columbia’s Bill Vander Zalm using his office to peddle his property, to the capers of an unending succession of ministers in Brian Mulroney’s government.

This extended survey of political faux pas is good fun, even when rendered in dry academic language, and will serve political science students well as an essential primer and handy reference. The numerous examples also illustrate Greene and Shugarman’s useful typology of ethical shortcomings and bolster their underlying argument: that the recent and marked trend in Canadian politics is toward cleaner government.

The authors focus on three categories of misconduct: conflict of interest, undue influence, and “dirty hands,” in which politicians lie or cheat in order to pursue what they believe is the greater good. Especially in conflict-of-interest cases the authors demonstrate that concern over these problems is relatively recent, but that progress in dealing with them has been swift. Alberta, B.C., and Ontario, for example, have had independent ethics counsellors for less than a decade, but in each of these provinces conflict-of-interest scandals have all but disappeared.

The heartening conclusion is that more often than not, politicians will follow the rules if there are rules to follow. The authors quote B.C. ethics commissioner Ted Hughes saying that of 75 members in that province’s legislature, “we don’t have a rogue among them.”

B.C. voters who suspect that Premier Glen Clark lied about the deficit to win last year’s election might beg to differ. Greene and Shugarman would call that a “dirty hands” shortcoming, and their discussion of this genre breaks with the book’s otherwise cheery tone. Politicians can be weaned from their old tricks of influence-peddling and profiteering, it seems, but lying to get into office may prove a tougher habit to kill.

Honest Politics would be still more useful if it included more international context – is the pursuit of political ethics making similar headway in other industrial democracies? Greene and Shugarman also do their worthy case little good when, in a brief digression near the end, they argue that deficit-cutting and “neo-conservative” politics are inherently ethically flawed. Political integrity progresses when it commands multi-partisan support; hectoring one end of the political spectrum does little to achieve this aim.