This is the kind of story that should be served as a dietary supplement; it's full of irony.
The Canada School of Public Service, which trains bureaucrats, is in trouble for breaking its own rules on contracting.
The CSPS (sample course title: Leadership Through Values and Ethics) apparently rigged contracts for outside or temporary workers.
Now there's a crackdown, of course, and maybe some heads will roll, but are we shocked? Not really.
This reminds me of the other story making the rounds last week, about the humility of newly-elected Pope Francis I.
We are told that the day after being named the leader of more than a billion Catholics, Francis shunned the "papal limousine" and then headed by more modest vehicle to pay his hotel fee.
This was shocking behaviour. Because why? Please, someone explain to me how a man who has taken vows of poverty refusing to ride in a limo is not absolutely normal.
I'm not a Catholic, but is there any religious viewpoint from which the phrase "papal limousine" makes sense? Is there also a papal gold-plated bathroom, a papal mitre-shaped swimming pool, a papal high-roller account in Las Vegas?
Then, here in British Columbia, we have both the Liberals and the NDP having trouble discerning exactly what the difference is between private and party money.
The Liberals, who have their hands on the levers of power, have been winning the race to blow public money on getting re-elected, whether through the pandering ethnic outreach strategy or through the deniable (but odious) ads about the BC Jobs Plan and the recent budget.
All of these things are indications to me that power corrupts, that privilege and luck come to be seen as rights.
Human beings (definitely including me) are blinkered and stupid, most of the time.
I have been known to whine and complain about my lot in life, about my job, about the weather, about how bacon-flavoured toothpaste is hard to find.
Every now and again, I give myself a smack and repeat the humility mantra: I am a straight, white male living in the dawn of the 21st century.
I am literate, employed, and connected to the Internet. The number of people who have ever, in history, had it as good as me is microscopic.
As author John Scalzi pointed out, being a white, straight male is basically playing life at the lowest difficulty setting.
Most important, it's undeserved.
Those bureaucrats rigging contracts, or those past papal officials who signed off on the limo, or those politicians who funded their re-election efforts out of the public till, all felt they deserved it.
They're underappreciated, or they're holy, or they're just on the right side of history, see?
Everyone does this in smaller ways. We worked hard, so we deserve our houses and big-screen TVs and vacations.
We're better, somehow, than those people in other places who work much, much harder and live in shantytowns. We tell ourselves our station in life isn't largely the product of luck because that doesn't bear thinking about.
You think you want things to actually be fair? You think you deserve every good thing that ever happened to you?
Give your head a shake. The scariest thing you can imagine is a world in which we would all be treated with absolute, pitiless fairness.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter for the Langley Advance.
