By Lorne Holyoak

The Canadian Anthropology Society does not have its own code of ethics. While many Canadian anthropologists rely on their training, their institutions’ ethical guidelines and the Tri-Council policy, others choose to refer to the ethical codes of other national anthropology associations. Although many national associations have their own code of ethics, many others do not. You may or may not agree with the notion that CASCA needs its own code of ethics, or a statement of ethical principles.

In order to determine a course of action regarding the question of a CASCA policy on ethics, your executive committee decided at the last CASCA conference (YorkU 2015) to create a taskforce to examine the question and recommend a course of action. The members of the taskforce are Peter Armitage, Kirsten Bell, Marie-Nathalie Leblanc, Éric Poulin and Lorne Holyoak (chair).

The taskforce created a questionnaire designed to engage members of the Canadian Anthropology Society in the discussion around adopting a specific CASCA statement or code of ethics, which was recently distributed to the membership. The results will be analysed by the ethics taskforce and communicated to the CASCA executive committee. The executive committee will decide how to proceed on this question after reviewing the results of the survey. You can look forward to further communication in the next few weeks, and certainly the topic will be a matter of lively debate at the upcoming CASCA conference in Halifax!