Reading a Globe and Mail article, The Social Contract in Canadian Cities is Fraying, made me think about our business and its many written and unwritten rules, and the big set of expectations we have of each other as REALTORS® when we put on our professional hats.

Marcus Gee, the Globe’s columnist, writes about the social contract residents have with their city government. He points out there are rules governing city life, both written and unwritten. Written rules say we mustn’t speed through a school zone, cut down a tree without a permit, or refuse to pay our property taxes. Unwritten ones are more malleable – for example, we shouldn’t throw our garbage over the fence onto a neighbour’s property, have loud raucous parties in the early morning, or park a car by taking up two spaces.

Written rules can be clearly defined with words. Unwritten rules, not so much. They’re more a set of expectations governing our conduct to each other, for example, treating others as we would want to be treated, and all that.

Break a law and you may have a bylaw or police officer banging on your door. Break an unwritten rule and you can expect to be shamed or called a jerk. 

Our informal set of unwritten Realtor-to-Realtor rules and expectations form the social contract we have with each other as professionals. “I’ll modify my impulse to throttle you or say something rude, in return for not getting the same treatment from you.” “I’ll give you a heads-up call to let you know I’m going to be late, in return for you giving me the same courtesy when I’m running late.”

Translating Gee’s thoughts into our weird little world, we could say, since the Ethics Guy® and BC Financial Services Authority investigators can’t be everywhere at the same time, the only way we can make our relations with each other work is to informally agree to suppress or modify our darker, more mischievous impulses. In return, we get back a good measure of order and civility. Without those, we’d be working in a professional jungle. This notion ought to appeal to us.

As Canadians, we generally think of ourselves as being more polite than most. We seem to prefer order over freedom. There’s evidence to support this: The Americans, in their Declaration of Independence, make much of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The British North America Act (the act of the British Parliament that brought Canada into existence,) declares we want peace, order and good government. C’est un difference, n’est pas?

We’re in the bringing-people-together business. I doubt any of our clients hired us to pick a fight. If our social contract with each other is fraying, we can do something about it. Let’s be generous to each other. Let’s respect each other’s time.

When we treat others as we would want to be treated, I doubt we’ll need to have conversations about fining regimes not being high enough, raising professional entry levels, or increasing the number of rules.

It’s going to take a collective effort to get there, but I know we’re up to it.

Three colleagues work behind the scenes making sure my columns are available and easily found. Teresa edits my columns, and each year also indexes them using keywords and linking the keywords to my columns. Since 2006, this index has grown to about 25 pages for 432 columns.

Fiona and Jesse take this behemoth and ensure it all works – the columns are posted, the index links are working and go to their intended destination, and the technology glitches are solved. This is done for two platforms, membernews.rebgv.org and rebgv.ca. This means you can get past the, “I know he wrote something about it but I can’t remember the title of his article and I don’t know when it was published” conundrum. Thank you, Teresa, Fiona, and Jesse for making members’ work easier because of this.