How Honest Are We?

BY ROBERT KIENER

ON A CLOUDLESS September afternoon, Don Corbert, 54, stepped out along Sunset Beach in Vancouver's West End. Jobless for nearly three years and now a resident of the city's Skid Row, the former construction worker was just passing time. As he walked, he saw a wallet on a nearby park bench.

       Inside was $50 in cash -- money that could come in handy for Corbert. Then he noticed a man's ID card and pictures of a smiling mother and three young children. This guy's got a family and probably needs every cent, he thought. An hour later he called to return the wallet.

       In a mini mall within the upscale Douglasdale Estates in suburban Calgary, a fit, black-haired man in his 40s jumped out of a 1996 Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicle. Spotting a wallet on the sidewalk, he scooped it up and slipped it into his pocket. After visiting a video rental shop, he drove off -- $50 richer.

       The wallets these people found were among those Reader's Digest staffers "lost" all over Canada. In each we put a name, local address and phone number, family pictures, receipts -- and $50 in cash.

       We dropped 120 wallets -- ten each in three large cities, three major suburban areas, three medium cities and three small towns. We left them in parking lots, malls, bus stops and on sidewalks. Then we waited to see what would happen. To each person who returned the wallet, we offered the $50 as a reward.

       This was no rigorous scientific study but rather a real-life test of integrity. Would people in small towns return the wallets more often than those in big cities? Old folks more than young? Women more than men?

       Every wallet told a story like the ones above -- whether of outright theft, a struggle with temptation or a refreshing affirmation of honesty. Here is what we found on our trans-Canada lost-wallet odyssey.

AT BUSTLING Lonsdale Quay Market on Vancouver's north-shore waterfront, we learned firsthand how warmly tempting cold cash can be. When commercial diver Bernie Cordukes, 23, spotted our wallet in a phone booth, his first thought was: Great! I hope there's some money in it! We watched as he opened the wallet and slipped it into his pocket.

       However, moments later, he called us. "My conscience got to me," he confessed. "I'm a Christian and would feel like a hypocrite if I stole it."

       Mona Neilsen, 35, didn't hesitate when she found our wallet outside an office building on Georgia Street. She immediately handed it in at the building's reception counter. Why? Neilsen, an insolvency administrator, told us: "It's because of my mother. She taught us never to even consider keeping anything that did not belong to us."Neilsen added that she is trying to pass the same lesson on to her own children. She refused to accept our $50 reward.

       Sadly, Vancouver's young people let the city down. Typical was the young man who picked up our wallet on Dunsmuir Street and hurried into Vancouver Community College. Inside, we found our wallet, minus the cash, in a second-floor hallway.

       In Montreal André Tranquille, 38, an unemployed electrical worker, found our wallet on an ABM machine in a shopping centre. When he returned it to us, he hadn't even checked to see how much money there was. "A wallet is private property," he told us. "If everyone started taking advantage of others, society would be in chaos."

       However, a red-haired woman in her 30s, shopping with her young son and her mother, showed no qualms about looking into our wallet -- and emptying it -- after she picked it up in a Zellers store. She used our cash to buy a slow cooker.

       Light-fingered residents made Toronto the least honest location in our survey. They came in all guises. A woman in her 70s picked up our wallet off the sidewalk in 400-Acre High Park at 8:40 in the morning. She examined its contents, put it into the pocket of her blue overcoat and walked away. We never heard from her.

       On trendy Yorkville Avenue, a well-dressed man in his late 30s picked up our wallet from the front steps of a newspaper and magazine shop. He bought a paper and drove away. Later, across the street, a man wearing scruffy jeans and a Mexican blanket jacket snatched the wallet off the sidewalk in front of the Little Tibet restaurant. Neither called.

       Maureen Maloney, 47, spotted our wallet at the base of the CN Tower and quickly turned it in to a security guard on patrol. She and three friends had come from Delhi, Ont., to watch the Toronto Blue Jays. "I grew up with small-town values," she told us before she boarded her train home.

PEOPLE who live in and around Winnipeg say they pride themselves on their honesty. But where does it come from? According to Marc Chartrand, 41, and his wife, Thérèse, 40, who found our wallet in a parking lot in Garden City, outside Winnipeg: "Honesty has to be learned at an early age." They called us the minute that they got home, they say, because of the nuns who taught them in elementary school. "They drilled into us, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,'" says Marc. "It stuck."

       We were shocked by a woman who watched her son, about ten years old, pick up our wallet outside a Wal-Mart in suburban Halifax. The little blond boy excitedly showed his mother the wallet as they walked to their car. She did not call.

       Roger Munroe, 41, an electronic technician from Westphal, N.S., was with his girlfriend, Valerie Coles, 33, when they saw our wallet in a parking lot in Lower Sackville, near Halifax. They called us as soon as they returned home. "Even if there were $15,000 in it, we wouldn't have kept it," Munroe told us. Coles remembers her mother saying, "God sees everything."

       In a suburb north of Calgary, we watched two women in their 20s pick up our wallet outside Deerfoot Mall. Both were dressed in tights, boots and ski parkas. They riffled through the wallet, looking at the money, examining the pictures and reading the ID card. Then we watched them turn it in at the mall's information desk. Minutes later, however, when we reclaimed the wallet intending to reward them for their honesty, we realized they had stolen $40 of our $50.

       Murray Schmidt, 33, a salesman wearing a stylish grey suit, found our wallet in a phone booth in Deer Run, south of Calgary. He called us immediately. "I'd want someone to give my money back if I lost it," he told us.

MANY travellers rush through Moncton, N.B., on their way to somewhere else. That's a shame, for they're missing the chance to meet some of Canada's most honest people. This town of 57,000 topped our survey with all ten of our wallets returned.

       On the lobby floor of Moncton's City Hall, lawyer Michel Cyr found our wallet as we watched within earshot. "I want you all to witness this," he told his co-workers as he opened the wallet. "There's $50 inside. I'm going to call the telephone number on the ID card." True to his word, Cyr, 38, called us. He refused to accept the $50 as a reward, saying with a chuckle: "See? there is such a thing as an honest lawyer."

       We left a wallet on a bench on Main Street near the Capitol Theatre, Moncton's cultural centre. Although the finder, Jean Power, 74, is a widow living on a modest pension, she "never thought for a minute" about keeping our money.

       We like to think that a couple dressed in blue-and-white windbreakers spoke for many in Moncton when they brought our wallet to the local police station. "We don't want to give our names," they told the desk officer, Bob Ross. "Knowing this man will get his money back is thanks enough."

       While feeding the ducks in Bowring Park in St. John's, Nfld., single-mother-of-two Novalee Taylor spotted our wallet at the water's edge. "Wow, there's $50 in here!" she told her friend Dave Carroll. Just as quickly she thought, I don't have the heart to keep it. Later she told us that although she's living on social assistance, "I'd never have taken anyone else's money -- they might be worse off than I am."

       A tall, black-haired boy in his late teens wearing a baseball cap showed no such scruples when he scooped up our wallet in Memorial Park in the centre of St. John's. He quickly slipped the wallet into his pocket and rejoined his skateboarding friends.

       In Saskatoon Brian Toothill, 36, restored our faith in our fellow-man. Unemployed, he gets by on welfare and the $20 or so a week he scrapes together by redeeming discarded bottles and tin cans. He was going through garbage cans when he spotted our wallet in a telephone booth at a bus stop on 23rd Street East.

       He immediately turned the wallet in to a bus driver. Why? "I am an honest man," he told us. He'd found other wallets in the past and always returned them. "Your wallet was down low in the phone booth, and I thought it might have belonged to a handicapped person in a wheelchair. They'd need the money more than I do, wouldn't they?"

IN Charlottetown 11-year-olds Krystle MacDonald and Erica Doucette spotted our wallet on the ground at Charlottetown Mall. Without hesitating, they took it to a nearby shop and turned it in. "My parents taught me it's not nice to be dishonest," Krystle told us. "Mine told me that if I ever stole anything, the truth would always turn up," added Erica.

       Another Charlottetown teenager unwittingly proved that. Thirty minutes after we watched her pick up our wallet -- and pocket the cash -- the blond-haired girl called us. She boldly returned our wallet, minus the money. "I wonder what happened to the $50?" we mused. She looked us straight in the eye: "Well, someone must have stolen it. I'm not surprised."

       A miner, Rosaire Boutin, 51, of Val d'Or, Que., has had to work hard all his life but never even considered making "easy money" after finding our wallet in a gas station. He told us, "When you are honest, life pays you back."

       In Whitehorse we left a wallet on top of a pay phone on Main Street and waited. Soon two men in their 50s in jeans, work boots, flannel shirts and baseball caps spotted the wallet. One quickly removed the $50 while his friend scanned the street. They dumped the empty wallet and headed to the bar of the 98 Hotel, where we saw them celebrating their good fortune with a round of beers.

       Connie Epp, a 36-year-old Cree, found our wallet on Main Street and insisted on hand delivering it to us. She told us how devastated she was when she lost her own wallet and it wasn't returned. "There's no way I wouldn't have returned it."

       Ninety-year-old Elizabeth Taylor spotted our wallet in the Hougen Centre in downtown Whitehorse. When we asked her why she returned it, the sprightly woman who has lived through 60 Yukon winters seemed startled. "It's not mine. Simple as that," she said.

OUT OF 120 wallets dropped in Canada, 77 were returned intact -- 64 percent. In a similar Digest survey of 12 U.S. towns and cities, the figure was 67 percent. In Europe it was 58 percent; in Asia, 57 percent.

       Moncton proved to be the most honest place in North America, since no U.S. location returned all ten wallets. Two Scandinavian cities matched Moncton: Oslo and Odense, Denmark.

       Toronto posted the poorest record of anywhere in North America with only four returns. But Ravenne, Italy, was worse with three returns, while Weimar, Germany, and Lausanne, Switzerland, fared worst of all with only two returns.

       Intriguingly, women far outperformed men in our exercise. Of the 58 women who picked up the wallets, 42 returned them with the money still inside -- 73 percent. Of the 62 men who picked up the wallets, only 35 returned them intact -- 56 percent.

       Are small towns the repositories of virtue they are often claimed to be? Our survey would suggest not: Returns in our small-town category matched the national average of 65 percent, even though Charlottetown boasted the survey's second-best results with eight wallets returned.

       We found a fascinating contrast between perception and reality. While many of our respondents predicted that we would get back fewer than half the wallets, in fact two out of every three were returned intact.

       We got a strong sense that people mistrust bureaucracy. The vast majority of people who returned our wallets preferred to call us directly; later they told us that they didn't trust security guards or police to pass on the money.

       Many returners, both old and young, doubted the honesty of young people. Sadly, they were proven correct. Of the 20 people visibly aged under 21 who picked up our wallets, only eight returned them -- a disappointing 40 percent, 24 points below the national average.

       The wallet test made one thing abundantly clear: Our moral compasses are set early by the example of our elders. An overwhelming majority of returners said their desire to do the right thing was instilled by the teaching of parents.

       Even those who kept the wallets still had a conscience, judging by the furtive glances and the attempts at concealment many of them made as they left the scene.

       Whether that sense of right and wrong grows or withers in tomorrow's Canada will depend on whether we, as individuals, set an example of personal integrity. Our experience around the country suggests that plenty of us are doing so.