Adroit Political Ethical Challenges

Canada's reputation as a predictable, boring, staid nation where nothing exciting or mildly rousing ever happens is being challenged. We've always been rated highly as a stable democracy whose population is nothing if not complacently placid, and our politicians known for their nose to the grindstone. In an internationally rated corruption index we barely nudge the needle. We are yawn-inducing to a fault. And mostly, we like it that way.

Lately, however, some odd virus appears to have gone berserk, infecting quite a number of our politicians at every level; municipal, provincial, federal -- possibly reflecting the general population itself, feeling more casual about such verities as honesty, reliability and trustworthiness? Or is it that untoward circumstances have simply converged to render the appearance of things having gone awry?

Cream rises to the top, but who is to say that curdled cream cannot also rise to the fore?

Quebec's tradition of corruption in its politics and its business environment well infiltrated by criminal gangs has always been bandied about. But publish the theory as fact in a national magazine contending that alone among the provinces Quebec outdoes itself in graft and corruption at all levels and the rest of Canada quickly swerves to the defence of its culturally exceptional neighbour.

Then years pass and the burden of corruption becomes so intense a commission is struck and the testimony of witnesses become stridently credible.

In the wake of which Quebecers cringe at the revelations and long-time sitting mayors slink out of public view and abandon their aeries. Well, that's Quebec. It's the province where separatist sentiment continues to ferment and foment. While striving to serve its citizens well as a social welfare state. With services so generous they surpass the ability of the province to pay for them other than by acquiring the highest debt load in the country.

Which hasn't stopped the Parti Quebecois from edging toward sovereignty. Broke as it is, it is paying out a half-million dollars for a committee to examine wasteful spending by the federal government in federal services purportedly duplicating those already offered by the province or that the province feels encroaches on provincial jurisdiction, thus harming the dignity of this state-within-a-state, agitating to become fully separate.

And then there's that other province right beside Quebec, where the provincial Liberal-led government has seen fit to turn a once-wealthy province into a have-not province requiring transfer payments to allow it to continue offering basic services to its population. Where the premier thought nothing of throwing good funding after bad to ensure re-election, then resigned rather than admit his mis-governance.

And where a committee has been struck to get to the truth surrounding the absence of files, emails and records relating to the Government of Ontario's handling of gas plant placements and the casual, election-mode cancellation of new gas plant infrastructure halfway through construction. To be informed by the Province's executive-level chiefs of staff that routine deletions of electronic mail and files and records represented normal business practise for them.

There is no incriminating evidence to be found. There is no written record to be perused. "Without a written record of how key government decisions are made, the government can avoid disclosure and public scrutiny as to the basis and reasons for its actions", reported the province's Information and Privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian.

Quebec has its political corruption deeply ingrained throughout the decades where politicians can be bought onto the payroll of crime syndicates, and Ontario has its ethics-dented politicians who order political staff that it is incumbent upon them in service to their elected masters to ensure that no embarrassing files are carelessly left intact to inform investigators how tax funding has been criminally manipulated.