In normal times, most Canadians cannot name a single member
of their country's Senate,
but in the spring of 2013,
they got to know Senator Mike Duffy and a few of his colleagues.
Duffy is a rather rotund jovial looking guy with a twinkle
in his eye and a gregarious manner.
But the twinkle disappeared and this normally extroverted
former broadcaster became reclusive when Duffy found myself
in the eye of a storm of criticism
for having claimed housing expenses
that should not have been charged to taxpayers.
His attempt to make amends involved a personal loan
for ninty thousand dollars from Nigel Wright,
prime minister Harper's chief of staff.
This made matters worse.
And in short order, Duffy was forced out of the conservative caucus
sitting as an independent Senator,
and the PM's chief of staff had resigned.
In short order, the parliamentary ethics commissioner was examining
Duffy's case and others,
and the RCMP also was having a look to determine
whether there was any criminal wrongdoing.
At the same time as Senator Duffy and some of his colleagues
in the cross hairs of media scrutiny,
Toronto mayor, Rob Ford found himself embroiled
in another sort of corruption scandal.
The Toronto star claimed to have been approached
by an anonymous tipster with a video purporting to show
the mayor smoking crack cocaine
and making offensive comments about gays and blacks.
The mayor charged that his political opponents, of which there are many,
and in which category would be fair to place the Toronto star,
had invented the story and challenged them to produce the video.
They did not.
A couple of weeks after the story broke,
the alleged video still had not surfaced.
While all of this was happening, many Quebecers,
and Canadians outside that province,
were riveted to the news coming out of the Charbonneau commission.
This Quebec commission of inquiry revealed a long-standing
and widespread web of kickbacks in the awarding
of public construction contracts.
The mayors of Montreal and Laval resigned
as a result of revelations from the commission,
both of them denying charges of corruption.
Other public and political party officials were also named
during the commission's proceedings.
Charges of political corruption are rather common throughout the world.
When Xi Jinping was confirmed as China's new president in March, 2013,
his first speech to the communist party delegates who elected him,
took aim at what had come to be seen as endemic corruption
in that country's political system,
where public officials were routinely becoming rich
through the sale of their influence.
In Russia, political corruption is so rife that some commentators argue
that the country's political system deserves to be called a kleptocracy.
Klepto is from the Greek word, kléptēs, meaning thief.
So kleptocracy means rule by thieves.
Russia placed dead last in the 2012 broad payers index reported annually
by the respected watchdog organization transparency international.
Neither China, nor Russia is a democracy,
unless one defines the term in such an elastic manner
that it is drained of real significance.
But the United States is.
In the state of Illinois four of the last seven governors have gone to prison,
three of them because of corruption charges that took place
during their time in office.
According to citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington,
a public interest organization,
twelve members of Congress were under investigation by either the FBI,
the department of justice, the federal election commission,
or a congressional committee, or by some combination of the above,
as of May, 2013.
Citizens for responsibility and ethics has cited eighty one members
of Congress on its most corrupt list
since it started to monitor corruption among American lawmakers in 2005.
A former mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick,
his father and long-time friends and city contractor have been convicted
of lengthy jail sentences, arising from kickbacks worth millions of dollars
during Kilpatrick's tenure as mayor.
In Greece, a list of over two thousand Swiss bank accounts
with a total value of about two billion dollars held by Greek citizens,
including many politicians and their family members,
was given by French tax authorities to the Greek counterparts.
Three years later, no one has been charged
and the investigation is still ongoing.
A former Greek mayor was recently convicted of having embezzled
about twenty five million dollars,
and a former Greek defence minister was convicted on charges
of having skimmed over one billion dollars from defence contracts.
French politics were recently roiled by corruption
when the budget minister in the socialist government
of François Hollande was forced to admit that he had almost
one million dollars in a Swiss bank account where it avoided French taxes.
Not only had this cabinet minister categorically
and with great umbrage denied these charges when they were first made,
his confession was particularly embarrassing for a government
whose main policy for dealing with France's large public deficit is
to require the well-off to pay higher taxes.
Perhaps even more spectacular was the fact that former French president
Nicolas Sarkozy was accused of having illegally accepted money
from France's wealthiest woman,
and the heir of the L’Oréal cosmetics empire, Liliane Bettencourt.
Sarkozy’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde,
who is the current head of the international monetary fund
was recently grilled by French prosecutors regarding
what was alleged to have been a politically motivated settlement
between the French state and a wealthy businessman who supported
Sarkozy’s successful 2007 presidential campaign.
And the list goes on and on.
Canada obviously is not alone in having its politics marred
by occasional cases of political corruption.
Indeed, over the course of Canadian history,
there've been some cases of corruption on quite a grand scale.
The conservative party’s acceptance in 1872
of over three hundred thousand dollars from Sir Hugh Allen,
a donation that essentially bankrolled the conservative party
in that year's election,
was said by critics who have been given an exchange
for the Canadian Pacific Railway contract.
When this came to light in 1873, the prime minister, John A. MacDonald
was forced to resign and the conservative party lost the election
the following year.
Although no law was broken and no one went to jail,
the stench of corruption was too much for Canadian voters.
Closer to the present, the former conservative prime minister,
Brian Mulroney
was investigated by a parliamentary committee,
a federal commission of inquiry, and the RCMP
on charges that you received kickbacks for his role
in air Canada's purchase of thirty four planes
from the European aviation from Airbus.
Although the charges were never substantiated, and in fact,
the government of Canada issued a formal apology
and paid Mulroney's legal bills in the case launched by the RCMP,
Mulroney did admit to having taken money after he was no longer
prime minister for what he described as consulting services.
While Jean Chrétien was prime minister,
the liberal government operated a sponsorship program in Quebec
intended to bring the federal role in support of cultural
and industrial activities in that province to the attention of Quebecers.
It came to light that the program was rife with corruption,
including money being paid to companies with liberal party connections
for little or no work in return,
and contracts to companies that retained liberal organizers
and fundraisers on their payrolls.
The sponsorship scandal, as this affair was called,
led to a Royal commission of inquiry,
the prosecution and conviction of three persons,
and almost certainly contribute to liberal party losses in Quebec
in the 2006 election, into the parties fall from power.
So, corruption is not a known, or something new in Canadian politics.
The allegations launched recently at several Canadian senators
involve claims of deliberate fraud for personal gain at the public's expense.
This is one of many varieties of political corruption.
Another, perhaps as old as recorded history, involves nepotism.
The hiring or promotion, or the granting of other preferential treatment
to persons based on family connections or other close ties.
Roughly a decade ago, a prominent Canadian cabinet minister was forced
to resign his position in the government
when it came to light that he authorized a thirty thousand dollars
untended consulting job
to a person with whom he was romantically involved.
The fact that she was about twenty years his junior,
and that she produced a twenty page paper in exchange for the money
probably helped give the story more bite than it would otherwise have had.
The government of Canada, and many other governments
throughout the country, have rules on the hiring of family members
and persons with whom a public office holder has an intimate relationship.
Their violation is an ethical matter, not a criminal one.
Another form of corruption that falls short of criminal behaviour,
but that is viewed by many Canadians as tantamount to theft,
involves wasteful and ostentatious spending by public officials
at taxpayer expense.
A fairly recent example, involved former conservative cabinet minister
Bev Oda,
whose spending while on public business in London, England
ignited a storm of criticism back home
and led to her resignation from the government.
Fraud for personal enrichment, nepotism,
and the egregious waste on a scale that many believe deserves
to be categorized as corruption,
are matters about which citizens have every reason to be concerned.
And such behaviour may even be criminal.
Certainly, when public officials deliberately defraud taxpayers by knowingly
claiming expenses to which they are not entitled.
But such behaviour pails alongside influence pedalling,
and the accepting or soliciting of bribes,
forms of political corruption that are comparatively rare in Canada.
Well, notwithstanding the revelations of the Charbonneau commission
in Quebec.
According to the corruption perceptions index published annually
by transparency international,
Canada is ninth, is the ninth cleanest country in the world,
behind only the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, Australia,
and Singapore.
Many of the world's democracies, including the US, the UK, France,
and Ireland
are believed to be more corrupt.
And some, including Spain and Italy, are considered
to be much more corrupt.
Canada's comparatively good international ranking
when it comes to political corruption seems to be mirrored
in public attitudes.
According to data reported by the two thousand world value survey,
Canadians are more likely than the citizens of most democracies
to agree that it is never justifiable to cheat on taxes,
claim government benefits to which one is not entitled,
avoid a fare on public transit,
or accept a bribe.
So, let's return to Mike Duffy
and the other senators who in the spring of 2013 were accused of having
defrauded the public.
Did these revelations show the corruption is a problem
in Canadian politics?
This after all was the conclusion reached by many editorialists,
commentators, and members of the public.
Or was the scale of the media coverage and the depth of public indignation
perhaps due to the fact that, generally speaking,
corruption is not much of a problem in Canadian politics.
The second explanation is surely the more plausible one,
a handful of senators who succumb to human advice
when they saw the opportunity for personal gain,
if indeed this is what happened, does not a wave of corruption make.
Canadians, however, think otherwise.
Their cynicism about honesty in politics is deep
and certainly predates the stories of senatorial shenanigans
that blanketed the media in May of 2013.
A survey carried out for transparency international in 2003,
found that about half of Canadians said that corruption
very significantly affected their personal and family life.
Almost six out of ten said that corruption effected political life somewhat
or very significantly.
And seven out of ten said that it affected the culture and values of society
somewhat or very significantly.
Asked what institution in Canadian society was most in need of reform
to eradicate corruption,
Canadians did not hesitate.
fourty percent of them said political parties.
Four times more than mentioned any other institution.
Subsequent surveys carried out for transparency international
have reported similar results.
A 2009 survey found the Canadians were about as likely to perceive
their country's institutions to be affected by corruption
as were national populations in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and the middle East.
The reality is that corruption in both the public and private sectors is far
more widespread
and a much greater problem in the countries of all of these regions
than in Canada.
There is in short, a serious disconnect between the public perception
and the reality of political corruption in Canada.
A point made in a very fine 2009 article by Michael Atkinson,
director of the University of Saskatchewan's graduate school
of public policy.
This gap between perception and reality,
Atkinson argues, and I quote,
has its roots in the meaning assigned to the term corruption.
Canada's corruption problem is minor by international standards,
but is substantial when considered against the definition and standards
that Canadians have come to adopt in evaluating their political institutions.
End of quote.
This gap between perception and reality is unlikely to disappear
anytime soon.
Indeed the 2010 survey for transparency international
found that six in ten Canadians believe that corruption had grown
worse over the previous three years.
And three quarters believed their government's efforts
to fight corruption were ineffective.
As is also true in the case of crime and violence,
there were significantly less of both in Canada today
than twenty or thirty years ago,
but most people believe that there is more,
public perceptions of corruption are fuelled by media stories
that have the effect of exaggerating the scale of the problem.
And across the board downdraft in the public's confidence
and trust in institutions in Canada, as in many other Western democracies,
is probably another part of the explanation for why Canadians believe
that political corruption is a major problem.
Stories about Senator Mike Duffy, Mayor Rob Ford,
and the disturbing revelations that have emerged
from Quebec Charbonneau commission,
will reinforce the widely held view that corruption is rampant in Canada.
The reality is however that it's not as bad as you think.