By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, QMI Agency - The problem with bribes is they don’t just corrupt the bribee. They corrupt the briber as well.
That’s being overlooked in the latest phony, only-in-Canada “controversy” over the Maclean’s cover story describing Quebec as Canada’s most corrupt province.
All the usual suspects in Quebec and Ottawa — provincial and federal politicians of all stripes, both separatist and federalist — predictably have their shorts in a knot over Maclean’s stating what everybody already knows, including inside Quebec.
That is, while there’s corruption in every province, Quebec really is different. That’s because the constant bidding war between federalists and separatists for the affection of Quebecers, using federal tax money, fuels a unique degree of corruption inside Quebec.
But that doesn’t just corrupt Quebec. It corrupts the rest of Canada, too.
Indeed, the most infamous recent case of corruption in Quebec — the “federal” sponsorship scandal — originated in Ottawa.
An idiotic plan by a panic-stricken Jean Chretien to win the loyalty of Quebecers in the wake of the 1995 referendum by buying them a few federalist trinkets with our money, exploded into a scandal in which $100 million of our cash disappeared down the same sinkhole it always does in Quebec, going back decades.
To state the painfully obvious, that constantly trying to buy the loyalty of Quebecers by bribing them to stay in Canada corrupts everyone and everything it touches, is not to insult ordinary Quebecers.
Indeed, they were as infuriated by the sponsorship scandal as the rest of the country, and gutted the federal Liberal party in the ensuing election.
The real disgrace is that our political classes in Ottawa and Quebec constantly attack any mention of the endemic corruption in that province as bigotry, in order to avoid ever having to address it.
Historically, both the federal Liberals and Conservatives (let’s not even get into the provincial parties) have an abysmal history of committing and countenancing corruption in Quebec.
This includes vote-buying, ballot-stuffing, influence-peddling, toll-gating, recruiting party members from graveyards and runaway patronage, to say nothing of turning a blind eye to wholesale corruption inside Quebec’s construction industry.
(That said, recent revelations via a Quebec inquiry that — horrors! — political influence affects who gets appointed as a judge, is hardly a problem confined solely to Quebec.)
While the sponsorship scandal involved actual corruption by federal Liberals, the federal Conservatives under Stephen Harper have corrupted themselves politically by pandering to Quebec — which hasn’t done them any good.
This instead of doing what they said they would do if elected — treat every province equally.
Instead, we get infuriating, pathetic spectacles like eight Conservative MPs donning Nordiques jerseys to show their brainless support for shelling out $175 million of our money for a new hockey arena, so Quebec can get a second NHL team.
That prompted the higher foreheads in the federal Conservative and Liberal parties to say if we’re going to do something that stupid in an era of huge deficits, we’ll have to do it for other provinces, too. Mon Dieu!
That’s another way bribing Quebec corrupts all of Canada, since other provinces are perfectly happy to let Quebec extort whatever it can from the feds, before lining up at the trough to get the same deal for themselves.
In Canada, that’s called taking the high road.
lorrie.goldstein raz sunmedia.ca