Western Standard: Monday, October 04, 2010
MPs took the unprecedented step Wednesday night of unanimously denouncing articles published by the country’s national news magazine, Maclean’s.
[…]
But the suggestion that all of Quebec was the “most corrupt province” was too much, apparently, for MPs from all parties, who unanimously supported the motion from Bloc Quebecois MP Pierre Paquette “that this House, while recognizing the importance of vigorous debate on subjects of public interest, expresses its profound sadness at the prejudice displayed and the stereotypes employed by Maclean’s Magazine to denigrate the Quebec nation, its history and its institutions.”
In the long, long history of Anglo appeasement of Quebec, this is a new and pathetic low. The Maclean's article is factually correct (the cover image is simply beautiful). Its discussion of the rampant culture of corruption in La Belle Province is a straight forward statement of what observers of the province's politics, the honest and attentive anyway, already well understood. Corruption and politics are siblings, but whereas in most of the Dominion the former is kept to a dull roar, in Quebec it's modus operandi. Sure, overpasses collapse all over the western world, but not quite in the same way, or for the same reasons as in Quebec. Sure, politicians make inappropriate phone calls, but so many and in so brazen a manner? Of course large sums of money vanish, but $100 million and in only one province?
Nor is all this a recent phenomenon. The Maclean's article mentions in passing the Pacific Scandal (which originated in Quebec) and Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis' legendarily corrupt administration. Further back there was that vast engine of patronage, the Montreal based Grand Trunk Railroad. On the cusp of the Depression Mackenzie King, the Great Equivocator, was "humiliated" in the wake of Beauharnois Scandal. Though this did not prevent King from returning to power with a majority government in 1935. Then there was the Munsinger Affair, Canada's only certified sex scandal, which involved one of Dief's Quebec ministers. The province's culture of corruption and moral ambivalence, clearly, predates the Quiet Revolution's massive expansion in the scope and scale of government. It's in the air.
Take your pick of explanations for all this brown envelope shuffling; the Federalist-Separatist divide which poisons and distorts provincial politics; all that wonderful equalization funny money (Merci Alberta et Ontario!) slushing around; something in the poutine. My own favourite theory revolves around culture. As more than a few Quebecois will admit, privately, they tend to have a liberal understanding of the rule of law.
This isn't entirely a bad thing. The only thing worse than a bad law, is a bad law rigorously enforced. If not for Quebec, the whole of Canada might have joined the disaster of alcohol Prohibition. The ROC might have been puritanical prigs about many things, but the Quebecois understood that the perfect should never become the enemy of the good, or a good time. While such a lax attitude is useful in skirting bad laws, it can be disastrous in failing to enforce good ones. A culture of corruption isn't selective. It tends to corrupt everything. Maclean's did its job in exposing the dark side of Quebec politics. The cowards who inhabit our House of Commons failed in their duty, the first of which is to leave the press alone.
Posted by PUBLIUS on October 4, 2010