Quebec Corruption Transcends Language, Ethnicity and Class

 It's safe to say that Quebecers, rocked by endless stories of corruption, collusion and malfeasance over the last year or two, have become obsessed with the issue, to the point that it has become the overriding public concern, ahead of the accumulating debt problem, high taxes, deteriorating wealth, a health system in trouble, education issues and indeed even sovereignty itself.

Ask the average Jean or Jane in the street what the number one public issue in Quebec is and invariably, corruption will almost certainly top the list almost all every time.

The voluminous catalogue of corrupt business people, public employees and politicians exposed as crooks has indeed tested our society's ability to cope, the ubiquitous stain of dishonesty tarnishing us all, leading to a collective sense of rage and overwhelming feelings of humiliation.
And so it is natural to seek a scapegoat.
It is convenient and therapeutic to find someone else to lay the blame upon and of course, it usually falls upon the Jews or the Italians to take the rap, both communities historically singled out whenever blame for society's ills are to be apportioned. 

In this case, it is of course the Italians who are being scapegoated because they are strongly represented in the construction industry and are front and centre in the recent scandals at Montreal City Hall.
This, largely because the Charbonneau commission's first witness, corrupt businessman Lino Zambito, testified that a bunch of Italian entrepreneurs were paying off city officials to 'win' contracts with the help and oversight of the Mafia.
And so the blame game is on.... c'est la faute des Italiens..

Le Canada, un refuge pour la mafia?  Radio-Canada

Une faction calabraise de la mafia italienne est au pouvoir à Montréal Huffington Post .

"Bid-rigging, a cartel headed by businessmen of Italian origin and  corrupt officials and politicians accountable to the mafia, as confirmed by testimony before the commission..." Link{fr}

Of course these stories are tame, compared to the stuff published on the Internet, where the entire Italian community was quickly held responsible and smeared for the foibles of a few.

"What strikes me the most, since the beginning of the Charbonneau Commission's hearings, is the number of Italian-Quebecers that have been implicated, and the total absence of reaction of the leaders of the Italian-Quebec community, who seem totally indifferent and insensitive to the damage to their reputation that these rotten apples have inflicted...." Richard LeHir, vigile.net{Fr}

Of  course the unsaid contention is clear, that these 'rotten' Italians, like a drug dealer enticing a twelve year old to try his product, were somehow responsible for corrupting the hitherto 'white as snow' Quebecois ....bah!!

But as the corruption inquiry widens and as events play out, a different, reality emerges, one which exposes the reality that corruption in Quebec transcends language, ethnicity, religion and social class.

The English, the French, the Ethnics, the rich and the poor, the educated and the not so bright, are all as guilty as the next when it comes to corruption.
It is perhaps, one of the few aspects of Quebec society where everybody, but everybody participates equally.

Let us review what we have found out in one short year;

• The City of Montreal is not only thoroughly corrupt, it appears that it has always been this way (and long before the Italians arrived). The ex-deputy-mayor stands indicted on various charges of fraud and influence pedalling, while the entire construction department seems to be under the influence of the mob and its proxies, where millions of dollars in bribes were made to city planners, inspectors, engineers and politicians, resulting in the sad reality that up to one third the cost of building the city's infrastructure was going to pay for graft. Mayor Gerald Tremblay was drummed out of office and the chief fundraiser of his ex-political party, Bernard Trépanier of the Union Montreal political party, stands indicted for influence-pedalling as well.

• Ditto for Quebec's third largest city, Laval, where the mayor himself, the now resigned Gilles Vaillancourt is accused of being the Godfather  Jabba the Hutt of corruption. A couple of years ago, two provincial politicians came forward to say the good Mayor offered them both $10,000 in cash, as illegal campaign contributions. It is rumoured that when police raided two of his bank safe-deposit boxes, investigators found them stuffed with over $100K in cash. When anti-corruption police raided his luxury apartment in  Laval, Vaillancourt's cousin (the official owner of the digs) was caught trying to flush money down the toilet. The problem was that the stack of new money wouldn't flush because the bills were made of the new polymer compound!  Ha!!

• Just about every major consulting/engineering firm in Quebec is alleged to have participated in various levels of fraud, either to secure government contracts, to funnel illegal campaign contributions to political parties and politicians and/or inflating cost estimates to enrich construction contractors, all for a price.  The president of Canada's most important consulting/engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin, Pierre Duhaime, was ousted over the debacle of alleged bribes paid to secure a Libyan contract under the then dictator and now dead, Muammar Gaddafi. Now he has been arrested in relation to a possible bribe paid to Arthur Porter the highfalutin ex-director of McGill university in relation to winning the contract for the billion dollar plus super hospital project in Montreal, which Porter was overseeing. Questions surround $22 million dollars in missing money and when the police got involved, Mr. Porter skipped town in disgrace, now holed up in the Bahamas, refusing to pay back the hospital for other monies he owes. It's a real kettle of fish!

• Quebec's largest construction conglomerate, a multitude of companies run by the infamous Tony Accurso, is alleged to be a criminal enterprise. The high-flying, twice indicted, construction kingpin used to wine and dine public officials on his yacht in the Caribbean. He is facing possible jail time in regards to various alleged illegal schemes employed by his companies to defraud the taxman and for a multitude of successful overpriced bids on public contracts, secured through collusion with public officials. Mr. Accurso has already paid millions to the Canada Revenue Agency to settle past crimes, with predictions of more to come.

• By the way, the Montreal office of the Canada Revenue Agency (Canada's version of the IRS) was discovered to be riddled with employees on the take. These auditors would turn a blind eye to millions of dollars in tax transgressions, all for a cut. Link

• Then there are accusations against a former senior Liberal party fundraiser, Pierre Bibeau, the ex-husband of then serving Liberal party cabinet minister Line Beauchamp, who is accused of accepting an illegal $30,000 cash payment for the Liberal party. It led to his suspension from his very senior job at Loto-Quebec, the state run gambling agency, itself accused of fraud by a disgruntled ex-employee.  

• Recently, Michel Samson, the verificator-general of Quebec complained that there is a lack of competition in the acquisition of software by the various government contracts. In analyzing a sample of the tenders, he found that in almost half the cases, only one company submitted a bid. This should be no big surprise, over two years ago I reported that;
  

  "Perhaps the most egregious abuse is that which takes place in the civil service where contracts subject  to the tender process are also said to be rigged. A software developer recently confided that he was asked to make an uncompetitive bid so that the favoured vendor would win the bidding process. "Don't worry" he was promised, "Your turn will come." Read my post, Octoer 2010,- In Quebec, the Fix is always In

On and on it goes, stories of corruption that would be unbelievable if presented in a Hollywood movie, with enough miscreants to fill a fictional rogues gallery.

Let us not forget the wholesale waste and mismanagement, while not always illegal, represents a callous disregard for the public purse.
The egregious financial mismanagement of Concordia University, the extremely poor judgment of the Board of Directors of McGill in unanimously appointing a two-bit crook like Arthur Porter as President.
Let's not forget the cynical disregard of the public's interest by the Anglophone/Jewish chairman of the Old Port of Montreal in publicly supporting his Catholic/Francophone serial expense-account abusing president.

How about the generally Protestant English Montreal school boards sending employees to Hawaii and the Dominican Republic in the middle of winter to 'study' conditions, or the Catholic French school boards sending teachers on Yoga excursions to fancy hotels, all on the arm of taxpayers.
Read: Quebec Anglos Prove We Are Pigs as Well

In all this, the only thing that all the players have in common is that they generally have nothing in common.
English, French, Ethnic, public servants, politicians of all stripes, professionals, blue collars, business people and clerical, all the various religions and races, it seems that everybody from all walks of life seems to have a hand in the sorry saga of Quebec corruption.
This is one gravy train that is an equal opportunity employer!

So let's have no more finger pointing and scapegoating, Quebecers from all walks of life are equally to blame and as the famous cartoon character  POGO said;
 "We have met the enemy and he us"