Global Policy Forum

By Donald McKenzie

Almost 70% of Canadians believe their federal and provincial political systems are corrupt, suggests a recent opinion poll. Sixty-nine per cent of the 1,500 respondents in the Leger Marketing survey said the federal system was highly or somewhat corrupt, compared with 26% who thought it was not very corrupt or not at all corrupt.

At the provincial level, it was 68% versus 26%. Municipal politicians and their entourages fared only slightly better, with 53% of respondents describing them as being equally corrupt.

The numbers, which are considered accurate within 2.6 percentage points 19 times out of 20, did not surprise political science professor Gilles Paquet, who said Canadians appear as resigned to corruption as they are to the weather.

"The level of crookedness that we have come to expect from our politicians is so high that indeed people can get away with anything," the University of Ottawa professor said in an interview. "The cynicism is so profound that it will take something absolutely extraordinary to reach people. Their sensitivity has been dulled completely."

Leger Marketing conducted the poll April 2-7, just a few weeks after revelations that grabbed headlines across the country and might have influenced people's answers.

The federal government and Groupaction, a Montreal-based company considered Liberal- friendly, could not find any copies of a $550,000 study the company did for Ottawa in 1998. When Groupaction finally found some of the report on one of its computers, it resembled a $575,000 report the firm had done for the government on the same subject in 1999. Sheila Fraser, the Auditor-General, is investigating the matter.

Another subject that sparked outrage early this year was the appointment of former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano as Canadian ambassador to Denmark. Mr. Gagliano was under fire before being dropped from Cabinet in January over claims he had meddled in the affairs of Crown corporations under his authority and pressed them to hire his friends and supporters.

Lee Morrison, a retired Canadian Alliance MP from Saskatchewan who railed against the decline of Parliament in his valedictory address, said last night that Brian Mulroney made ministers ''walk the plank'' for less when he was in power.

''The Canadian public have become over the last 20 years or so, so bovine. They just see this and shrug. They expect it. They expect to be screwed,'' said Mr. Morrison, who left Parliament because he felt he was wasting his time, and because he didn't like the fact some people assumed he was corrupt simply because he was in politics.

''Even politicians who are straight and believe in representing their constituents, they give up after awhile. Because nobody seems to care,'' Mr. Morrison said.

Many provincial governments have experienced scandal as well, including a series of British Columbia premiers resigning under a cloud, and the mid-1990s death of the Saskatchewan Conservative party following a corruption scandal. Even in Quebec, the ruling Parti Québécois, known for ethical high-mindedness, lost a senior Cabinet minister and the party's director-general this year in a lobbyist scandal.

The Leger poll was done before last week's release of the annual auditor general's report in which Ms. Fraser pinpointed "significant weaknesses" in government, departmental and parliamentary spending accountability and good management.

"Large sums are spent without any accountability," Ms. Fraser said. "I think that this is unacceptable."

Dr. Paquet, the former head of his university's centre on governance, believes Jean Chrétien's government is actually more vulnerable to accusations of patronage and corruption than Mr. Mulroney's government was between 1984 and 1993.

"The difficulty with Mulroney was that he was so disliked," said Dr. Paquet, adding he is not involved with any political party. "Even if this man [Mulroney] had walked on water, people would have accused him of not being able to swim."

The poll also found 80% wanted to see a major reform of the rules of conduct regulating how government contracts are awarded. Another finding suggests 24% of Canadians believed the country's political system at the federal level was either not very democratic or not at all democratic.

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