MacLean's Magazine recently ran a front page titled "The Most Corrupt Province in Canada", with the picture of Quebec's
Carnaval Snowman mascot carrying a briefcase bulging with cash. At this point I have lived about half my life in Quebec, and half in the province of Ontario, (plus a few years in Sierra Leone), and I would like to share my perspectives on corruption.
There is an article about it in the
Globe and Mail here.
I do not subscribe to
MacLean's because of all their hate propaganda. I happened to read part of it when I saw it at a coffee shop. Apparently MacLean's is taking time off from bashing
Moslems and the Canadian Human Rights Commission to have another go at the bad, bad province of Quebec and French Canadians.
I have never been able to find a reference to confirm this, but I remember many years ago reading an opinion piece by Barbara
Amiel in
MacLean's, which was then owned by Conrad Black, her husband. In this article, she claimed (I'm paraphrasing) that French Canadians were genetically unsuited to democracy. Of course, Conrad Black is the same one who recently got sent to jail in the USA for fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and obstruction of justice. He no longer owns
MacLean's, but I still see Barbara's opinions in there occasionally, along with articles by one of Conrad's supporters, Mark
Steyn.
Now getting back to corruption in Quebec, and the inference that it is much much worse than Ontario, and as Andrew
Coyne (National Editor
MacLean's) has said it has something to do with "political culture rooted in nationalism and state interventionism."
My one and only experience with corruption, growing up in
Baie Comeau, an isolated paper mill town in Northern Quebec was this. My father, a French Canadian, had an English speaking boss of Scots background. He hated his boss, let's call the boss
MacLeanson, just to avoid any lawsuits against me, and to incidentally reinforce the ethnic stereotype of the magazine. The company would hire outside contractors to perform many functions including cutting wood, and maintaining the logging roads. All contracts were awarded by
MacLeanson. All the contractors were independent French Canadian businessmen. My father noticed a few things going wrong in the woods department. One was that the roads were not being maintained, which annoyed him because of the pounding he took driving a pickup truck from camp to camp. Second he noticed
Macleanson had a brand new luxury car every year. My father claimed that
Mcleanson was totally corrupt and taking bribes to enrich himself, but my mother argued to not make any accusations down at the company offices, because she assumed this was a simple case of my father not liking his boss and inventing this whole conspiracy. After all, he could have been fired, and with a grade four education in northern Quebec, there were no other places to work. I personally heard about these stories as a young teenager, and tended to side with my English mother, as she was by far the most level headed of the two.
About 12 years after, I was back in
Baie Comeau, as a teacher at the
English high school. At one parent-teacher meeting, I happened to get into a conversation with the father of one of my students. He was telling me how he ended up living in
Baie Comeau. The company had sent him up to
Baie Comeau to investigate the books. It seems that the head office could hardly believe that the
Baie Comeau division was losing money every year, and wanted to send an independent auditor to figure it out. This parent said that he had uncovered a huge amount of corruption in the woods department at
Baie Comeau, enough to explain the lack of profits of the entire division. And one man had
singlehandedly taken the company into the red. It was
Macleanson. Following his "forced retirement", profits picked up again.
I never encountered any other corruption in either Quebec or Ontario that in any way personally affected me. All I know is what I get in the news and from various official
inquiries. I assume that there might be a fair amount going on that is not being investigated, and I do not equate amount of corruption being investigated with amount taking place. In fact it might even be the inverse, as far as I know.
I do not want to be bashing other ethnic groups, like
MacLean's does, but I have a question. Given that
MacLean's is pushing the idea that this is a French Canadian/left wing thing, are they forgetting that the Mafia, even in Quebec, is from a background of Italian and Sicilian immigrants, whether they speak French or not?
Last night on TV I happened to tune in to the Michael
Coren show on the Christian channel (another one I don't subscribe to). They were discussing the
MacLean's Magazine article, and it was not long before one opinion was put forth that "all French Canadians supporting the Bloc Quebecois party should be hung for treason". As I recall, no one in the panel felt it necessary to belabour the point or to rebut it.
One more issue is the use of the
Bonhomme Carnaval, the mascot of the Quebec
Carnaval on the cover. Apparently
MacLean's was given written permission by the Quebec
Caranaval, although obviously
MacLean's was negotiating in bad faith. I suppose French Canadians could be forgiven for thinking that any dealings with English Canadians would involve bad faith negotiations. But they don't. They see this as being just one small group of people at one magazine with questionable ethics, that resulted from the negative influence of convicted felon Conrad Black.
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