Over-policing corruption is unwise, McGill conference told
In a roundtable discussion Friday about the roots of Montreal’s corruption issues and how best to combat them, McGill University post-doctoral researcher Mathieu Lapointe raised a potential problem not often heard in the Charbonneau Commission era: beware the perils of over-policing.
Lapointe cited the book The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective, written by public administrators and legal experts from New York City, considered North America’s laboratory for first-hand anticorruption research because of its immense size and long history trying to combat it.
The authors found that in the 20th century, New York saw such a strong shift toward surveillance, verification and policing of city functioning that it hampered the city’s ability to govern.
“That approach ended up creating bureaucratic pathologies that were perhaps more serious than the corruption they were seeking to fix,” Lapointe said. Bureaucrats were too scared to work on any files, public contracts stagnated in the face of investigations and infrastructure work stopped.
Lapointe was addressing a conference organized by McGill’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research titled The Inspector General: The Move Towards an Ethical City?
“I am not saying Montreal has been too long at the mercy of an overzealous anti-corruption drive, as was the case in New York,” Lapointe said. “But to be aware of the possible dangers in an approach that is focused on absolute integrity.”
Given the rush toward anti-corruption measures spurred by tales of malfeasance in media reports and the Charbonneau Commission, and the slowdown in public works contracts in Montreal caused by more intense scrutiny, Lapointe’s caution rings true.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre made the institu- tion of an inspector general department, to monitor how billions of dollars in city contracts are awarded and carried out, the central corruption-busting theme of his campaign. It would work in conjunction with the numerous other oversight departments in place at city hall and outside — including the auditor general’s department, the controller general’s department, the Autorité des marchés financiers watchdog role over contractors, and the EPIM and UPAC police squads tasked with investigating corruption.
On Feb. 24, city council unanimously endorsed Coderre’s choice of Charbonneau Commission lawyer Denis Gallant to head the $5-million a year department, responsible for a staff of roughly 20 accountants, engineers and lawyers who will have the power to search documents and computers of any city department or business doing work for the city. Gallant will be able to suspend or cancel contracts found to have circumvented the rules.
In late 2012, the Quebec government enacted the Integrity in Public Contracts Act, which stipulates that companies bidding on major public works projects pass a background check. Thenmayor Michael Applebaum requested the law be made more stringent for Montreal, resulting in public works contracts slowing to a crawl, and the city administration begging for the investigations to be sped up. The pleas were ignored, the probes continued and Applebaum was arrested on fraud charges in June.
“I leave it up to the experts to decide whether the powers (of the institutions already in place in Quebec) are sufficient,” Lapointe said.
He added a final caution learned from New York’s experience.
“No institution is at the shelter of sclerosis, or political neutralization, or even corruption. This is even true of an inspector general.”