National Post (National Edition)
Sinkhole Montreal
Jin Montreal ust when it seemed impossible for Quebec’s corruption scandal to get worse, Montrealers awoke Monday to news that their mayor — the man who promised to clean up the mess — was under arrest on bribery charges. But the arrest of Michael Applebaum, who resigned as mayor Tuesday while protesting his innocence, could prove one crisis too many.
“We simply can no longer afford these crises, one after another, that damage the metropolis’s business climate,” Michel Leblanc, president of the Montreal Board of Trade, said in a statement this week.
The arrest has cemented the impression that corruption is deeply ingrained in the country’s second-largest city, leaving its citizenry disillusioned and potential investors wary. The damage will likely spill beyond Quebec’s borders.
“Montreal is associated with Canada. It will do reputational damage to the whole country,” Robert Hanlon of the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Asian Research, a research fellow specializing in the effects of bribery, said this week.
Mr. Hanlon is also a contributing editor with the Anti-Corruption Research Network, the academic branch of Transparency International. With Mr. Applebaum’s arrest, Mr. Hanlon’s contacts around the world have been asking him, “What is happening in Canada?” The Berlin headquarters of Transparency International, which produces a global ranking of countries’ perceived levels of corruption, recently requested that he prepare a report on the situation in Quebec. Canada is seen as one of the least corrupt countries on the index, but “our trajectory is in decline,” Mr. Hanlon said.
“The thing with Quebec is that it just seems to keep going. It doesn’t stop. As it’s going, we’re getting a very clear image,” he said. “Municipal politics in Montreal appear to be corrupted to the very core.”
Jacques Duchesneau, now justice critic for the Coalition Avenir Québec, said he has sensed Montreal had a serious corruption problem since he ran for mayor in 1998. The former police chief lost the election and moved on to other issues, but in 2010 he would be named to head a provincial anti-collusion force. When in 2011 he reported that collusion schemes were robbing taxpayers of billions of dollars and last year claimed that 70% of political financing was illegal, he was met with skepticism. But the witnesses who have paraded before the Charbonneau commission into corruption over the past year have vindicated him.
“The other day I said, ‘I’m really sorry I made a mistake. It’s not 70% that’s dirty money; it’s 90%,” he said in an interview. “People were not ready to hear the truth. It took many of the bad guys who came forward and decided to give the explanation.”
The corruption culture was able to flourish because people in a position to blow the whistle felt powerless. “When you’re the accuser, you’re just by yourself,” he said, and you’re taking on respected political leaders or powerful businessmen. It has taken the Charbonneau commission to open the floodgates and create an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable telling their stories.
There was also a perception that corruption is a victimless crime: An official or his political party profits, the project gets built, the company makes a handsome profit. Everyone’s happy.
“These big guys, because they wear a tie and they are presidents of companies, they think they can get away with it, but that’s not my idea of justice,” Mr. Duchesneau said. “What’s the difference between you being a CEO of a company stealing money from all citizens, when we need that money to build hospitals and things like that, and the other guy who commits an armed robbery? The means are different, but you’re still stealing my money.”
Claude Montmarquette, a Université de Montréal economist and president of the CIRANO research centre in Montreal, said certain aspects of Quebec government policy, including an obsession with hiring local firms, made the province a soft target for schemers. “When we do not open the market to competition, it’s an incentive for collusion,” he said. “When people say, ‘We have to buy Quebec,’ this is what happens. Quebec is a small market. Everyone knows each other.”
Mr. Montmarquette said the kind of public scrutiny that might have detected corruption earlier is stifled when people see no direct connection between the taxes they pay and the services receive. He favours more direct fees for public services, such as road tolls. “When people pay for services from their pockets, they will be more vigilant than when they don’t really know who’s paying for what,” he said.
Mr. Hanlon thinks the damage from Quebec’s current crisis will be longlasting.
“There is a deep culture of corruption in Montreal, and possibly beyond, and until that culture is smashed, which could take years and years, it’s going to be very hard to gain back investors’ confidence,” he said. Rather than incur the costs associated with keeping your nose clean in a corrupt environment, law-abiding businesses may look elsewhere.
“When we have examples from other parts of the world where corruption has been publicly known and has been a political issue for decades, we know very well that companies avoid going into those markets,” he said. “Companies will spend a lot of time, hire specific law firms to carry out extensive due diligence on their local partners. So there’s a major cost associated with businesses going into an environment that they presume is corrupt.”
Milos Barutciski, a partner with the law firm Bennett Jones and a board member of Transparency International Canada, said the extent of corruption uncovered in Montreal leaves one “awestruck.” But he said the province’s engineering firms are not alone — internationally such firms have been the focal point of recent corruption investigations. And he maintains the city’s battered reputation will not be enough to dissuade businesses from investing here. They will just be more careful.
“At the end of the day, companies will say, ‘If we’re going to go there, we really need to pay attention to the rules. We’ ll have to take extra precautions.’ They don’t want to be swept up into the morass.”
Extracting Quebec from the corruption sinkhole is no easy task. Maryse Tremblay, a Quebec researcher specializing in integrity in the public service, said the Charbonneau commission, which adjourned hearings this week until September, has helped raise public awareness. “Maybe people will have more courage to come forward to report things they have witnessed,” she said. But that’s only a first step.
“Corruption is not something that can be completely eradicated 100%,” she said. She proposes shifting the emphasis to better understand why the majority of people resist corruption.
“What makes it that eight of 10 are good? A lot can be learned from resistance to corruption and we should try to promote these good behaviours. I think we don’t talk enough about that.”
Mr. Leblanc says the city’s economy has so far withstood the black eye left by the corruption scandals. Office towers are being built in Montreal, and unemployment is lower than in Toronto. But rebuilding trust is another matter. “A perception is taking hold that elected officials are not trustworthy, that decisions are not being made for the right reasons,” he said.
Mr. Duchesneau said the true test will come this November when Montreal elects a new mayor. Voter turnout in the last election in 2009, when the incumbent, Gérald Tremblay, was already dogged by corruption allegations, was just 35%.
“We’ ll know in November,” Mr. Duchesneau said. “If people do not come forward and mark their ballots, then there’s something wrong with democracy. That’s the scary thing.” Hundreds of English-embossed spoons are back in use at a Montreal frozen-yogurt shop, more than a week after Quebec language police allegedly ordered their removal.
Frustrations swelled late this week when the owner of two Montreal Menchie’s franchises announced that an inspector had banished the popular spoons. They feature company mascots, including one that shows Mookie the cow and is embossed with “Sweet moosic.”
But it may have been an misunderstanding, according to a spokesperson for the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF). He told the
it was “impossible” that an inspector would shirk protocol and demand the removal of the English spoons. He said an investigation into the matter had yet to begin, so Menchie’s could keep handing out the reusable spoons until further notice.
The statement was forwarded to Menchie’s franchise owner David Lipper, who subsequently returned boxes of the unused merchandise back to his stores on Friday afternoon. Later that evening, Mr. Lipper said an OQLF official called him to “apologize for the confusion.”
The controversy began last week, when an OQLF inspector visited, and allegedly told the store to pull the spoons.
Mr. Lipper said he planned “to fix the problem without having this noticed,” but con- stant inquiries from upset customers forced him to explain why his whimsical utensils had been replaced with generic white spoons. According to Mr. Lipper, many children have started collecting the spoons and fashioning jewellery out of them.
But on Friday, OQLF spokesman Martin Bergeron said Menchie’s may not need replacements, pointing to a series of exemptions in the French Language Charter that allow non-French phrases if the object is produced out of province and the words are permanently engraved, baked, inlaid or embossed. He denied that any demands were made on the stores and suggested a language barrier led to a misunderstanding. The inspector only gathered evidence, which will be considered in the investigation.
The Menchie’s store manager who was present during the inspection, as well as Mr. Lipper, say the woman was clear in her demands for the spoons to be removed. One of the offending
Menchie’s spoons.