OpenCDA

June 22, 2013

“Corruption becomes a kind of cancer”

Filed under: Probable Cause — Bill @ 4:35 pm

slippery slope

I seriously doubt that too many of our county and local politicians have even heard of Montreal’s Charbonneau Commission, so its lessons will be missed.   Missed…ignored…same difference.  We are in Idaho, after all.

We provided information about it in our June 18 post titled Another Mayor Arrested – Corruption.

The Charbonneau Commission has remained in the public eye in Quebec largely because of the reporting of diligent news media, especially Montrea’s newspapers The Gazette and The Globe and Mail.  But it would never have launched had it not been for relentless public pressure on Quebec Premier Jean Cherest  to appoint a courageous Quebec Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau to lead the inquiry.

The title of today’s post, though, was a quote taken from The Gazette article on June 21.  That article is a story of how a civil engineer bought public contracts in the local construction industry.  It was a way of life, a cost of doing business, a cost of getting those juicy public contracts for construction and engineering work.  The story notes,

As Quebec continues to delve into the deeply-rooted system of kickbacks, bribes and illegal fundraising that link the province’s construction industry to politicians and civil servants, stories like Raymond’s [the engineer) are becoming increasingly familiar.

The Gazette’s June 21 article is, once again, an excellent tutorial on how municipal corruption happens.  Read it in The Gazette, because these are stories you will never see in the Coeur d’Alene Press or The Spokesman-Review.

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