MONTREAL MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION

A few years back a major Canadian magazine named Quebec as the most corrupt province. There were the expected howls of outrage by various illuminaries in Quebec but seriously; who took them seriously? The public inquiry into political and construction corruption is shining a light in some dark corners, particularily dark Montreal corners. Last Thursday's Waterloo Region Record published this story "Not my job", "Montreal mandarin tells inquiry that kickbacks were't his problem".

Basically a city engineer (Gilles Surprenant) has confirmed that he received cash kickbacks for helping to rig bids for municipal construction contracts. Naturally of course the inflated bids all came out of the taxpayers' pockets. Isn't it ever so? It's funny but most provinces learned long ago how to fleece their taxpayers with only minor bending of the rules. I guess Quebec are simply more advanced than the other provinces in the fine tradition of screwing citizens and taxpayers, by those in charge. Perhaps there's a fine line between politics as usual and criminal activity. Maybe the line gets crossed a lot more than we think but provided the greed is at least a little under control, it doesn't get publicly exposed. I mean really, do you think just as a hypothetical example that our Waterloo Region politicians would want to advertise if they caught one of their colleagues dipping his beak, fingers in the cookie jar, wetting his whistle etc.?

It seems as if this ONE civil servant has received more than $700,000 in kickbacks over the years. I'd suggest that Waterloo Region send some municipal and regional employees down east to give pointers on legal beak dipping but am concerned that it could backfire and they might pick up some pointers from La Belle Province that would increase our taxes here even more. Better leave well enough alone.