Corruption and Quebec, a slight refrain

This afternoon a Quebec City radio guy named Stéphane Gasse essentially asked me if, in the wake of a leaked report detailing widespread, long-standing and deeply rooted corruption within Quebec construction industry, I felt like doing a touchdown dance on the heads of all the critics who lined up to pillory the magazine last year for our cover story on the subject. The report, written by former Montreal police commish Jacques Duchesneau, details what La Presse’s Tommy Chouinard describes as a "the existence of clandestine funding of political parties by engineering and construction firms." Radio-Canada got its paws on it yesterday.

Not at all, I said. Zen is a wonderful thing, and anyway the fact that the province of my birth has a political culture that allows such a thing to fester for so long is nothing to be happy about. One thing, though: I wonder whether Parliament will express its similarly profound sadness at a situation Le Journal de Montréal pithily dubbed "Corrupt To The Bone" this morning, as it did when we dared write about it almost a year ago?