David Piccini, Ontario Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development and Premier Doug Ford in Hamilton, Ont., Aug. 20, 2025. Carlos Osorio/The Canadian Press.

Not just one-off scandals, corruption is now embedded in our governments, systems, and culture

06 Dec 25

Canada used to know how to do difficult things well. Westrung rail across a continent in about six years. We carved hydro stations out of the wilderness. We founded universities that produced engineers, city planners, and public servants who could deliver complex work with competence and restraint. We were not perfect, nothing human is, but we were serious.

And out of that seriousness came the most famous line in our constitutional tradition: peace, order and good government. It was an ethic grounded in the idea that the state should act where it adds value, but step back where it does not. Our institutions knew their limits, and we were proud of them for it.

That ethic has eroded. Today the state is too often a hollow shell of its former competence, a client of its own consultants and an issuer of contracts to intermediaries who manage the process of decline. We congratulated ourselves for imposing sunshine lists and salary caps, then acted surprised when the most capable public servants left, only for governments to buy their time back at multiples of the previous cost. We renamed outsourcing, modernization, and debt-financed spending as investment, as if language could disguise the fact that the state now struggles to deliver even routine services without importing capacity from outside. What government once did as a matter of routine is now purchased from private vendors. Design, engineering, analysis, project management, digital systems, and even procurement have been handed off.

Outsourcing institutions did not make our government modern; it dissolved the foundations of competence, and now we rent it back at a premium because the capacity no longer exists inside the state at all.

A government that cannot do its own work cannot defend the public interest.

A state that forgets its limits has no standards

As the state is hollowed out, the political system becomes easier to exploit. Complexity expands. Discretion grows. Influence substitutes merit. Those who understand how to navigate government learn that it is easier to extract advantage from politics than to earn it in the market. We slid into it with a smile, telling ourselves we were being caring, inclusive, consultative, and reconciled. Corruption becomes cultural, not because people become worse, but because the system becomes exploitable. And so now it is.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Skills Development Fund scandal makes this painfully clear. The $2.5-billion program was billed as a workforce training initiative. Instead, it became a tool of political graft. Minister of Labour David Piccini did not simply mismanage it. He used public money in ways any reasonable person would consider unethical, directing grants to weak but well-connected applicants, including one tied to a strip club. He did so because the program vested him with broad discretion, and he assumed nobody would find out, or probably even care.

The deeper scandal is not merely the misuse of funds. It is that no one inside a conservative government questioned the premise of the program in the first place. Businesses that need workers with specific skills they cannot find should invest in worker training themselves. Individuals who want new skills should rely on broad, impartial public programs available to everyone. The government’s role is long-term talent development, not subsidizing short-term labour needs for politically connected firms seeking handouts.

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The same collapse of restraint is visible in the dispute between Sanofi, a vaccine manufacturer in North Toronto, and Tenblock, the developer next door. Tenblock submitted plans for a 39-storey rental building on its own land. Sanofi, unhappy with the idea of a tall building beside its facility, bypassed the owner entirely and went straight to the province to request a Minister’s Zoning Order that would limit what could be built on the site, rendering the project unprofitable. It justified this with vague security concerns, even though Tenblock had already commissioned an independent review that found no credible risk. If Sanofi wants control over neighbouring land, the responsible thing to do is to offer to buy it, not to conscript the state. The province’s willingness to entertain the request tells us something uncomfortable about our political culture. A rules-based society cannot be both accountable and arbitrary. Once powerful actors learn that state power is available for the taking, more will take. That is how a culture of corruption settles; not with money in envelopes, but with the quiet assumption that government power is easily coaxed. Too many of us are seeking handouts This problem becomes unmistakable when we turn to unions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), two of the most influential institutional actors in Canadian public life. Criticizing unions has become a third rail in Canadian politics, even though they are among the most powerful civic institutions in this country. We behave as if their actions always serve the public interest, when in reality they often shape policy and spending in ways that place their own incentives first. When the TTC union secured a prohibition on suburban transit services operating into Toronto, did that really serve the public interest? When LiUNA workers were brought out as political props to support a one-hundred-billion-dollar tunnel under Highway 401 (a theoretical project that fails any basic test of value), we do not call it corrupt because no law has been broken. But it is still a form of extraction. Consider that the City of Toronto steers about $1.65 billion in construction work each year into “closed tendering” union arrangements, with estimates saying taxpayers are over-paying by roughly $350 million annually as a result. Or the federal level, where the government has committed $382.9 million over five years to launch the “Workforce Alliances” programme, which “brings together employers, unions, and industry groups to coordinate public-private investments in skills and training”. The same budget also provides $75 million over three years to expand the “Union Training and Innovation Programme.” Unions are among the biggest non-party political advertisers in federal campaigns, and are influential in procurement, public advisory boards, and sectoral decision-making with little public scrutiny. Unions make up the bulk of the millions of dollars spent directly on electioneering by third parties. The list goes on, not because unions are uniquely evil but because we have stopped applying a test of public value to the privileges they receive. Why? Because politicians fear their electoral impact. The NGO world mirrors this. Canada now spends tens of billions of dollars each year on grants and contribution agreements, both domestic and international. Many of the organizations receiving this money exist largely because the government funds them, and they have learned the vocabulary that unlocks support. These words sound virtuous but often replace measurable outcomes. Worse, the system rarely checks whether the work actually generates good value for the price we pay. For instance, a review of Global Affairs Canada’s own portfolio shows 177 active foreign-aid projects that reference “gender,” with a combined cost of $1.73 billion committed through to 2033. These include $8.2 million for “gender-just” rice in Vietnam, $7.7 million for “gender-responsive climate-smart agriculture” in Ghana, $4.5 million for “intersectional democratic spaces” in Nepal and Bangladesh, and a five-year $9.5 million microfinance initiative in Morocco to promote “positive masculinities.” These projects are built around grant-friendly language for progressive domestic audiences rather than the basic state capacity and infrastructure failures that keep poor countries poor. If the public truly valued the work of these organizations, they should be able to find support privately. Most would not survive outside the grant economy. The true cost of this ecosystem is hard to pin down because it is scattered across governments, but the scale is unmistakable. Federal and provincial tax expenditures now exceed 200 billion dollars a year. Some of this reflects broad measures that few dispute, but buried within that total are tens of billions in narrow credits, carve-outs, and incentives that function as benefits secured by organized groups even when the public value is questionable, especially when you consider how they distort markets. Combined with grants and contribution agreements, the amount directed to low-value organizations could exceed 50 billion dollars annually, although the exact number is impossible to determine because so much of it is hidden across the tax code and in the reports of hundreds of proliferating programs. The opportunity cost of this spending is staggering. These are resources drawn out of families and businesses, then filtered through layers of bureaucracy and processes that add complexity without adding value. Money that could have remained with citizens, enabling investment, growth, and personal agency, is instead being absorbed by an expanding network of interests whose primary output is the demand for more. This, too, is part of our culture of corruption. Not criminality, but the quiet normalization of behaviour that prioritizes organized interests over the majority of Canadians who now fund an increasingly extractive system. Scandals are just a symptom Across all these examples, an unmistakable pattern emerges: the erosion of restraint. Canada has built a system where every pressure is answered with a new program, a new grant, a new intervention, a new procedure. Complexity accumulates. Discretion expands. Those with influence use it. But the public feels the consequences. Infrastructure is slowly built that costs far more than it should. Housing approvals take years instead of months. Businesses wait on permits rather than customers. A younger generation feels downwardly mobile. The population has a growing sense that government money is being used to manage political interests rather than create opportunity. Corruption in Canada is not a handful of scandals. It is now a culture. A system of indulgence and avoidance that rewards extraction because no one is willing to confront the incentives that sustain it. Sometimes scandals do occur, but they are a symptom. One all-too-familiar recent case in Vancouver saw three First Nations serving as ceremonial “host partners” for the 2026 FIFA events get paid 18 million dollars of public money with no strings attached. The scandal attracted attention, but the real story is a culture that treats reconciliation spending as automatically justified and any effort to question it as colonial prejudice. Leaders must learn to say “no” The remedy to our ailment is not another initiative or strategy. It is restraint. The discipline to say no. The willingness to end discretionary funds, simplify the machinery of government, rebuild internal capacity, and recover an ethic that remembers public power is not costless and not a toy. Decline is not destiny. The country that built railways and universities can rebuild a culture. A nation that once prized quiet excellence can relearn it. A public that has tolerated delay can insist on speed. Citizens who were taught to whisper can speak again. A better Canada is possible. A Canada where young engineers seek out public service because the work is demanding. A Canada where ministers take pride in delivery rather than slogans. A Canada where civil society earns trust through indispensable work rather than fashionable language. A Canada where unions defend their members without ignoring the public interest. A Canada where firms compete by building well rather than shaping rules that burden the upstart. This is the promise of peace, order, and good government restored to meaning. But recovery depends on honesty. We must be willing to see corruption not as a one-off scandal but as a culture. Public power is a responsibility. And responsibility begins with restraint.

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