Few countries are more strident in scolding others about corruption than Canada. In Africa in 2002, former prime minister Jean Chrétien made a campaign for transparency in administration a pillar of foreign policy.

The message was applauded by international agencies worried about corruption, though one, Transparency International, couldn't help noting our own record has started to look quite wobbly of late. Transparency studies government and business practices for an index ranking the least corrupt nations down to the worst offenders.

In 1995, Canada was right up amongst the squeaky cleanest, (French written Document) in fifth place after countries like New Zealand and Finland.

By 2001, however, we'd started slipping, down to only seventh place. And by last year, we'd tumbled out of the top 10, down to 11th place, a disturbingly steep fall highlighted as "worsening" and "noteworthy."

Wesley Cragg is head of Transparency International in Canada. He warns of dangers if there's further slippage in Canada's integrity.

"So that's significant because it means that a very positive asset that Canadians have built over a very long period of time is now being eroded internationally," Cragg says.

"It has an impact on our reputation, and it has an impact on the way in which people approach the Canadian government and Canadian companies when they're doing business. What you discover over time is that if corruption is believed to be a factor in the granting of contracts, then people begin to think that they have to offer bribes. For example, they have to engage in corrupt practices in order to win those contracts that they want so badly. So eventually, it undermines the standards of business conduct."

The issue involves much more than a scandal, even a large one shaking the governing party. It really comes down to the question: is there now something systematically corruption-prone about our government process? Something so broken that any future government will have a hard time to even fix it?

The roots of the problem are long. Even three years ago, a previous auditor general summed up 10 years of inspecting the Canadian government with the warning that Parliament is diminished, much of the civil service a mess, and the government has a culture of secrecy and unaccountability. It all sounds like a recipe for great scandal.

History doesn't suggest today's politicians have become more corrupt. Many who have studied Ottawa feel personal integrity is usually high. But since the 1960s, the culture in government corridors has changed. As government has exploded in size, prime ministers have struggled to control bureaucracy by adding loyal political advisors to senior ranks and by reducing the influence of top civil servants, the so-called mandarins.

"I think that there's a real erosion of the distinction between the political officers in government, the political advisors to government, and the senior civil service," Cragg says.

Leslie Pal, at Ottawa's Carleton University, is an expert on federal administration. He knows Canada's often criticized and ridiculed civil servants were intimidated by this rougher school of politics.

 

Pierre Trudeau

"It really begins at one level with Trudeau because he had a dislike for the traditional bureaucratic relationships that had been characteristic of the Pearson period – very intimate, very close relationships, very senior types of mandarins running a pretty closed shop and getting together on a clubby kind of basis – and Trudeau wanted something that was more rational and, if not mechanicistic, then more responsive in the sense of a politician," Pal says.

Mulroney

"Then the second wave of cynicism came with Mr. Mulroney. That was characteristic of more conservative politics around the Anglo democracy with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People may recall Brian Mulroney's phrase about giving bureaucrats pink slips and running shoes as soon as the government was elected. So it was a very negative, a very critical, quite suspicious..."

Brian Mulroney

As the traditional civil service was weakened, real power was concentrated increasingly around a prime minister, more centralized power than other western leaders enjoyed. Some spoke of an imperial prime ministership, even a benign dictatorship.

It still featured a cabinet of normal size, in theory wielding joint power. In reality, fewer and then fewer members were beside the prime minister within the inner circle of decision making. This inner core of perhaps 50 people included those at the head of the Prime Minister's Office, including his closest advisors, the Privy Council Office, the command and control centre for the smooth functioning of government, the always critical Finance Department, and the Treasury Board which is supposed to oversee federal spending and activity.

In the tumult of modern politics, this inner core feels and acts as if under permanent siege by media, resentful members of Parliament and auditor general inquiries. In this atmosphere, the civil service is now expected to form a protective barrier, avoid exposures, even take the fall when necessary.

"The intimacy of the relationship sometimes gets too close between the civil service and the politicians. And, in this case, well, over the last decade, the government was, how shall we put it, it was fairly intolerant of dissenting views coming from the bureaucracy," Pal says. "There was a kind of a chill that settled out over town. As a consequence, that kind of 'speaking truth to power' relationship seems to have eroded."

This uneasy relationship of mutual suspicion led both Liberal and Tory governments to turn increasingly to a new class of loyal political advisors, aides and consultants to steer government. Some do excellent work and help make government more responsive to citizens. Still, reliance on such paid allies instead of civil servants opens lucrative new fields for patronage.

Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson is author of Spoils of Power, a study of this changing face. This political elite has seen new openings appear over 15 years as government has downsized by outsourcing more operations.

"The patronage almost exclusively now is for the elites, if I can put it that way, I mean, the big party supporters, et cetera, advertising firms, lawyers, people like that, and you can always name pooh-bahs to the Senate," Simpson says.

"You have dozens and dozens and dozens of boards, agencies and commissions, what the British call quangos. They're doing things in the public sphere, and they have a board of directors, and in most, not every single one, but in most cases, the CEO of that corporation and the board of that corporation are appointed by the government.

"In the Prime Minister's Office, they have a system for knowing when these appointments are coming up because the appointments have to be made, after all, and they have another system whereby they bring to the consideration of who should be appointed partisan considerations."

Desmond Morton, at McGill University, is one of Canada's leading historians. He says the new class of political professionals are there both to influence and to be influenced.

"There are an awful lot of these people hanging around Ottawa, and they're the kind of people who are available to form special new directorates and agencies such as the one that looked after the sponsorship program," Morton says.

"Who wants to lobby an MP who is just a voice, a hand?" Morton says. "He will have to vote yes if the Liberals say yes. He'll have to vote no if they say no. Of course, there are all sorts of other decision makers, including this great fluffy crowd of influence peddlers who hang about Ottawa. You've got to influence them, and they float in and out of these agencies delivering minimal services, but having connections with ministers and with deputy ministers and with other officials of a partisan kind. It's a great cloud of influence. I don't find that any political party has the medicine to deal with this problem or even the sense that they should because each political party depends on them."

While most around government are honest, successive auditors general have warned of alarming gaps opening in the system that invite corruption temptation.

"I am troubled by the appalling lack of regard for rules and regulations," Sheila Fraser said recently. It does seem a contradiction, but the more centralized power becomes, the more oversight seems deficient. That's because the power core can only track a few policy areas at any time. So it has delegated oversight to distant departments to run more like a business.

Remember that inner circle Treasury Board? In 1983, it reviewed spending of departments 6,000 times. By 1997, only 1,100 times. Last year, fewer than 1,000. This whole series of scandals suggests money was flowing out often to party friends with fewer checks and documentation.

"So I'm not comparing Jean Chrétien to Saddam Hussein, but highly centralized dictatorships, which is clearly what the PMO became under Chrétien and his predecessors, are not well informed," Morton says. "And not, perhaps, eager to be informed because you have to let some people have some freedom out there in the periphery and I think they were enjoying it."

Pal says, "I think for those who defended the new public management, which again swept not just Canada, but the U.K. and the United States, the idea was that it would be balanced with appropriate mechanisms of control. The unfortunate thing is that they weren't. So we had continuous, year after year reports from the auditor general sending up balloons about worries about expenditure controls, about subsidies and grants and how they were defined and how they were managed and then all of these chickens came home to roost in the last four or five years with a whole host of problematic kinds of programs."

The sponsorship program, where tens of millions allegedly changed hands without basic accounting, has shaken the system. Prime Minister Paul Martin vows major reform to restore accountability.

Among suggested reforms is whistleblower legislation to protect the jobs of civil servants who expose wrongdoing, though there's debate over how effective this is in practice. The key reform urged by many experts on government would be to give members of Parliament far more resources and time to oversee operations, perhaps even a new permanent super-committee on public administration to scrutinize spending and vet important contracts. The aim would be to make bureaucracy more answerable to Parliament and somewhat less subservient to whatever party's in power.

"It's crucial to integrity in the civil service that senior civil servants be seen as people who are serving the Canadian public and not just the political interests of the government that happens to be in power," Cragg says.

But will reform momentum last in the wake of scandals? Opinions differ.

"Well, they tend to pass, frankly, because other issues arise," Morton says. "That's the sad experience of them. Then they sort of waft into a legendary status, and you'll say in 10 years, whatever happened? Was a guy named Gagliano or Galliano Island? Whatever happened to him? Et cetera. Or do you remember the sponsorship scandal? Which was that?"

Pal adds, "This may have a kind of silver lining in that it may have enraged enough Canadian citizens who were more typically apathetic and not really interested or concerned about government, that it may make them seize the day and make them try to engage more directly in politics just in order to ensure that there's another check and balance there."

Much seems at stake, including the country's cherished reputation for integrity, which, as we've seen, is still high in the world, but now starting to slip.