Exerpt from a report written by Madelaine Drohan,

Globe & Mail, 8 aug. 08

Canada has signed and ratified the OECD Convention on Combatting Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business, the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption, the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the UN Convention Against Corruption. We've funded training for officials here and abroad, financed and attended seminars and conferences to discuss the problem, and set up not one, but two, dedicated anti-corruption units with the RCMP.

It all sounds impressive until you realize that this is all about process and not about actual results. For information on those you have to turn to a report, quietly tabled in the House of Commons last November by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, that details what progress has been made since Canada passed the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act in 1998.

The report goes on at some length, with an especially long section on awareness-raising that talks about all the information that various government bodies have put on their websites. But the truly relevant section is the one labelled “Prosecution,” which starts with the following line: “There has been one successful prosecution under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.”

That's right. One prosecution in the last decade. It involved a U.S. immigration officer at the Calgary airport who accepted bribes from Hydro Kleen Group, an Alberta firm. The immigration officer was deported and Hydro Kleen paid a fine of $25,000. There have been no other provincial prosecutions, according to the report, and no federal prosecutions at all.

Little wonder then that Canada was criticized in another report on corruption that also came out around the time of the G8 summit. This one, written for Transparency International, a non-governmental organization based in Berlin, was a good deal more critical than the G8 whitewash.