It's Procurement, Stupid!

News about government corruption caught my eye yesterday. Not because there is corruption in the federal bureaucracy, though it seems to be widely the case. Readers might remember when CRA discovered hundreds of its employees collecting CERB during the COVID restrictions and ended up firing nearly 200 of them. But there is corruption in every human institution. The feds don’t have a monopoly.

The Ottawa Citizen reported that 3 employees in the Auditor General’s office have been drawing income from side contracts with the federal government, very much in the news style that we have seen prominently in the ArriveCan federal scandal. The Auditor General is tasked with investigating corruption such as that. In that sense, it is a problem greater than if it just happened in any other government department.

Justin Trudeau has enlarged the federal bureaucracy by nearly 40 per cent since forming the government. More shenanigans are likely going on in the bureaucracy because there are so many …