Secrets in High Places

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

As the 1995 Quebec referendum approached and the federal deficit
mounted, Jay Innes and other young Canadians wondered why Canada was
disintegrating. Determined to find answers, they discovered that federal
civil servants would not co-operate. Frequently the civil servants did
not answer their phones, promised replies that never materialized, or
claimed either that they had just begun to work at their current job and
did not know the answers or that the answers must come from someone who
happened to be on vacation or studying French. To Innes and company,
government seemed ineffective and indifferent. The team persevered,
making a case study of the federal–provincial Canada Infrastructure
Works Program (CIWP).

Preliminary results indicated that political patronage was a primary
concern and that too much money went for such items as a golf course and
sports stadiums, not the roads, bridges, and sewers critical to the
infrastructure. Thwarted by the secrecy of federal civil servants, the
young researchers began to consult provincial and municipal authorities
in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Prince
Edward Island. Researcher Deanne Corbett then discovered an expenditure
of $10 million from CIWP on a bocce court in North York, “the
nation’s richest riding.” “Bocce,” Innes explains, “is a cross
between lawn bowling and horseshoes and is very popular with
Torontonians of Italian heritage.” Mayor Greg Halsey-Brandt of
Richmond, B.C., said that he often received phone calls from CIWP
administrators, federal and provincial, who said that they still had
money to spend and needed the name of an additional worthy project
before 5 p.m. that same day. New street lights opposite Lloyd
Axworthy’s Winnipeg office were part of a $1.6 million expenditure,
but Winnipeg’s needy and less-visible sewer system received nothing.
In Quebec, money went for tennis courts, churches, synagogues, and
Cirque du Soleil, and the CIWP record in Prince Edward Island and
Alberta was similar. The researchers also discovered that provincial and
municipal authorities could be as uncommunicative as their federal
counterparts.