TANNARA YELLAND
Associate News Editor
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   Corruption is not the issue many Canadians think it is, says University of Saskatchewan political studies professor Michael Atkinson.
Atkinson delivered a lecture on corruption in the Canadian political system on Nov. 16 at the Diefenbaker Centre.
   After joking about not having anyone to introduce him, Atkinson launched into a discussion about the World Bank and non-government organization Transparency International. Each group has created its own index organizing the world’s nations in order of corruption.
   The World Bank’s index goes from ”“2.5 to +2.5. Canada has received a 2.03, putting it in the 95th percentile for lack of corruption.
   Despite such a glowing reference from the World Bank and from other institutions, Atkinson mentioned a Gallup poll wherein 41 per cent of the respondents said yes when asked if widespread corruption existed in Canada.
   Atkinson chalks this up to a fundamental difference between what the business people and “country analysts” who help the World Bank with its index consider corruption and what regular citizens understand corruption to be.
“For democratic citizens,” Atkinson said, “corruption is really about the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”
   There is also an important distinction to be made between two types of corruption — petty and grand. This distinction plays a large role in the difference between the nations, like Canada and many Western European nations, that are perceived as low in corruption, and nations like Zimbabwe and Somalia where people assume corruption runs rampant.
   Atkinson described petty corruption as small, discrete transactions usually on the part of minor officials. Often they take the form of “kickbacks and bribes to provide services officials should be providing anyway” or to receive special privileges.
   Almost no Canadians have had any experience with this inside Canada, Atkinson said. This is not true of all the countries that have ratified the convention on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Atkinson cited Italy and the USA as OECD nations where petty corruption does take place.
   Rather than small fees taken in exchange for services, grand corruption entails the “shaping of rules by selective interests who then benefit.” Whereas petty corruption often involves bureaucrats, politicians are almost always involved in grand corruption. Grand corruption, unlike petty corruption, is rarely undertaken solely for the politician’s or official’s immediate monetary benefit.
   But are Canadians responding to an epidemic of grand corruption when they claim their government is corrupt? Atkinson said there is very little corruption of either persuasion. Rather, he thinks, Canadians judge their elected officials too harshly.
   Atkinson moved at this point into an argument about the definition of corruption and the difficulties it brings with it. He contends that the problem with defining corruption today stems partly from an article written by Joseph Nye of Harvard in 1967, where Nye defined corruption as “behaviour that deviates from formal rules” and undertaken for personal gain. Atkinson sees a problem in the fact that Nye refused to account for any moral wrongdoing.
   “I think we need to recognize that by defining corruption this way”¦ Nye wanted to distance the concept from any moral evaluation, to rely on strictly a scientific assessment.”
   Atkinson claimed that this leads to officials trying to safeguard against corruption bureaucratically, such as with tighter restrictions and more involved reporting on people’s actions. However, Atkinson cautioned, this will only make people work hard enough to avoid being caught. With an approach to corruption more focused on morality there might be more success in stopping officials from behaving unethically.
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photo: Tannara Yelland