Hacker News Reader

Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a source for this, but I grew up in NJ and now live in Montreal, and I am pretty sure the local corruption here is worse than where I grew up (where three of the four mayors of my hometown served time in jail after their time in office). Things got a lot better there and I think a lot of the organized crime might have moved up north.

The construction industry is very clearly siphoning billions of dollars of tax money into organized criminals' hands. Every few years a given street gets torn up with a new excuse. And it seems to be consensus that it's much worse these days than it used to be.. this year in particular I think something like one out of every five blocks downtown is closed off for "construction".

Cops saying "just don't look into it" regarding organized crime sounds about par for the course anywhere I've ever been though.

View on HN

The corruption in Montreal is more visible than in many other metropolitan regions places, but the city and province do a lot more than other areas to bring it to light and fight it.

My estimation is that if we had a similar level of effort into looking into other regions, we'd see similar or greater issues. The refusal to look into real-estate or casino based money laundering as well as substantially counterproductive financial secrecy laws make for lots of issues in Canada.

Is there grift in Montreal? You betcha. Is there grift in Toronto? You betcha, but it doesn't make the news.

I love this related quote from The Wire: "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the f* it's gonna take you."

I'm not sure. I think your comparison with Toronto is probably fair, but I would say Montreal has a greater share of corruption than most major Canadian cities. Why? The presence of organized crime is probably a big factor. When you have crime families who have been established in Montreal for decades, I think that breeds more corruption than a city that has a less organized set of criminal elements.

There’s something especially dysfunctional about Montreal grift where it involves physically destroying the built environment every year and impeding traffic, creation pollution and making excess noise.

I’d prefer it if they could just take kickbacks on financial shenanigans.

I mean, that grift extends all the way to your PM and political dividing lines are preventing it from being properly investigated.

This is a great shame.

The US president made his career in casinos, development, and high end real estate... It's shameful but not really rare.

The Canadian PM got caught red handed in a number of scandals, lining the pockets of his friends with tax payer money. Overpaid $100 million in COVID medical equipment; his former parties' MP setup a shell company 7 days prior to be the middleman between govt and equipment imports (pocketing a nice $10K per unit purchased). Add on that a huge no-bid contract awarded to his favourite buddies that run a for-profit charity that has promoted his brand for years, paid his family members, expensed lavish trips, etc. These guys had zero experience in these domains. Then he prorogued parliament to prevent investigations. He continued with filibustering tactics, threatened an election during the pandemic when further inquiry was pushed.

It is amazing how time and time again, his supporters entirely dismiss these things. Amazing that they are fine with a government with zero transparency and zero accountability, despite their platform clamouring for exactly that. Regardless of the party in power, I would be equally as disgusted. I wonder if people will wake up when they see the bleak financial situation that comes to light post-COVID.

I haven't even mentioned his other previous ethics violations but I'll spare you the details.

Do you have any sources? I'd love to look into this more but can't find anything about the overpaying for Covid-19 medical equipment.

https://thepostmillennial.com/trudeau-liberals-overpaid-100-...

https://www.journaldequebec.com/2020/10/21/des-millions-pour...

I'm not saying your overall point is incorrect but using "The Post Millennial" as a source is a very curious choice. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Millennial -

>The Post Millennial is a conservative Canadian online news magazine started in 2017. It publishes national and local news and has a large amount of opinion content. It has been criticized for releasing misinformation and articles written by fake personas, for past employment of an editor with ties to white supremacist-platforming and pro-Kremlin media outlets, and for opaque funding and political connections.

>The Post Millennial has been described by Buzzfeed News as an advocacy organization for the Conservative Party operating through opaque personal connections and undeclared social media ties.

>In July 2020, The Daily Beast exposed an online network pushing United Arab Emirates propaganda against Qatar, Turkey and Iran, using op-eds placed in news outlets using fictitious authors. The Post Millennial published some of these articles. After being contacted by the Beast, it took the articles down without comment.

If you don't trust Wikipedia on this, just have a look the topics and opinion pieces run by this "news" organization. Hardly a reputable source by any stretch.

Duly noted but are you suggesting that this story is false? For your convenience, here are some others I just found:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canadian-co...

> Given that much of what has been released on the WE contract has contradicted what the prime minister has told Canadians publicly, the opposition are well within their rights to probe it and other spending, including the sole-source $237-million contract for ventilators made by former Liberal MP Frank Baylis’s company Baylis Medical

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/macdougall-trudeau-embrace...

https://alkhaleejtoday.co/international/5157524/Contract-to-...

https://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/news/companies-warn-tory-mo...

>are you suggesting that this story is false?

Did you read the first sentence of my comment? It starts with "I'm not saying your overall point is incorrect..."

Yes you said "I'm not saying your overall point is incorrect" and then questioned a source for a specific point. That created some ambiguity in my head. Perhaps you disagreed with that specific point? Perhaps you were calling into question that specific point because the source is bad? That's why I asked for clarification. No ill will.

Could be my interpretation. My apologies. No need to be snarky about it eh.

I chose that wording because the gist of your comment was correct (there is indeed corruption) but the devil is in the details. For instance, WE Charity is NOT a "for-profit" charity[0] as you claim. I could go on, but I have no desire to engage on specifics when the overall assertion is mostly true.

I only want the reader to be wary of claims (and the claimant) citing an obviously partisan source. A source that has been caught red-handed publishing disinformation provided by foreign state actors[1].

Although you sound well-intentioned, I'm just not interested in engaging when someone plays fast and loose with facts and sources. I'm just so incredibly tired of it.

[0] https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/82-we-cha... [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-media-outlets-duped...

> For instance, WE Charity is NOT a "for-profit" charity[0] as you claim. I could go on, but I have no desire to engage on specifics when the overall assertion is mostly true.

Actually your own cited source challenges this. You didn't dig far enough.[0,1] WE Charity transferred 7% of its revenue to Me to We, a for profit company that did the payouts to Trudeau's family. Charity Intelligence themselves found this very unusual. Unlike every other charity that they monitor, in fact. I guess it's okay for a not for profit to operate a for profit company to get around the rules then?

This isn't even a partisan thing, this is on WE Charity's wikipedia page.

[0]https://www.canadaland.com/we-charity-was-in-financial-troub... [1]https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-july-13-...

>Actually your own cited source challenges this.

No, my link does not challenge this. WE is a registered charity (as designated by CRA). It's public information, you can look it up.

I initially chose not to bring this up precisely because it detracts from the fact that there is likely corruption (as you point out). I only brought it up when pressed for why I endorsed the gist of the parents comments, but not the stated details.

You know, it is possible for someone to believe that corruption occurred but also believe that getting the surrounding facts correct is important. That's all I was advocating for.

You've totally misinterpreted this entire thread.

My favorite part about his family being paid speaking fees was all of the other celebrities that the same charity told that they don't pay speaking fees.

it's a matter of degree - Trudeaus scandals aren't in the same league as Trump. The fact that these violations were investigated (and has had a real, damaging effect on the PM's approval ratings when they came to light) shows that Canadian politics is doing much better than the US, where the president literally fired the FBI director for investigating him.

> It is amazing how time and time again, his supporters entirely dismiss these things. Amazing that they are fine with a government with zero transparency and zero accountability, despite their platform clamouring for exactly that. Regardless of the party in power, I would be equally as disgusted. I wonder if people will wake up when they see the bleak financial situation that comes to light post-COVID.

It is, but then also it isn't really all that amazing if you sit down an examine the entire system. People being "fine with a government with zero transparency and zero accountability" isn't surprising, because these problem derive from the structure of the system itself, not any one individual politician operating in it. One could Google up plentiful examples from history of all politicians leveraging the opaqueness of the particular political system they operate in (all systems on Earth are flawed in this manner, to varying degrees) - but at the individual level (politicians and voters), they all realize that "these things are inevitable", and that even though technical wrongdoing has occurred, from the aggregate perspective, the ends justifies the means (which is a perfectly reasonable position to hold in my opinion, if we assume that the individuals in question are not aware that their perception of reality does not match objective reality, which is ~always the case).

I believe that to fix the problem, these systems must be completely redesigned to accommodate the obvious shortcomings. But then to do that, it would require buy-in from both politicians and the media, who both likely enjoy the amount of power in their possession and wouldn't be too keen on giving it up, so I wouldn't hold my breath on anything improving, ever.

The president would never have had his first and greatest success without his dad ( Trump tower).

He mostly does name licensing these days.

He's being compared to Justin Treadeau, who basically owes his entire political career to being Pierre Treadeau's son. Nepotism encourages such underworld connections.

His first and greatest success was actually the Grand Hyatt New York @ Grand Central Station in 1980.

That area of NYC had been completely derelict and run down at the time. Midtown East was NYC's red light district up until the 1950s when it moved across town to Times Square. It still is the area to this day where most of the asian brothels in the city are.

Anyway, the Grand Hyatt project completely revitalized that neighborhood.

Then Trump put his (rejected) bid in for the Javits Center project and was the project's biggest salesman to the public. His proposal for which streets to develop nearly exactly became the Hudson Yards project 30 years later...

Indeed. The former finance minister was just cleared of ethics violations because he firmly believed he had paid the $41,000 in travel expenses when in fact a charity funded by the Liberal gov't paid for it.

I mean, it's pretty typically for a gov't official to lose track of $41,000 in expenses right? Happens every day.

The guy's a former CEO of a ~2 billion dollar company, that's actually fairly believable. The rest of the claims are more damning.

And I wouldn't trust Sûreté du Québec I'd rather RCMP.

In this light, it's really crazy reading about the initial Montreal Metro construction -- completed in less than 5 years. They actually extended the orange line by two whole stations because they found their construction costs were lower than expected.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Metro

I recall a buddy of mine worked in construction industry in 80s/Miami Florida. It was “typical”, as he told me that they ordered truck of concrete, and then at the same time filled out the hole with as much garbage as they could. Then covered with concrete using less than 10% what was ordered. Of course rest was sold on black market. First people who were doing it (probably not first but the most “famous”) was Morgan family (constructions) before they switched industry to became Morgan&Morgan Lawyers (for the people).

Not sure how well that works in practice. Concrete has an amazingly short window of time that it's usable for, anywhere between 30 minutes and a couple of hours between the time it's mixed and the time it's set. To get a truck of concrete to a second site that is ready to go just doesn't seem like it work to mr.

I was going to say, it’s hard to sell wet concrete on a short window. Min back order window for concrete is 24 hours and the construction crew plans the pours ahead so they are not waiting around for black market concrete. It actually costs a lot more to idle the crew than the price difference of black market

It wouldn't surprise me if what really happened was the concrete forms would bill for a crew and a "truck", send a truck of concrete 20% full, bill the whole thing, fill with whatever instead, and pocket the savings.

There was one instance I remember hearing about. A concrete truck driver was stopping on the way to the site and then adding water to his load to keep it at the right consistency. The result was weaker concrete that lead to some kind of collapse.

> Then covered with concrete using less than 10% what was ordered.

I'm curious about the logistics of this scam. Does this mean the concrete delivery would show up on the books of the concrete company as two orders, one for the 10%, and one (or more orders) for the remaining 90%? Or was the concrete company in on the scam for a kickback so nothing would show up on their books nor the contractors' books?

With so much being automated and tracked these days, is it squeezing out these scams?

This is correct. I lived in Montreal for one year, and the road closures (barree barree barree) is ridiculous. It's so bad that without a navigation app like Waze you can get stuck going in circles.

And for roads or streets that aren’t closed, you better drive a tank of a car or keep your eyes wide open on a bicycle because of all the potholes.

I lived in Montreal in the early 70s and this was rumoured to be the case then. I see little has changed in 50 fucking years.

I went back to visit right before leaving North America forever. I was shocked at how depressed the city was still. I assume it's these parasites stealing from the people.

I lived in Montreal a couple of years 10 years ago and I visit it quite regularly. I actually enjoy that city and don't find it depressing. It is a big city but it does not feel oppressive.

A lot of new modern buildings have been erected downtown and the city is quite clean.

As for the corruption, it is very visible on the roads. They are constantly redoing the roads and yet there are still a lot of potholes. The weather is not an excuse, roads are much better in Ontario.

Also I don't know if it is still the case but you could read occasionally in the news some housing construction buildings being burnt.

There is definitely alot of organized crime in Montreal, but a lot of money is invested into fixing the water distribution system, which is crumbling and was neglected for decades. They usually fix 1-2 blocks at the time, and it costs hundreds of millions.

Roads do get a beating because of snow. Montreal definitely get more than Toronto, and the road system is way over capacity, with the number of cars and trucks increasing 2% each year.

The costs estimates are interesting too, because the construction industry is/was colliding in order to hike prices. So now all projects are fixed-price, meaning that companies won't take risks and tripple their estimates.

Some say that these problems started in the 60s, but got worse during government downsizing attempts. Internal expertise was lost and they had to rely on (corrupt) private companies. Others say that the restructuring were required to get rid of inside corruption. Whenever two government entities get merged, it's pretty much always as an attempt to water down corruption.

All that said, these days the city is pretty lean. I know lots of folks working there. I also did my small part to help liberate the city from Oracle consultants (siphoning the city) and also ran for borough office some time ago.

Just don't get your car towed. They are as bad in Montreal as everywhere else. And the city needs more public transport.

Thanks for adding these details. Montreal's ancient water system is a big reason for a lot of the construction. Apparently more water leaks underground from broken pipes than is used. My street is slated for construction to remove lead pipes (interesting comparison to Flint; https://globalnews.ca/news/6113701/montreal-drinking-water-l...)

The other factor is repairs were neglected for much of the 2010s, which compounded damage, so they're playing catch-up. So yes, there is a lot of construction, and undoubtedly some corruption and incompetence mixed in, but it's not as bad as some people who like to complain say.

It will be interesting to see if they can "catch up" some year, and it's very important for informed people to remain critical and engaged.

Sounds like Boston. The roads are torn up on a perpetual basis and made worse. These are what I call “brother in law contracts”

Is there an underlying pattern here: Canada's most 'socialist' big city is also its most corrupt?

What makes montreal the most "socialist"? Which socialist policies even apply at the municipal level?

Montreal has a public housing initiative, but so does Toronto. The public transit networks are municipal, so maybe those? We've also got a good library system...

Those damn commies and their public transit (that you have to pay for) ;)

The library system in montreal (+BANQ) is one of the things i missed most when i left. It really was amazing.

culturally, the income taxes, the intra-provice tuition, low competitiveness in publicly-funded domains e.g. city construction, subsidies etc.

I've lived there. Any canadian who has lived in all the big cities (toronto, vancouver, montreal, calgary) will tell you the same.

So in other words, things that have nothing to do with the city of montreal, but are the domain of either the provincial or federal government (other than construction which i'll give you is not great... but not sure how you link it to socialism.)

> I've lived there.

So have I

Does a single instance of a thing represent a pattern?

It’s not a “socialist” city and it has not been proven to be more corrupt unless you count anecdotal media reports to be robust scientific studies.

There is corruption, but it’s not clear how much worse it is than in other North American cities.

Also, fun fact, parties that seemed to be more engaged in this corruption were not the “socialist” ones, but the neoliberal ones.

But hey, don’t let that stop you, it’s a great strawman you built there.

I live in Montreal it is 1) expressly more socialist and 2) definitely more corrupt.

The government here pays huge subsidies for electricity, a lot of social housing and a generous $6/day child care regime, which is far more than anywhere else in the US.

Montreal is measurably 'more corrupt' [1], there's no doubt about it, there was a massive investigation into it, and some of it was addressed by having more intelligent/trained buyers for public sector goods etc., but much remains.

"At the Charbonneau inquiry, an "ex-construction boss said that for years, three per cent of the value of all contracts he received from the city of Montreal went to the mayor's party, and another one per cent, known as "la taxe à Surprenant," went to a city official"

I don't think the level of corruption has that much to do with the ideology of government though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charbonneau_Commission

"The government here pays huge subsidies for electricity, a lot of social housing and a generous $6/day child care regime, which is far more than anywhere else in the US."

Montreal is in the US?

That commission didn't "measure" any other jurisdiction so what are you talking about? And because there was "a massive investigation into it" doesn't mean it's worse than elsewhere, if anything it implies the contrary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com