Global Integrity Report: Canada - 2010

This peer-reviewed country report includes:

Integrity Indicators Scorecard: Scores, scoring criteria, commentary, references, and peer review perspectives for more than 300 Integrity Indicators.

Reporter's Notebook: An on-the-ground look at corruption and integrity from a leading local journalist.

Corruption Timeline: Ten years of political context to today's corruption and integrity issues.

HIGHLIghts

Despite its reputation as one of the world's "cleanest" democracies, Canada is not without anti-corruption challenges. The ability to request information from the government is not as effective as one might expect, especially concerning the timeliness and quality of govrnment responses. Canadian law continues to treat the asset disclosures of senior civil servants as private and confidential, in contrast to many countries which make the information freely available to the public. Despite those pockets of weakness, Canada's public integrity and anti-corruption system is relatively robust. The media is able to freely report on corruption cases, and the integrity of elections are rarely questioned. The country's taxes and customs agencies are assessed as professional and independent, and the justice sector is perceived as independent and effective despite the high costs of bringing cases to court and the executive's control over judicial appointments.

From the Reporter's Notebook: The furor in the United Kingdom over Westminster MP expenses — the moats and swimming pool repairs — reverberated in Canada’s parliament, too, with calls for Canadian MPs to open their expense books to see what they might have been hiding. Each MP has an office budget that he or she is free to spend largely at pleasure, with the only scrutiny provided by a secretive all-party committee of fellow MPs called the Board of Internal Economy. Canada’s open-records law stops at the door of Parliament Buildings and does not apply to MPs.