Talk:List of political scandals in Canada

Time Line
I think this article would be better served as a timeline. It could make a nice feature article with some research and work. I'll see what I come up with over the next few days. -- peterwlowe 17 May 2005 (22:35 PT)

I agree, it should be in a timeline. -- cooltobekind 15 Feb 2006 (14:19 ET)

So are these scandals?
Timeline's a good idea, but I also think maybe there should be separate pages; at least for Quebec and BC, since there are so many scandals (I've barely taken the lid off BC so far; some scandals never quite had names; which is why I've linked the Doman Scandal to Herb Doman, and this kind of thing is pretty much necessary back in the colonial days (ah, Mr Joseph Trutch, we barely knew ya); scandals including Gov Douglas on four or five counts, including his mistreatment of Gov Blanshard, and also the Douglas Road which involved misappropriation of funds and disagreements with contractees over rates of reimbursement for investments; similarly the later Lillooet Trail fiasco, which also involved misappropriation of funds, as well as being a waste of money like the Fast Ferries (and was the largest capital expenditure of the provincial government until the late 1880s. One very important one from the 19th C. that comes to mind is Lord Dufferin's pronouncements on First Nations policy and other matters during his visit to British Columbia in the 1970s; if the King-Byng affair is in there then surely a political scandal involving a member (or in-law?) of the royal family. By the way has anyone heard of an Admiral Seymour from that period or thereabouts, RN? And other than scandals, there's just general govt ineptitude - which is really what Fast Ferries is; and left out of the list (so far) are such matters as Gustafsen Lake and the Seton Portage Incident during the Oka Crisis and similar events, including ongoing blockades on backroads in BC that other Canadians never hear about (it's not next to a major city is why. Even just in BC the scope of scandal is very wide:
 * The Pickton Affair, to euphemize it a bit; using "affair" to refer more to what the real scandal was - the length to which the authorities (including the Crown, i.e. the Solicitor-General) avoided taking action on the rapidly growing roster of disappeared women from the Downtown Eastside.
 * Payouts to Clifford Olson's family to locate his victims' bodies
 * The lack of success in the Air India case resulting from sloppy work, or the recent revelations concerning the abandonment of hundreds of child-death investigations because of the notorious cutbacks budget brought down after the Liberal landslide that demolished the NDP's standing in the House in - what was it? - 2001? But there was a precedent:
 * the Restraint Budget of 1983, which also took advantage of the public will to foist completely unannounced radical agendas on an outraged public. This is summed up in an entry Solidarity (British Columbia) (named because of the way the disambig goes in classifying Solidaritys; text in articles might better say Solidarity Crisis; others to be redirects of course.  Tricky subject - "I was there" but as in need of documentation like Oka and other stuff.
 * Breaking contracts with doctors is another nasty bit, and not the first time the Liberals have been seen to break a contract - or in the case of the Legislature Raids (is there a proper name for that scandal? I think there is but I just can't call it to mind), the dirt that came out about the BCR becoming the PGE.
 * Gordon Campbell's refusal to recognize a Leader of the Opposition - contrary to all constitutional precedent - is already in the Gordon Campbell article, which I haven't looked at, but if not it should be; a mere act of vicious pettiness against the hated enemy, but so typical of the flavour of BC politics that its arrogance and brazenness.
 * Powder Mountain (investor claims cabinet collaborating with business competitors (Peter Toigo wasn't it?) over proposed ski development west of Whistler, near where the 2010 Olympics site is, or actually right where it is come to think of it. Hmmmmmm....
 * And what was that thing Rita Johnston got caught up in before she booted herself out of office?
 * Hary Lali? Isn't there a stream of minor MLA and ministerial chicanery scandals that I haven't even touched yet - and I'm only talking from the 1960s.  I know the Carson brothers from Pavilion were both cabinet ministers caught up in scandals (acquitted, I think) around the turn of the century (the other turn of the century, which all of a sudden is a phrase which doesn't mean 1899-1901 anymore, although I guess most people take it that way).  Or acquitted scandals out of the ballpark?
 * Are civic scandals - i.e. in important cities or if unusual - in political scandals? I'm thinking of the history of political scandal at City Hall in Vancouver and of course Surrey, and occasionaly elsewhere, or lurid stuff like the Ministry of Environmnet fire-ee in Kamloops marching in on his old offices with a gun.  Nah, not scandal, but you'd think there'd be a page for it; if only in criminal history in British Columbia or something.
 * there's another side of the Glen Clark affair that's even more scandalous than what most of the BC public and certainly almost anybody else also know about: the apparent setup and hounding over almost nothing by BCTV and the RCMP, one of the ex-bosses of which had had interests in a competing Casino to the one that was connected to Clark by a backporch and his kids playing with some other guy (analysis of this in article I have ref for)
 * and myself I think the Wilson-Tyabji thing is more of a scandal for the way they were hounded on the matter, which came out to be a set-up to put the present Premier in position to become so; Wilson "won" an election, coming from the ranks of nothing to high standing as Leader of the Opposition overnight, and because he found his hormones acting up he got outflanked for the leadership and tarred and feathered in public for being in love like a goofy teenager. What I mean is a good chunk of what made the affair so ugly was the way the media and the other politicians went at them rather than what they actually did.  Being in love, and trying to hide it, doesn't make you unfit for power (well, that he didn't tell his wife before it went public is another side to the scandal, 's true...); the real scandal was the media/party backers ambush on him to get him out of the way so they could place their own choice in the new Opposition, which had miraculously appeared from nowhere with the evaporation of the Vander Zalm Socreds.  Anyone still following me?  I know, I know, it's complicated and has a "HUH?" aspect to it, but it's all true. I haven't even looked at the respective Wikipages yet; that's what I remember of it and there's way more to it.  It's typically juicy BC stuff, as is a lot of the rest of these other items...
 * the Salmon War is a sort of scandal; certainly a Premier seen to be stepping outside his bounds, but for a cause; also needs writing up.
 * the Grewal Affair (or is that there already?)
 * certain disbarment and contempt cases have political overtones, but I'm not willing to risk the wrath of the court by trying to remember them, or name those I do remember
 * I've only partially covered a few things I didn't mention already in my additions to the list, which amazingly there were a lot of standing links for already. It's a question of what's a scandal or not; I'm asking for input here; the native blockades and semi-wars, the budgets and the protests that came back at them
 * So as you can see even in the case of BC I've only begun; I've never studied the Bonner Affair, which is a biggie, and there are others from back then, and before. And it's been a while since the BCRIC Scandal but I should be able to find something on line.  Whose government was it that was so bad?  Not Pattullo's, or Hart's.  Boss Johnston's I think but I'm hazy on that era (19th C is my specialty).
 * The 19th C., speaking of which, is trippy with scandals, including all high-ranking colonial and early provincial officials, and at one time or another a good proportion of the Members of the House over the years. The crux of something called McGowan's War, which I've got to get around to writing and which is pivotal in the early history of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, involved the wheedlings and misdealings of the first two British commercial officials and magistrates appointed after the colony's inauguration (other than native chiefs already appointed as magistrates in recent months).  Selling of benefits, running liquor and operating companies and monopolies and still billing the government for expenses, then the whole legal buffade of McGowan's War that nearly tangled the Colony in a full-scale revolt by American miners only to be played away like a card bluff by the eponymous antihero; fascinating stuff and hard to condense which is why I haven't written it yet; and my Fraser Canyon Gold Rush thing and its cousins all need work, and more input; but they're subjects that had to be put up in order to qualify other articles that already existed, i.e. in references to their history.


 * Other scandals that aren't in the usual sense but certainly are now:
 * the Head Tax Redress issue (probably already in wikipedia as are some of the rest of these)
 * the Japanese Redress resolution and the Italian, Ukrainian and German internments and deportations and associated confiscations of property
 * the Komagata Maru and its equivalent in the St. Lawrence whose name I've forgotten
 * the residential school system,
 * Placer Dome is a private scandal but so large as to be public; and don't even get me started about the VSE or its predecessor the old curb exchange down at Cambie and Hastings (Victoria Square is where the Court Offices and Inns of Court used to be, plus all the brokerages and trusts which were housed in the Dominion Building; the collapse of the Dominion Trust in 1913 - 1911? 12? - somewhere in there
 * the Yellowstone Mine strikebreaking by Royal Oak Mines, and the ensuing bombing in the mine and ensuing court case and investigation scandal. Oh, not political?  Has to involve parties?  What about party backers?  I don't get the difference?  Especially when the Pinkertons that were brought in were off-duty feds, or so the story goes (it's so long ago I won't be able to find the reference, unless some clever scribe there has it in something other than hard-to-get-at newspaper files; same with all those hours of videotape, the nightly "live from Oka" that made NewsWorld so amazing for a while until the Military shut the cameras down and forced the CBC to air talking heads....again, touchy subject but definitely a scandal.
 * And I'm not sure what to do with things like the Nugent Affair during the opening of the Gold Rush (complicated thing involving the American consul and an escaped slave boy the Americans were trying to extradite; the case decided on the boy's right to remain free, once having acquired that status.
 * Other colonial scandals included the cost/revenue fiddling on the Douglas Road - and on the RE's subsequent expenses fixing it later because it hadn't been done right, and it was largely a waste of money due to its ultimate abandomment and only illusory strategic value (the route has been too costly to build a road until modern engineering techniques have made it possible; a highway via the lower part of the route, completing the old frontier-era circuit, will be open by 2009; the Sasquatch Highway no less. Along the same general route was another financial fiasco-cum-boondoggle, the Lillooet Cattle Trail, which lived on as the Howe Sound Trail and was followed by the [Pacific Great Eastern}PGE]]; remnants of it exist but are unprotected; archaeological/heritage protection and park protection "softness" are a major scandal but the media doesn't treat it that way; they'll report on it, but they don't get alarmist about it.
 * the buying of elections by obvious benefactors (I'd rather not list them because of the way I worded that)
 * mis-alienation of lands on Burrard Inlet during the original surveys of Burrard Inlet's south shore that were overturned later; the scandal had included conflict of influence and concealment by Joseph Trutch, then Colonial Commissioner of Lands and Works and one of the alienators of the claim. Trutch (former Gov. of the Falkland Islands, I believe) had used his powers as member of the Executive Council and Deputy Governor (or whatever the exact title was) to disown the chief of the Tsleil-wau-tuth and Capilano (then a joint chieftaincy) of his lands; he did so by declaring free all the chief's slaves, (thereby breaking his prestige/authority and the loyalty of his warriors).  Trutch was noonetheless later Lieutenant-Governor ; there were other issues with this but I haven't studied the case.  Seymour was a Liberal by comparison, empathic towards the "siwashes" he still despised but not "out to get them" in the same way that Trutch or de Cosmos were; Douglas was a radical by comparison in his approach to the native issue.  There's lots of dirt from the colonial period; almost too much to list here if ever in the main article of a BC political scandals page; better to have a separate list just for the colony
 * the ongoing mainstream corruption by government agents and local magistrates and, similarly, police violence and misconduct against the poor and native people historically and at present; yes, that's scandal, how could it not be? These include the various questions and cases arising from the unemployment/labour unrest in Vancouver in the 1930s, and the use of martial law and police action there.
 * there's more Welfare scandals than I can keep track of; the closed-files thing with the Children's Ministry right now is the first that came to mind, but it's endless once you start poking through the newspaper backfiles
 * the Fraser Canyon War was a scandal of negligence but not otherwise a scandal in the usual sense (another intricate matter I have to get around to writing). And, last but not least, the failure of the provincial government to recognize their responsibilities concerning treaty resolution for over 130 years despite being told loudly to do otherwise by natives, the feds, the churches and (no less) Lord Dufferin, which is more or less where that particular scandal gets filed.
 * The mis-apportioning and procedural inequities of Indian Reserves by the various Commissions (even within their own parameters they were failures and came far short of their assigned goal; the commissioner involved got a fat sinecure and later a pension in reward for not doing anything but touring around, and avoiding negotiations at all turns.


 * I suppose the Canyon War is part of the British Columbia Land Claims thing, properly, as is all the treaty resolution stuff just mentioned which is its foundation.
 * There's something called the Government Reserve that I was going to write an article for; it was set aside in British Columbia - about 85% of the land surface, shelved for later negotiation in the settlement of the non-treaty status of primordial British Columbi; in 1975 the forest companies backed WAC Bennett's son to replace the Grand Old Man and the next year Bill assigned the whole of the Govt Reserve over to the Ministry of Forests as Timber Supply Areas and Timber Berths and Licenses; the new Forests Act of 1976 which mega-sized the lumber and pulp industries. Citable but never treated as a scandal; totally scandalous; but who provides the newsprint?  Oh yeah....
 * Vancouver and Victoria society murders often have scandalous overtones just because they're society; and somewhat poitical.
 * purely unpolitical was the Rattenbury Case and it happened in London, but still part of the scandal fabric in BC society
 * I don't have the name for the affair as I don't know the names involved, but there's this guy in a tuxedo who still walks the halls of this converted house I once lived in, apparently the ghost of a then-famous scandal when the small apartment building in Vancouver's West End was a newly married couple, both of wealthy families, in which he murdered his wife and her lover - and he cut her head off. Don't know much more about it except that it was big news.
 * Is the Butterbox Babies thing already in-place? Or are police sloppiness scandals not political scandals?
 * Whatever it was that went on at Woodlands in New West that was so nasty; administrative sloppiness but the minister of the day was retroactively implicated
 * Then there's the Joe Filippone stuff, which I don't really want to get near, nor certain other similar topics, and some connected with it like the British Columbia Provincial Police, which needs to be written. But definitely in the ranks of scandal-laden stuff/ maybe more to do with police matters than political, but still highly public stuff; OK, OK, not a scandal but still interesting and, um, political?
 * One last question - Is there a page on scandals in Vancouver or should any of that stuff just go on some existing Vancouver-related page. (civic and public combined maybe, if not?)  A celebrity vacation, murder and deaths in BC page?  Where else to put Errol Flynn?  Malcolm Lowry? Dorothy Stratten?  Bob Hope and Bing Crosby getting sloshed while fishing at Painter's Lodge (up by Campbell River) for years?  Ben Affleck getting a lap dance and a massage at "Brandi's" (on tape)?

Skookum1 07:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

How about Harbourgate? I remember it was a big deal in 1975...2001:1970:5324:D600:251D:6B7A:280A:5FFB (talk) 05:08, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Renaming?
The American equivalent is called Political_scandals_of_the_United_States. Should we perhaps rename this article, or put a redirect at Political_scandals_of_Canada? (I'd go ahead put a redirect, but I have no idea how.) Toresica (talk) 02:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Lots of recent stuff missing?
It seems that is *a lot* of recent scandal's missing from the list. I'm hearing about them monthly but I don't see any of them in the list, even the ones that have been verified or admitted to. Is there someone who tracks this kind of thing from a non-partisan standpoint? brill (talk) 18:53, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Be nice if there was, but most listings of scandals tend to be partisan in nature, and often self-published.Skookum1 (talk) 03:36, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Driver's licensing scandal in BC
I understand removing this as uncited, but part of the problem with finding a cite for it is CanWestGlobal's archives were ordered destroyed in 1993 by Izzy Asper when he bought the chain; it's not only this scandal that we can't easily find refs for but many others, e.g. the Bonner Scandal, Bill Bennett's Doman Scandal (which was a red herring at the time questions were being raised about his brother Russell's buying up land in the Nicola Valley before the Coquihalla announcement; and the graft overruns on the Coquihalla are a further difficult-to-cite item from this era; also the full story of Fantasy Gardens). The driver's licensing scandal is well known to older BCers, 300,000 licenses or so were issued via a $3000 bribe split between examiners and translators and instructors. ICBC was going to prosecute around 30,000 of them and the Chinese community protested that it would be "racist to proceed" because 98% of them (the figure is around that, 98.5% I remember) were Chinese. It might turn up in some book of recent history somewhere, you won't be able to find the newspaper cites because they have all been hidden/destroyed unless someone were to go spend time in the Archives at UBC or SFU or VCA or BCArch or the VPL.....could be there's stuff in the Globe and Mail's online archive but I don't have access to it (any uni student does though). Also hard to cite from before 1993 is the so-called Kelowna Accord (1983) and other matters connected to the Solidarity Crisis in BC that year.Skookum1 (talk) 03:25, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Concerning various things in BC in 1983, the Globe's "Special BC Edition" which ran during the newspaper strike at Pacific Press during the "uprising" and which ended just before the abortive general strike in the fall covered events without editorial/political oversight and was a great read.......the papers that came back online in the fall were tabloid in nature, unlike their previous more-or-less literate and fair style; anyways I tried to find copies of this edition, which was the precursor to their more editorialized "National Edition" which came into the market within the year after, looked and looked in their online archives via a friend's access to it at the Dalhousie Library, could find nothing at all; copies may be in university or government archives - and should be in the VPL and VicPL.....Skookum1 (talk) 04:25, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Infringing political party
Some parts of this article have the political party clearly noted, while others (namely in the Federal level) do not. Could this be amended for consistency and ease of access to information? Stats would also be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 23.16.131.17 (talk) 22:06, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

This page should be deleted?
I did a general Google search for Canadian political scandals and found this article amongst the first returns. This is not a list of political scandals, it is partisan attack progaganda. Scores of major scandals are conveniently not listed, while others that are not scandals at all but the government of the particular day exercising its democratic right to do what it deems appropriate. I do not have the time or inclination to do the extensive research and editing to correct the glaring inequities of this article. It took thirty minutes alone just to find a means of posting an opinion about this article. Wikipedia help is nothing more than links to links to links to links, reiterating the same information over and over again in reworded forms without providing the actual information or the links being sought. This article should be deleted outright and not resurrected under any other title. It is highly doubtful that anyone could be found to conduct the extensive non-partisan research necessary. Morever, Wikipedia is supposed to be an information source, not a political forum, little less a clearly partisan one. I found zero information about where the actual proposal for deletion is supposed to be filed, since as a alluded above, fifty iterations about but absolutely nothing concerning where. I leave this to any interested party who knows how this is done to submit it for deletion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Political Ethics (talk • contribs) 17:03, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I absolutely agree ....Delete this page or update it with information from ALL parties. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.75.88.130 (talk) 16:59, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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"Terrorist Payout" section
The section titled "Terrorist Scandal" seems to suggest a bit of a PoV.
 * "Terrorist Payout" labels Mr. Khadr as a terrorist. While he has been convicted (of war crimes, and by a US military commission, not a Canadian court), his conviction has been somewhat cast into doubt considering that it depended on evidence alleged to have been extracted under duress . Regardless of whether or not Mr. Khadr is a terrorist, it might perhaps be better to refer to the scandal as the "Khadr Payout", which would seem to be the more commonly used and distinct name for it anyways.
 * While the cited Global News article refers to it as a payout, it might better be referred to as a settlement. Most articles seem to skip between the two (example: Government formally apologizes to Omar Khadr, as Andrew Scheer condemns 'disgusting' payout). On Wikipedia's Omar Khadr, the payout is referred to as a settlement.
 * "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid $10.5 million..." suggests a direct decision by Mr. Trudeau, and pins blame on him. However, the ministers who delivered the apology were Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.
 * That the deal was made "...without acknowledging the Canadian public" would seem to be opinion. Perhaps it would be better to mention the polling featured in the cited Global News article, or disappointment and disgust expressed by the Conservative opposition in Parliament.
 * I would suggest that it might be necessary for context to add that the settlement was part of court-assisted mediation, and was settling a court case brought against the government by Mr. Khadr's lawyers, and not just a spur-of-the-moment by Mr. Trudeau as the current version of the section might suggest.

Laefk (talk) 19:00, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

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Newfoundland and Labrador
Constituency spending scandal, 2018 harassment scandal, Ed Martin scandal, Muskrat Falls cost overruns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kbq430 (talk • contribs) 07:49, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Humber Valley paving scandal.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by MMMcMaster (talk • contribs) 08:48, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Emergency Act Scandal
Shouldn't we include the Emergency Act Scandal? Blangland (talk) 17:42, 10 February 2023 (UTC)


 * The emergencies act scandal should definitely be included in the scandals as the federal court has determined it to have broken multiple rights of citizens and regardless of the outcome of the appeal is still a large event worth notation. 2001:1970:4AE5:A300:7D78:FC87:ACB9:28D9 (talk) 03:47, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Scandals of blocking investigations
I feel if we are including scandals such as blocking investigations like the “Canadian Afghan detainee issue” then it should also include incidents such as;

“Liberals covered up incriminating evidence about the RCMP interference scandal”

“Liberals block bid to force campaign strategist to testify about MPs' budgets”https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6099884

“Liberals block ethics probe after public funds paid to firm run by Trudeau friend”https://nationalpost.com/news/conservatives-accused-of-engineering-fake-scandal-over-funds-paid-to-firm-run-by-trudeau-friend/wcm/6fb62356-a0f6-4395-ad6a-dadae70d6b4e/amp/

“Liberals shut down meeting to question RCMP commissioner on SNC-Lavalin probe” https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-shut-down-meeting-question-rcmp-commissioner-snc-lavalin/wcm/e83fb108-adb5-4927-9646-e210428c0521/amp/

“Trudeau accused of stalling on public inquiry into foreign interference”https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/politics/article-trudeau-accused-of-stalling-on-public-inquiry-into-foreign/

“Trudeau accused of attempting to cover up WE charity scandal by proroguing parliament” https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/justin-trudeau-scandal-prorogue-parliament 2001:1970:4AE5:A300:7D78:FC87:ACB9:28D9 (talk) 04:22, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

POV issues, undue weight on recent past, potential offsite evidence of abusive editing
This article (which is extremely incomplete if attempting to be a list of all notable scandals in Canadian history) seems to be the pet project of right wing trolls on Reddit. A casual observer would assume, as per the linked comment, that Canadian politics was virtually scandal-free prior to ~2000. Any chance an experience editor could take a look at the state of the article? Wikipedia isnt supposed to be a soapbox and the article as it stands places undue weight on the recent past of a 150 year old parliamentary democracy.

https://archive.ph/jQjvS

2605:B100:1132:1E35:E171:FA87:83EC:A819 (talk) 16:53, 10 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks for raising this concern. There are definitely entries and references which are borderline TMZ-like gossip and violated biographies of living persons policy. The page will be set to pending changes to guard against future poorly-sourced insertion of contents. OhanaUnitedTalk page 14:34, 19 June 2024 (UTC)