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Globally, as instability increases and democratic backsliding persists, the norms guiding political processes are evolving. Political corruption, broadly defined as a public official’s subversion of the rules or norms of their office to the detriment of public interest for private gain, has increased as many governments face less public accountability. In Canada there have always been instances of scandals involving politicians suspected of acting in a corrupt manner; however, recently, they have not faced significant public response. This article seeks to examine recent political scandals surrounding abuse of public trust and the factors that can explain why these scandals did not provoke a major change in political support.
Recent Instances of Suspected Corruption in Canadian Politics
Over the past few years, several scandals involving political actors allegedly exploiting their office for personal gain have surfaced. Notable incidents include the Greenbelt scandal in Ontario and the Alberta Health Service (AHS) scandal in Alberta, which will be the focus of this article.
The Ontario Greenbelt is a swath of 800,000 hectares of land which was protected by the Greenbelt Act in 2005. This land has specific importance to flood drainage, protecting diverse ecosystems and promoting the agricultural sector, making its legal status a necessity. The Greenbelt especially needed protection because much of it surrounds growing urban areas where new housing developments are increasingly valuable.
In 2022, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative (PC) government announced it would be removing protections from almost 3,000 hectares from the Greenbelt to allow for housing development. Shortly after, concerns were raised by the opposition NDP about the ethics of removing environmental protections to further private interests. These concerns grew louder after the revelation that certain developers who stood to benefit were personal friends of Mr. Ford and had attended his daughter’s wedding. Accusations of wrongdoing have been further elevated because, on March 13th 2026, the Ford government proposed changes to the law that would prohibit freedom of information requests surrounding cabinet ministers and the Premier. Along with reducing future accountability within the Ontario government, this presented change would be retroactive and shelve any ongoing requests for information surrounding the Greenbelt scandal.
A similar subversion of public interest is suspected to have taken place in Alberta. In February 2025, the Globe and Mail reported that Alberta premier Danielle Smith had dismissed the CEO of the AHS, Athana Mentzelopoulos, two days before she was scheduled to meet with the Auditor General to report on issues relating to the AHS’ procurement practices. In a letter obtained by the Globe and Mail, Mentzelopoulos claims that various members of the Alberta government, including Ms. Smith’s chief of staff, pressured her to sign deals with private healthcare providers despite the AHS’ concerns about the possibly inflated costs of private delivery.
It is important to note the informal investigation led by Raymond Wyant, a retired Manitoba judge, that looked into the AHS scandal, revealed no wrongdoing from the Premier or any of her staff. However, Mr. Wyant was chosen by Ms. Smith to undertake the investigation and he did not interview Ms. Smith or any cabinet ministers when completing it. Furthermore, Ms. Mentzelopoulos’ accusations of wrongdoing were substantiated by revelations surrounding inappropriate relationships between Danielle Smith, her staff, and certain cabinet ministers with Sam Mraiche, owner of MHcare—a medical supplies company that has won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the Alberta government. Mr. Mraiche was in the room with Ms. Smith’s inner circle on the night of her election and has entertained cabinet ministers in his box during Edmonton Oilers games. Additionally, Ms. Smith’s former chief of staff, Marshall Smith, used to live in Mr. Mraiche’s sister’s 1.6 million dollar house in Edmonton, and while he claims to have been paying rent, it is unclear how much.
The Lack of Public Reactions To Scandals
The Greenbelt scandal has impacted Ontarians’ views of Doug Ford. In August 2023, Abacus Data surveyed Ontario voters to gauge whether the Greenbelt scandal had an effect on their perception of Ford’s government. This survey found that, following the Auditor General’s report on the Greenbelt scandal, 51 per cent of respondents feel worse about Doug Ford and his government, and nearly 60 per cent of respondents feel that Mr. Ford makes decisions based on the best interests of his friends and supporters.
However, the Greenbelt scandal had a negligible effect on the ballot box choice of Ontario PC voters. Mr. Ford’s government won another supermajority in Ontario’s parliament following a February 2025 election, the first after the Greenbelt scandal reached its publicity climax in August 2023. This incredible result implies that the increasingly negative perception of Mr. Ford did not cause major changes in his voter base. Abacus Data’s survey provides some explanation for the lack of vote change, showing that while 37 per cent of PC voters from 2021 felt worse about Mr. Ford and his government, that percentage was 54 per cent for Ontario Liberal Party voters and 72 per cent for Ontario NDP voters. Thus, it appears the scandal mainly impacted Ontarians who were already not going to vote for Mr. Ford’s PCs.
The same disconnect between negative perception of a party leader and choice of vote for their party is plausible in Alberta. Aggregated polling completed by 338 Canada’s Philipe J. Fournier shows that, throughout 2025, the UCP’s projected vote percentage hovered consistently between 50 and 56 per cent without substantially dipping following the AHS scandal.
What is Responsible For The Lack of Change In Support Post-Scandal?
Numerous factors likely contribute to the minimal change in political support following these two major scandals. Most centrally, a poorly informed electorate, increasing political partisanship, and widespread political cynicism all likely played an operative role.
Many voters vote for candidates despite feeling that they do not have adequate knowledge of their history or their party’s policy platform. Canadians are nowadays more likely to be uninformed, especially about provincial politics, as a decline in local journalism and the ban of news on Meta platforms following the Online News Act make information scarcer. It is very possible, therefore, that many supporters of Ms. Smith and Mr. Ford do not know the full details of their relevant scandals and thus cannot factor that information into their vote choice. This assumption is backed up by the Abacus Data survey, whose results showed that in August 2023, 17 per cent of respondents had not heard anything about the Greenbelt scandal and 44 per cent of respondents had heard about it but were not following the story.
Increasing political partisanship also means that the section of the electorate that has heard of a scandal and politically leans towards the offending party might feel enough partisan attachment that their opinion cannot be changed. In hyper-partisan environments, party faithfuls are more distrustful of political opponents and journalistic criticism, and are simultaneously more emotionally attached to their ‘team.’1 In the case of political scandal, this may mean that a partisan is willing to overlook abuses because they strongly believe in party ideology and are distrustful of criticism they view as ideologically motivated.
Furthermore, a population that is cynical about the nature of politics could expect politicians to be corrupt and thus not take extraordinary action when corruption occurs. A 2024 Angus Reid poll revealed that 86 per cent of Canadians believe that political corruption is either common or very common in their province, a percentage that demonstrates a perception but does not reflect empirical reality. Transparency International gives Canada a score of 75/100 in their corruption index (100 signals no corruption), and ranks it as the 16th least corrupt country in the world.
Nonetheless, perceptions, in this case, are more powerful than reality. Sen Tian and Lianfo Zhao argue that citizens’ “attitude[s] toward corruptive acts significantly influences levels of corruption” in part because individuals can “[affect] the moral cost and social pressure faced by perpetrators.”2 These authors’ study into social norms surrounding embezzlement concluded that citizens might not choose to affect that moral cost because “when victims [of corruption] perceive corruption as widespread and expect outcomes to be inequitable, they become less inclined to penalize corrupt behavior.”3 Thus, political cynicism and the perception of widespread corruption are factors that simultaneously allow corruption to go unpunished and the proliferation of said corrupt behaviour.
Conclusion
This article does not seek to argue that political corruption is inherent to, or endemic within, either Ms. Smith’s or Mr. Ford’s governments. Rather, the mentioned examples of suspected political corruption and the subsequent lack of public reaction, raise warning bells about a normative shift in Canadian politics. Numerous factors could be leading Ontarians, Albertans and Canadians more generally to not have their vote choice swayed by political scandals. However, it is clear Canadians need to be more forceful in setting the standards guiding those who they elect. While corruption is not currently common in Canada, if further instances of governments subverting public interest go unpunished, malicious political actors will take notice, and Canada’s political fabric could be harmed beyond repair.
Edited by Catriona Hayes Morris
The argument defended in this article is solely that of the author and does not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Students’ Association, or the McGill Department of Political Science.
Featured image by Haljackey via Wikimedia Commons
- Edda Humprecht, “Where ‘fake news’ flourishes: a comparison across four Western democracies,” Information, Communication & Society, (2018), 4. ↩︎
- Sen Tian and Lianfo Zhao, “Tolerance for corruption and descriptive social norm: An experimental study of embezzlement.” PLoS One 19, no. 5 (2024): 1, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303558. ↩︎
- Tian and Zhao, “Tolerance for corruption,” 14-15. ↩︎
