Systemic Corruption in an Advanced Welfare State: Lessons from the Quebec Charbonneau Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Quiet Revolution in the 1960s propelled the province of Quebec onto the path of greater social justice and better government. But as the evidence exposed at the Charbonneau inquiry makes clear, this did not make systemic corruption disappear from the construction sector. Rather, corrupt actors and networks adjusted to new institutions and the incentive structure they provided. The patterns of corruption emerging from the Charbonneau inquiry bear the imprint of the so-called Quebec model inherited from the Quiet Revolution in at least three ways: (1) the economic nationalism that made public policies partial towards French-speaking and Quebec-based businesses, notably in the engineering sector, with major firms like SNC-Lavalin using their dominant position as “national champions” to engage in cartel-like practices to raise the price of construction projects; (2) the Jacobinism that strongly centralized power at the provincial level and left municipalities underdeveloped in terms of bureaucratic capacity, thus making them easy prey for corrupted interests; and (3) the sovereigntist/federalist cleavage that, since the 1970s, has made Quebec businesses dependent on the Liberal Party for political stability and has allowed party operators to extract a rent from businesses in return.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".