Same As It Ever Was

Good morning Wednesday;

Yesterday's post started with a reference to the Interim Mayor of my home city arrested at his home at 06:00. And it is on my mind again today, now that he has officially resigned. Even as just the Interim, he was the first non-French mayor of Montreal in a century.

Since the October crisis of 1970, when the French Quiet Revolution exploded onto the streets of Montreal and then Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau enacted martial law to keep the peace, the ascending masters of Quebec provincial government conceived a new French Reign of Terror to attack the economic stability of English business. Where firebombs had failed, and the murderers of the Deputy Premier and Minister of Labour for Quebec were never brought to justice (one now teaches in a taxpayer funded school) the economic attack succeeded in the exodus of business headquarters en masse. Coupled with the draconic laws placed upon the French to restrict their children’s entry to English-language schools, the labour pool of literate business professionals withered. As the labour pool weakened, more business left for Toronto, which is now Canada’s economic centre.



So what does all of this have to do with the current corruption in Montreal that implicates the leader of the province (being accused, losing his job, and quitting politics without being charged) and the arrests of mayors, city councilors and bureaucrats from the largest city in the province and its neighbouring boroughs? Simply this, people have to eat and they need the money to do it. After that, human beings need to care for their emotional and psychological welfare. Then, when the corruption needed to achieve this is systemic, greed follows. That is its cycle. It is destructive, mired in personal attitudes of survival, and poor models of communications.

I have been witness to and affected by it in my home city; and I have observed it in practice within the CIS and former CIS country where I now reside. I originally left my home, migrating to Toronto, because that was where my clients were situated. I had my own business because I could not overcome the economic barriers to employment I had faced back home. My own career, in the traditional sense, is a corrupt path: as a young president employing older mentors rather than working my way up to business owner.

This economic warfare accomplished its intended domino effect on my own family life. It shifted me, and other English kids I knew growing up, to foreign cities looking for work. It broke up our friendships before the Internet became big. It made me wonder, at 34, if I was destined to remain in dead end serial monogamy until I would be too old to enjoy the challenge of raising my own family. So I relocated, as I had already done once in my life, to another foreign city in an effort to break away from socio-economic warfare I had experienced. I chose Warsaw.

Much to my chagrin, I only realized how similar the common practices in CIS countries mirrored those systemic within my home city and province, when I met the local men and women. Here, like back home, no one wants to expend their energy to change the corrupt system. They just want to live well within it using the minimal effort. And this isn't how I was raises and or my style...

This brings me full circle to the news yesterday about arrests of another mayor and his councilors back home. And I am thinking same as it ever was.