But government today has burrowed incomparably deeper into society than in the days when the opportunities for a little honest graft were limited largely to the railroad business. In 1867, government spent just 5% of Canada's GDP, federal and provincial combined; today it spends close to 40%. Its tentacles extend everywhere: just to list the recipients of grants in excess of $100,000 takes up hundreds of pages in the public accounts every year. Hundreds more pages, indeed thousands, would be needed to list the regulations by which a wide array of industries are governed, and on which their livelihoods depend. The number of patronage posts at the disposal of a modern Prime Minister are many times what a Macdonald could have dreamed of.

A sponsorship here, a hotel renovation there, pretty soon you're talking real money. Add up all these little cheques, these petty indiscretions, and what you get is not only billions of dollars in misspent money, but something more systemic, a culture of corruption -- a culture that extends far beyond the ranks of elected office-holders or the civil service, beyond the hordes of lobbyists and consultants and pollsters camped out around Parliament Hill, into every boardroom, every small business and activist group and folk festival in the country. We have all been corrupted, a little, each of us looking to government to enrich us at our neighbour's expense. And while we have all acquired some of the requisite skills -- how to plead, how to lobby, how to complain, how to threaten-- some of us are in a position to argue our case in more tangible form: the millions of dollars in private donations that flood into the coffers of the political parties every year.

So we have given members of the governing party virtually unfettered discretion to dispense money and favours to the private sector. And we have allowed, indeed encouraged the private sector to contribute massive amounts of money to the party. And then we are astounded to find a correlation between the two.

Sacking the odd cabinet minister isn't going to clean up this mess. Neither is it enough for the Prime Minister to resign, or even for this government to be defeated. It's the system that has to change, not just the names of those who run it. The problem is not simply individual acts of wrongdoing, but the opportunities and incentives the system presents for those so inclined.

There are two contending models of reform. The first, much favoured by the governing party, would leave everything more or less as it is, only with "full disclosure." Politicians would continue to give money to businessmen, businessmen would continue to give money to politicians, while lobbyists would continue to broker the exchange. The only constraint is that each would be required make his activities part of the public record.

An informed electorate, so the theory goes, should then be able to decide for itself whether politicians are too cozy with business or other interests, and punish them at the next election. It's perfectly simple, really. Voters have only to check the list of recipients of grants and subsidies in the public accounts, keep tabs on all untendered contracts issued by Public Works, sift through the files of the various federal lending agencies to see which companies have received government loans, scan the text of each piece of legislation or order-in-council, then cross-reference these with the list of donors maintained at Elections Canada, not only for the current year, but previous years as well.

Supposing they discover a match, they have then to decide whether this is evidence of a quid pro quo, or whether it is mere coincidence: with so many beneficiaries of state largesse and so many contributors to political parties, it would be remarkable if some names were not to be found on both lists. And if, after all this, they do find fault with the party in power, they have still to divine whether the opposition would be more likely to uphold a higher standard.

The disclosure model, in other words, is a crock. Not only does it depend upon a greater level of vigilance than even the most public-spirited citizen is remotely capable of delivering, but it puts the voters in an impossible position at election time. Rather than being able to take integrity in public office as a given, something they have a right to expect as a matter of course, voters must consider it as just one "issue" among many.

Either they must ignore all other factors, and base their vote entirely on the government's ethical record, or they must sacrifice their concern for integrity for the sake of those other qualities they might desire in a government. Thus, in the last election, those voters who might want to punish the Liberals for their ethical lapses would have to accept Stockwell Day as their Prime Minister.

It is a curious means of enforcing ethical standards: voter vigilantism. We do not, after all, leave it up to the voters to punish politicians for breaking the law. We have the police and the courts for that. That is, we call in the specialists. But while that approach might recommend itself in some respects, as in the independent ethics commissioner the opposition has been demanding to enforce the conflict of interest code, it is still too limited a remedy. The problem is much broader than that.

Just as it is insufficient to ask of public office-holders merely that they do not break the law, so our definition of conflict of interest tends to be too narrow. That is, it is concerned primarily with the personal financial interests of the office-holder, rather than his political self-interest (which of course is not unconnected to the first).

Viewed in the latter way, the whole system is one big conflict of interest -- a political conflict of interest. It is not necessary to show that any specific act of government was made in exchange for any specific political contribution. It is enough that a reasonable person might suspect the two were linked. (As they should: Generally speaking, every quid has its quo.) Lacking any means of proving or disproving these suspicions, the public should not be expected simply to live with them. But neither can any ethics commissioner look into every single grant and every single contribution.

Hence the case for a second model of reform, more radical than the first: one that does not seek merely to police the relationship between government and private interests, but to disentangle them altogether -- to "snip the wires" of money and influence that lead between them, in both directions. More on this next time.