Public Safety Canada Report on Corruption in Canada

In the most recent Weekly Checklist of federal government publications,  there is a link to a May 2014 report written for Public Safety Canada by Deloitte LLP entitled Corruption in Canada: Definitions and Enforcement:

"The objective of this study is to outline how the concept of corruption is defined in Canada and to give an overview of enforcement responses, the results of which may serve to assist policy development regarding corruption and corruption-related crime. With this in mind, various types of corruption, definitions and related offences have been reviewed, including domestic, foreign and multilateral legislation , as well as civil society and international financial institution definitions."

"Corruption can be defined and categorized in different ways. The most common types or categories of corruption are supply versus demand corruption, grand versus petty corruption, conventional versus unconventional corruption and public versus private corruption. There are other categories or ways of describing corruption, such as 'systemic' versus 'individual' or 'isolated' , corruption by 'commission' versus by 'omission', by the degree of coercion used to perform the illegal act, and the type of benefit provided. In Canada, as is the case in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other OECD member states, both domestic and foreign corruption are criminalized. In Canada, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (CFPOA) creates an offense for foreign corruption and also contains books and records provisions. The CFPOA’s bribery offense only criminalizes the supply-side of the corrupt behaviors. Domestic corruption offenses, provided for in the Criminal Code, are broader in nature: both the supply and demand sides of bribery transactions are criminalized as well as acts of “unconventional” corruption, such as breach of trust by a public officer and misconduct of officers executing process."

"The Criminal Code also contains a private corruption offense. This type of corruption (between private sector organizations) has received weaker responses and focus from the media in Canada in recent years. The media and enforcement authorities have instead placed much focus on public corruption. Furthermore, although foreign bribery has been the source of much discussion with the recent amendments to the CFPOA in 2013, there has been much more activity surrounding domestic corruption by criminal enforcement bodies and in the media in the last few years, often in relation with organized crime charges and investigations." (...)

"Most cases in Canada have included acts of conventional corruption, as opposed to unconventional corruption. The few prosecuted cases of unconventional corruption were brought alongside other charges which included conventional corruption, as opposed to stand alone charges. This might be due to evidentiary issues, such as the lack of third parties or physical evidence in cases of unconventional corruption."

The report also examines the enforcement of corruption related offences in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The Weekly Checklist includes a listing of titles made available by the Parliament of Canada, federal departments, and Statistics Canada to the Depository Services Program for distribution to a network of Depository Libraries in Canada and abroad.