Canada came in at 15th place in the 2006 Gallup Worldwide Corruption Index, its image damaged by the Liberal Party sponsorship scandal.
There is a bright light though… our politicians (or their drivers) obey traffic signs.
Raymond Fisman, The Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University, does work on corruption, financial markets and development. He recently created his own corruption index based on the number of parking tickets each country’s diplomats were racking up in the neighborhoods surrounding the UN building in NYC.
The worst offender was Kuwait, with an average of 250 tickets per year, per diplomat. Kuwait had more than double the next nearest offender, Egypt. There were 20 countries with no tickets, of which, Canada was a member. Fisman highlights Canada’s ticket-free status, as a ‘pround Canadian’, in an interview with Clive Thompson in a NYTimes Magazine “The Year in Ideas” online multimedia clip.
The diplomat parking problem has been effectively solved by the Bloomberg Administration when it negotiated a deal in which the licenses of diplomats with more than two violations were taken away.