MONTREAL — On our daily political panel on CJAD, we recently debated the question of which is worse: A city with a corrupt system for procuring municipal contracts (Montreal), or a city cursed with a crackhead mayor (Toronto).

Already, the Charbonneau Commission is going a long way to take the sting out of that infamous Maclean’s cover story depicting Montreal as the most corrupt city in the most corrupt province. Quebec’s joint police task force, the fearsome UPAC, has proved it won’t hesitate to arrest mayors.

The creation of the Charbonneau Commission was the result of political pressure brought to bear by a scandalized population watching brilliant investigative journalism — particularly on Radio Canada’s investigative television program Enquete. This encouraged management at La Presse and The Gazette to join the hunt, commissioning some razor-sharp investigative reporting.

“Investigative journalism is expensive and the targets sue,” observes Jean Pelletier, journalistic editor and chief at Radio Canada. “But we are committed to it.” Enquete continues to give sleepless nights to politicians, contractors and corrupt civil servants across Quebec. They play no favourites, going after Liberals and Pequistes with equal determination. This week, the head of one of the province’s most powerful labour unions, the FTQ, was forced to resign in the wake of an Enquete investigation.

Enquete‘s Alain Gravel is conscious of the danger. In most of North America, investigative journalism has gone out of style. Not so in Quebec, where journalists have been known to put their lives on the line to dig out the rot. Reporter Michel Auger’s work on biker gangs put him in harm’s way. He survived six bullets — not meant to scare him, but to kill him. A generation earlier, Le Devoir crime reporter Jean-Pierre Charbonneau survived a mafia shooting in his paper’s newsroom.

Meanwhile, organized crime experts are saluting the work done in Montreal — while bemoaning the lack of attention criminal oligarchs receive in Ontario and in places like the docks in Vancouver harbour, where biker gangs rule.

In most of North America, investigative journalism has gone out of style. Not so in Quebec, where journalists have been known to put their lives on the line to dig out the rot.

But what little we know tells us that high-level corruption is not confined to Montreal. A team from Radio Canada approached their counterparts in Toronto, offering to perform a joint investigation into contract allocations in Toronto. On a preliminary scouting trip the RadCan investigative team discovered the system for asphalt contracting in Toronto was every bit as black and corrupt as it is in Montreal. But there was little appetite to commit the resources to do the necessary digging.

The city once called ‘Toronto the Good’ is now considered by international mafia experts to be the North American capital of the ‘Ndrangheta. Retired RCMP organized crime expert Paul Soave calls it the biggest and most sinister criminal operation in the world. In Toronto they are largely ignored by politicians and police, says Julian Sher, senior producer at CBC’s the fifth estate and author of several books on organized crime.

To their credit, CBC National News did a report on collusion and corruption in the tendering of construction contracts in Toronto last fall. But there has been little follow-up.

Radio-Canada also discovered little enthusiasm for investigating corruption in the booming Alberta economy. A Radio-Canada team went to Lamont, Alberta, just outside Edmonton, and discovered corruption in housing construction. They found and followed a disheartened Quebec contractor from Laval named Gilles Filiatrault, a born-again Christian looking for a clean start in the Western Canadian construction industry boom. Instead, the team found this Quebec builder running into the same system of kickbacks and graft he fled in Quebec. As a result of Enquete’s long-distance reporting, the former town manager at the centre of the allegations was charged with fraud and forgery.

Consider all of that and then consider the fact that the mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking crack cocaine — the kind of drug you source from shady characters, all quite capable of using extrortion to achieve their ends.

Organized crime experts across the nation warn us that most politicians are naïve. They accept cash and favours, leaving themselves vulnerable to extortion and blackmail.

Montreal’s new mayor has promised to appoint a crime-busting figure — our own Eliot Ness — to sink the mafia. We await the appointment.

Anne Lagace-Dowson is an-award winning broadcast journalist and political analyst. Anne appears every weekday morning at 9.05 a.m. for a political panel discussion on the Montreal talk radio station CJAD.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.