This week’s compliance agreement between Yves Côté, the federal Commissioner of Elections, and the immense engineering firm SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. does not name any of the since-deposed SNC executives who ran rings around the country’s election laws for seven years, primarily to the benefit of the Liberal Party of Canada. It’s a shame. Surely somebody should be congratulated for their chutzpah.

The facts of the case are impressive. From 2004 to 2011 former SNC executives, operating out of the office at least two successive CEOs, disguised $118,000 in donations to federal political parties by falsifying names, inventing expenses or bonuses, and spreading donations across several employees, and sometimes to members of employees’ families.

About $8,000 of the money went to the federal Conservatives, who were in power for most of those seven years. Since old habits seem to die hard, roughly $110,000 went to the Liberals.

Both parties paid back all the money once Côté’s office told them of the scheme, about which both parties claim to have known nothing. Côté says everyone involved in cooking up the unlawful contributions has left the company.

The compliance agreement, signed by both Côté and SNC, notes SNC’s enthusiastic co-operation in the investigation into this mess. Among other things, the company granted immunity to internal whistleblowers, which brought some of the political-donation scheme to light.

SNC has been on an accelerated reform kick since 2012, when its former CEO, Pierre Duhaime, and his right-hand, Riadh Ben Aissa, left the company just in time to be arrested for fraud in the awarding of a contract for a huge new Montreal hospital. The prospect of a hanging concentrates the mind: Faced with the possibility it could be barred from future federal contracts, SNC has lately taken care to wash whiter than white.

But the details of this story make it hard to be reassured. The clandestine donations began early in 2004, months after Jean Chrétien passed a new Canada Elections Act aimed precisely at reducing corporate influence over political parties. They continued through 2006, when Stephen Harper passed the Accountability Act, supposedly to eliminate corporate donations. It’s as if SNC was laughing at the law.

The Liberal party profited from almost all of the donations. Under three separate leaders, Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. Through four election campaigns in a row. All of it after the sponsorship scandal had supposedly led the Liberals to clean up their fundraising act.

And while SNC says it has shown the door to everyone who was responsible for its side of the scheme, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have offered any such assurance. Both parties say they were taken entirely by surprise by the news that a sustained rain of money from Quebec was all coming from the same SNC-branded firehose.

Let us, for charity’s sake, take the parties at their word. It is, I guess, possible that a few SNC executives were hosing money around purely for kicks, or for the satisfaction of enabling robust democratic debate. That they mostly stuck with the Liberals through four of the worst campaigns in the party’s history could, maybe, mean they simply wanted to give the Liberals a sporting chance in hard times.

But if the provenance of donations from 2004 and 2011 could surprise the parties now, then how can they be sure none of the money they received this week is similarly tainted? There’s no reason not to buy the glad news that SNC has seen the light. But SNC is hardly the only company with a stake in federal construction contracts. And indeed, given the $120 billion Justin Trudeau plans to spend on infrastructure over the next several years, the stakes are getting higher.

The things SNC executives did that were supposed to be illegal then are still supposed to be illegal today. That SNC executives managed to do them anyway suggests other people may still be doing them. Tightening the law some more sure wouldn’t hurt.

To the long list of reasons why Trudeau should keep swabbing the deck of Canada’s election financing laws, add this: He hopes to attract many billions of dollars in foreign investment. It’s one of his highest priorities. Investors like to believe the public rules are the real rules, that markets aren’t rigged, that a fair bid has a fair chance. If I were such an investor taking a look at large public works projects in Canada, this week’s news would have gone far toward ruining my appetite.

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