Peace, order and good government.

That’s what the Fathers of Confederation envisioned for the fledgling dominion of Canada in 1867.

But that constitutional altruism has not immunized the nation against political scandal.

Here are five of the biggest imbroglios in Canadian history:

The Pacific Scandal: Canada’s first major political scandal remains one of its largest.

Conservative prime minister John A. Macdonald was implicated after it emerged he had accepted more than $350,000 in election funds during the 1872 campaign from Montreal tycoon Sir Hugh Allan.

In return, Allan’s Canadian Pacific Railway Company received the contract to build the transcontinental railroad that bound Canada together.

The controversy’s eruption in 1873 forced Macdonald and his government to resign and swept the Liberals of Alexander Mackenzie to power.

Allan’s firm lost the contract and the building of the CPR — a condition of British Columbia joining Canada — was stalled until 1880.

But Macdonald made a comeback, returning to the Tories to office in 1878 and remaining prime minister until his death in 1891.

The Beauharnois Scandal: During the 1930 election, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberal party accepted a $700,000 campaign donation from the Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Company in exchange for allowing the firm to divert the St. Lawrence River west of Montreal to generate electricity.

After King’s Liberals lost that vote, the new Conservative government of prime minister R. B. Bennett revealed that Liberal senators had been personally given cash from the Quebec company to help bankroll federal and provincial campaigns. It’s believed Bennett’s party had spurned similar offers of money from the company.

King insisted he knew nothing of the payments though he conceded the debacle had damaged his reputation. “I have walked through the valley of humiliation,” he said at the time.

Still, he recovered and his Grits were re-elected in the 1935 election.

Gerda Munsinger:

The biggest sex scandal in Canadian history had all the elements of a John Le Carré novel.

For three years starting in 1958, an East German prostitute and suspected Soviet spy named Gerda Munsinger enjoyed affairs with Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker’s cabinet members George Hees and Pierre Sévigny.

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Diefenbaker put a halt to the dalliances when told of them by the RCMP in 1961 and Munsinger left for West Germany that year. The scandal did not hit the front pages until Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson’s subsequent government exposed it in 1966.

The Star’s Robert Reguly tracked down the alleged Cold War Mata Hari in Munich that year. She admitted to the sexual relations, but insisted she was not a spy and a subsequent royal commission confirmed that.

The Airbus Affair: The scandal emerged after Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of 34 Airbus A320 jetliners for $1.8 billion and a subsequent RCMP investigation.

During that probe, the Mounties claimed Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was involved in a kickbacks scheme allegedly orchestrated by German arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber. Mulroney denied this and successfully sued the government for libel, receiving $2.1 million for his legal costs and an apology from Ottawa and the RCMP.

But then it was revealed that, while still an MP in 1993, Mulroney had received between $225,000 and $300,000 in cash payments from Schreiber to develop an armaments plant and a fast-food pasta chain.

The government said it wouldn’t have settled the lawsuit if it had known of the Schreiber relationship.

While the RCMP never laid charges in the Airbus matter, the controversy still taints the reputation of the former prime minister.

The sponsorship scandal: After the razor-thin margin of victory in the 1995 Quebec referendum, where Quebecers only narrowly voted to remain in Canada, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien wanted to remind people in the province how much their federal government does for them.

But raising Ottawa’s profile in Quebec — through $250 million in advertising and sponsorship programs — was a boondoggle. Auditor general Sheila Fraser concluding up to $100 million had been misspent or couldn’t be accounted for.

Funds were misdirected to ad agencies linked to the Liberals, leading Chrétien’s successor, Grit prime minister Paul Martin to establish the Gomery Commission to distance his fledgling administration from Chretien’s government.

But the issue dogged the Liberals, costing them a majority government when Martin eked out a minority in the 2004 election before losing to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2006.

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