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Corruption is a strong word, which we don’t often use in Canada when it comes to politics. It infers a blatant disregard for honesty, ethics or principle. But it’s the word that springs to mind when you contemplate the insidious relationship between Ontario’s Liberal government and the teachers unions they do so much to cultivate and please.

How else to describe it? The Liberals spend hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure the unions remain relatively quiescent and co-operative, offering rich contracts, special treatment, secret agreements and generous payoffs with public dollars. In return the unions spend millions undermining the government’s opponents and working to ensure the Liberals stay in power.

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It’s a relationship that has grown increasingly rotten over time, and may have reached an apogee in revelations of a $2.5 million payment to three unions to cover their costs in acrimonious bargaining over a new contract. The brazenness of it alone suggests the Liberals have lost any hint of rectitude when it comes to the handling of public money — though they did do their best to hide the transaction, suggesting that, at some level, they still sense it’s offensive, wrong and abusive of the public trust. Not that those concerns stopped them. Indeed, Education Minister Liz Sandals response has been a show of public arrogance that takes the breath away. Asked if she’d demanded receipts to justify the $2.5 million paid to the unions for high school, French and Catholic teachers, she offered a reply that fairly drips with contempt: