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Rather than receding, national corruption levels remain unchanged since 1997 and may even be increasing, according to Transparency International’s annual corruption index. Indeed, most of the world is beset by corruption, aside from Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and a few European countries.

But Canada’s recent arrival in the global corruption spotlight is mainly a product of the OECD convention and its bungled adoption by Ottawa under lobbying pressure from activists and some U.S. corporations. The first major bungle was by the Stephen Harper Conservatives in 2013/14, followed by the Trudeau Liberals in 2017/18.

Its deeper origins, however, can be found in the bowels of Washington politics in the post-Watergate era. The OECD convention was concocted after U.S. politicians discovered their anti-corruption crusade of the 1970s — which led to the creation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977 — left U.S. corporations out of the running for international business deals.

It’s useful to recall that corruption has a rich history around the world, including in the U.S. In light of this week’s college bribery scandal, it also exists in surprising forms.

Rather than receding, national corruption levels remain unchanged since 1997 and may even be increasing

In his 1984 book Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea, the late John Noonan sifted through thousands of years of history to document bribery as a legal and routine practice dating back to at least 1500 BC.

Among the anecdotes in his 700-page work, Noonan describes the plight of Francis Bacon, the 16th-century father of the scientific method, who fell from political grace after his conviction for having enhanced his 3,000-pound income as England’s Lord High Chancellor with a bribing system that bought in 12,000 to 16,000 pounds a year from litigants.