Canada’s first prime minister resigned over a conflict of interest scandal in 1873. John A. Macdonald was accused of accepting election funds from a shipping magnate in exchange for the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
It was Canada’s first political scandal, long before the country had a conflict of interest watchdog.
“The big thing is we now have a conflict of interest commissioner,” Nelson Wiseman, political science professor at the University of Toronto, told The Epoch Times. “So if someone complains, this fellow or gal has to look at it. That’s their job, and before there was nobody who had such a job. Thus these things would happen, and how would you ever find out about them?”…