In a recent Project Save the World forum three people who are fascinated with malfeasance met on Zoom to talk: Metta Spencer, a sociologist long interested in the post-Soviet space, and two University of Toronto criminologists, Leonid Kosals and Matthew Light.
Spencer asked the two scholars to compare what they see in Canada with sleazy schemes that they’ve studied in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the broader Global South. The conversation ranged from furtive trafficpolice shakedowns to cryptocurrency memes launched by Donald Trump; yet beneath the anecdotes ran a single thread: corruption. The professors argued that it is not merely a catalogue of individual crimes but a barometer of shifting political and economic fault lines.
Spencer opened by questioning Leon Kosals, who spent much of his career teaching at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics before resettling in Canada a decade ago.p. Kosals observed that public debate too often treats corruption as a discrete offence—money under a table, perhaps—while for researchers it signals “political irregularities and dysfunctions,” a relationship among private actors, elites, and the state that changes with culture, technology and geopolitics.
TWO STRUCTURAL SHIFTS
Kosals then sketched two global transformations that, in his view, are redrawing the corruption map. The first is the so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ New digital instruments— he singled out cryptocurrencies—blur familiar legal boundaries. Ten years ago, he remarked, no one could have imagined a U.S. president introducing a personal cryptocurrency and forcing observers to ask, “Is that a scam or a legitimate venture?”
The second shift is the growing weight of the Global South. States once peripheral to rule-making now negotiate on more equal terms, and longstanding southern practices such as guanxi in China, blat in Russia, or wasta in many Arab societies come to the table with them.
Because those practices are normalized locally, he said, northern governments and corporations must decide whether to label them corruption or adapt to hybrid standards. The result, according to Kosals, is “great uncertainty” felt by ordinary citizens and elites alike. In unsettled times, he added, corruption frequently becomes the elite stabilizing strategy of choice.
Spencer recalled riding around Moscow in the 1980s with a hired driver who was stopped almost weekly for so-called ‘traffic offences.’ He always handed the policeman a bill from his wallet, entirely in full view. Does that casual brazenness still happen, and does it extend to higher officials as well?
Kosals answered that street-level bribery still occurs, but elite corruption in Russia has grown subtler through centralization. He highlighted what he called a “purge” inside the defence ministry during the war in Ukraine. While some senior figures were replaced, lower- and mid-level actors overseeing soldiers’ pay or procurement found new opportunities for personal enrichment.
War, he noted, spawns a “military economy” whose leakages differ from those of the Perestroika era, yet are pervasive now.
A DEFINITIONAL DETOUR
Matthew Light began by reframing the very word ‘Corruption’. In his organised-crime seminars, he tells students that corruption is an analytical or sometimes legal category, “not a moral one.” To illustrate, he cited the hypothetical case of bribing a Nazi concentration-camp guard to let prisoners escape—a corrupt transaction by any formal definition, but morally laudable.
The point, Light continued, is that calling something corrupt signals that private benefit has overridden an official duty; whether that breach is wicked or virtuous depends on context.
Having cleared up that point, Light turned to Canada. Citizens of wealthy democracies, he observed, often picture corruption as envelopes of cash or suitcases crossing borders, and by that metric, Canada looks clean. Patronage appointments, while not unknown, also appear modest beside extremes elsewhere. Yet if analysts shift focus to “grand” or political corruption—the quiet purchase of regulatory decisions— Canadian exceptionalism fades.
Light’s prime illustration lay a few kilometres from their computer screens: Ontario Place, the lakefront park now earmarked for a private spa. Ancient trees have been felled, Light said, to accommodate a company so opaque that journalists remain unsure whether it is Swiss, German or something else entirely. The project, critics note, required provincial amendments to planning law and a sizeable taxpayer subsidy for adjacent parking. Whether any statutes were broken is less certain, Light argued, than the lesson: influence can be channelled through formal lobbying, legal donations or post-office sinecures rather than brown envelopes.
If scholars include these routes, Canada’s corruption profile begins to look less like “pure as driven snow” and more like “purer only by comparison.”
Both professors stressed that the manifestation may differ—overt in one place, disguised in another—but the underlying dynamic is constant. Kosals’s Russian examples, Light remarked, illustrate administrative corruption fused to military urgency, while his Ontario case spotlights commercial interests courting pliant regulators. The unifying feature is a gap between the public purpose stated on paper and the private incentives steering behaviour.
TECHNOLOGY’S DOUBLE EDGE
Kosals returned to the theme of digital disruption. Cryptocurrencies, offshore exchanges, and encrypted messaging make it easier both to move illicit payments and to hide ownership.
At the same time, he hinted, the very transparency and immutability advertised by blockchain enthusiasts could eventually aid investigators. For now, however, regulators play catch-up, and that lag widens the zone of ambiguity in which elites can experiment.
The conversation circled back to the normative divide between North and South. Practices that are routine in Lagos or Shenzhen can scandalize Toronto, but as Kosals emphasized, the South’s growing leverage forces mutual accommodation. He predicted a search for “common ground” rather than unilateral moralising.
Light concurred, noting that multinationals cannot simply impose northern compliance codes while ignoring embedded local networks; instead they must navigate, reform, or sometimes replicate them.
Spencer asked whether ordinary Russians today find corruption worse than a decade ago. Kosals said that perceptions vary: Moscow’s visible petty graft has eased since the 1990s, yet the invisibility of high-level dealings breeds cynicism.
Front-line soldiers’ families, for instance, now confront exploitative middlemen when trying to secure promised bonuses. Such micro-level anguish, he implied, is where the abstract phenomenon turns visceral.
What should the forum’s viewers take from an hour spent comparing traffic bribes, wartime procurement and lakefront redevelopment?
First, corruption is not a distant problem confined to “weak” states. It adapts to structure, technology and opportunity.
Second, moral condemnation, while usually justified, cannot substitute for the slow, unglamorous labour of institution-building—tightening procurement rules, capping donations, writing conflict-of-interest codes with teeth, financing investigative journalism, and sheltering whistleblowers from retaliation.
Third, the two criminologists warned against the complacency that often accompanies comparative virtue. In an age of polycrisis—climate shocks, digital upheaval, shifting geopolitical blocs—the “elite response to uncertainty,” in Kosals’s phrase, will remain what it has so often been: the search for private insulation at public expense.
Whether that search takes the form of suitcases of cash, equity stakes in a lakeside spa, or ownership tokens hidden on a blockchain, matters less than the underlying logic: when rules are fluid, insiders prosper.
As the Zoom windows winked shut, Spencer thanked her guests and reflected on the session: Corruption is not a blemish on certain societies; it is the shadow that power everywhere casts when the light of accountability grows dim. We can narrow that shadow, but only if we first admit it falls on us, too.
