Petty Corruption?
For several years I worked in Winnipeg Manitoba. By strange circumstances it was also the city I was born in but left when I was one month old.
Winnipeg is actually a fairly wealthy place. It was the center of wheat board trading, insurance, investment and all sorts of lucrative financial stuff. For decades every Sony device sold in Canada went through there and was marked up significantly.
There is a world class Ballet troupe and a Symphony Orchestra. It is in the middle of dead flat Prairie with hot summers and painfully cold winters.
It is also just like a small town where everyone knows everyone and networking and connections start in grade school. I worked in a construction and construction materials company. I was told the job there was to be an engineering manager, but after I went to see I was told that job had been given to a young guy who they would appreciate if I helped him develop his skills. The money was the same and I was stupid and stayed. The reason the young guy was there was he was the son of the City Manager.
In many cities the city manager is a non-elected bureaucrat who holds all the actual day to day power. My employer supplied materials and things directly to the city without bidding on them, and this young guy was the tit for the tat. There was a lot of city money coming in.
I learned a lot about ethics and law there as the bosses made an art of skirting both. Over time I was getting more and more uncomfortable but I learned there was no way around the "culture" in the office. The usual outlets to report such things were filled with people's friends and even family.
The last big event that turned me was a huge project. The local newspaper was part of a big national chain. They were building a new printing facility. It was huge, expensive and everything had to be built around and for the press machine being made in Germany. I had been moved to sales as I could do preliminary designs and price them in one go. I would go to design meetings and offer alternatives and rough costs and follow up quickly. The project was being done by a company called "The Austin Company". I had never heard of them. At lunch with their project managers I found out they never bid jobs to tenders. They always negotiated with the owners and did turnkey work. The company was one of the biggest in the world and very rich. I was impressed.
The project was really interesting. As is often the case in Winnipeg they liked to build in the winter. The ground is nice a hard rather than the usual horrible sticky mud. I prepared a scheme with the architects to prefabricate the whole thing so It could be built like a kit in any weather. I worked hard and refined it and made a very thorough price estimate. That was taken by the sales manager and the bosses fiddled it a bit before submission.
The next day the head of the office was smiling and said we got the job. I asked how was that possible, it was only submitted the day before. He then told me that we always were getting the job regardless. Our company was owned by a huge international construction materials conglomerate which also, surprise, owned the Austin Company.
That upset me in a strange way. First I was elated to get the job as it was a tricky one and I had put a lot into it. Next I was pissed that I had worked so hard when the bosses knew the fix was in. Finally I felt more than a bit dirty.
In my defense I did not know and did the best job I could so the product was a clean effort. I do not know what the fiddles in the prices were or what transpired on phone calls, but my part was clean. Still the smell of cheating was in the air.
There were more things later. Like the provincial lottery company building a palace for themselves without bidding it out. I was already making plans for an exit. When the for sale sign went up in front of my house I started to get calls from other companies about job offers. There was a gentlemen's agreement to not poach people from other firms but they knew where I lived and when my house went on the market. I wanted out of the city. It was too much.
So I left and headed back West. A new baby and my wife in two cars driving through a spring blizzard.















