Leadership Quote by Pauline Marois

The power here is in the arithmetic of suspicion: Pauline Marois turns uncertainty into an indictment. By admitting “we don’t know” the exact proportion, she sidesteps the easy trap of sounding like a politician laundering a talking point through fake precision. Then she immediately offers numbers anyway - not as data, but as a moral range of what citizens should be prepared to believe. The question isn’t whether it’s 25 or 30 per cent; it’s whether the public can tolerate any plausible number that high.

The subtext is tactical. Corruption is often discussed as a pathology of individual bad actors; Marois reframes it as a budget line with beneficiaries. “Public funds” becomes a pipeline, and “feeding organized crime” supplies the visceral endpoint. That verb matters: it suggests an ecosystem being sustained, not an isolated scam. It’s a quiet escalation from waste to complicity, implying that everyday governance failures can bankroll forces that actively undermine the state.

As a politician, she’s also doing coalition-building work. Voters who might shrug at insider deal-making may not shrug at organized crime. The quote collapses the distance between City Hall-style collusion and the kind of criminality people fear in the street, making anti-corruption not just an ethics issue but a public safety mandate. In a Quebec context shaped by periodic scandals and inquiries into construction, contracting, and party financing, her vagueness reads less like evasiveness than like a nod to how corruption thrives: in the gaps between what’s provable and what’s obvious.