Excerpt from Chapter 1:
Alberta Politics and the Culture of Power

True to his word, the premier tabled his term paper in the legislature, and newspapers posted it on their web sites. He had received a grade of 77 percent for the essay in a course he was taking at Athabasca University as part of his work towards a degree in communication.

Within 24 hours, rumours were spreading that the paper was plagiarized. I dismissed them; politics is full of outrageous and sometimes cruel hearsay. Then on the third day, I received a call from a professor at the University of Alberta who had taught me when I was an undergraduate decades before. "Kevin," he said, "I was curious about the premier's paper so I downloaded it from the Edmonton Journal web site. Before the end of the first page, I was suspicious. If you mark as many papers as I do, you can sense when something is plagiarized. So I did a check through the Web and, well, he has copied whole sections of this paper word for word. I've marked a lot of papers in my career, and this is one of the worst cases of plagiarism I've ever seen."

By this time many people had done the same check on the premier's essay. More than half the paper was copied word for word from other sources. The news spread like wildfire. The media had a field day, quoting experts on plagiarism from all over the continent. Plagiarism normally warrants serious penalties, even expulsion, for any normal student. The premier toughed it out, defending himself as best he could, and in a few days the controversy began to fade.

Then came the really alarming event...


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