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VIDEO: Montreal Italians slam anti-corruption ad

The Local Italy
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VIDEO: Montreal Italians slam anti-corruption ad
The ad features a man dressed in a suit with a giant rat tail putting banknotes into a safe while Italian music plays in the background. Screengrab: YouTube

A satirical anti-corruption advertisement has angered members of Montreal’s Italian population who believe that it unfairly targets Italians as the sole source of corruption in the city.

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In the advertisement, sponsored by Montreal’s blue collar union as part of their ‘Nettoyons Montréal’ (Let’s clean up Montreal) anti-corruption campaign, a man dressed in a suit with a giant rat tail is seeing putting banknotes into a safe while Italian music plays in the background. 

“I think it’s pretty obvious with the choice of actor, the setting and the music, Montreal’s blue collar union was really aiming to portray the Italian-Canadian players as the sole perpetrators in this whole system, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” Adam Zara, deputy editor of the Panoram Italia magazine was quoted as saying by CTV news.

But this was not the intention of the ad campaign, according to union representative Stéphan Meloche.

“Nobody can deny the fact that…some names heard on the Charbonneau commission [a public inquiry in Quebec into potential corruption in the management of public construction contracts] sound Italian, but we want to assure the Italian community that it was not an attack against them,” he told Huffington Post Canada.

On the union’s campaign website, the advertisement is described in French as a “satirical and oddly realistic portrait that denounces with wry humour the abuses which have become established in the system for too long: from smart crooks to bribes passed in brown envelopes as thick as those who carry them.” 

Watch the advert and leave your opinion in the comments section below:

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