> As for the infrastructure, I'd posit that crappy infrastructure at high costs is largely due to corrupt politicians (ever hear of another place where money played too big a role in electoral campaigns?) and construction companies being run by the mafia [2].

To add on that, people always think Québec is more corrupt than anywhere else because of a number of events in the last years, but I'm quite sure this is not unique to Quebec and you have the same phenomena everywhere else. We only heard about corruption in Quebec because people were interested to investigate.