Oct. 29, 2006: Dog days
The dogs of bore
There must be something positive we can say about the current, ongoing, never-ending, will-it-ever-please-god-soon-end saga of Belinda and Peter, Paul and Belinda, Peter and his dog, Belinda and Tie, Tie and his wronged wife, Belinda and her feigned innocence, Condi and Peter, Peter and his dog… again. And now, of course, Peter and his foot in his mouth… Yet again. Still.
Perhaps the best news is simply the fact the most pressing political question of the day in Canada today is whether Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay really did suggest his former girlfriend and Liberal MP Belinda Stronach was… well, a dog. Surely, a country with nothing more pressing to discuss is a country worth living in?
Or maybe the good news is that this dog’s breakfast of scandal has given Canada’s underappreciated newspaper headline writers a chance to walk their own tortured word-dogs: Howls of Protest, Liberals Won’t Let Dog Lie, MacKay Not Out of the Doghouse, Dogged Determination, NDP Wants to Put a Leash on Commons Hounds … well, you get the picture. Perhaps now we understand why they are so underappreciated.
Or, just possibly, it is the fact this canine contretemps has given newspaper columnists — present company excluded, of course — more than enough fluff to fill up their word counts without having to do the intellectual heavy lifting required to figure out what we’re really doing in Afghanistan, or whether the Tories’ new clean air act is simply hot air or — with apologies to a headline writer somewhere— just a case of smog and mirrors.
Which, if you remember — you’ll be forgiven if you don’t — is where the latest chapter in the Peter-and-Belinda-and-the-dog story actually began last week with a dumb-as-dust retort from MacKay, which was in response to a dumber-than-dust jibe from a Liberal MP about whether Stephen Harper’s new Clean Air Act made MacKay fear for the future of his dog.
MacKay gestured toward Stronach’s empty MP’s chair. “You have her,” he said.
Is. Alleged. To. Have. Said.
I have no trouble believing — without benefit of surgically enhanced audio, voiceprint analysis, a stunning fall collection of signed, sealed and delivered-to-the-Speaker affidavits from eight disinterested, civic-minded Liberal MPs, or even the surprise announcement that the federal Liberal women’s caucus is “absolutely disgusted and offended” by it all — that MacKay really did say what he is alleged to have said. Or that he would deny having said it.
It fits a pattern that goes back at least to MacKay’s now-I-promised-now-I-didn’t promise to Progressive Conservative leadership rival David Orchard not to engineer a merger between the PCs and the right-wing Reform/Alliance/wannabe Republican Party of Canada. Ooops.
It certainly fits too with the descriptions — as laid out in journalist Don Martin’s new biography of Stronach — of MacKay’s bitter, jilted-lover, “volcanic fury” at even seeing Stronach in the immediate aftermath of their very public breakup.
So, OK, he probably, almost certainly, absolutely said what he said.
So?
Where do we go from there?
The short answer is nowhere. It just adds one more pixel to our unflattering six-megapixel mental image of our foreign affairs minister.
Unfortunately, the Opposition in Ottawa now has a dog-with-a-bone (sorry, it’s catching) fixation with what MacKay said or didn’t say. Their almost ludicrously sanctimonious pronouncements — Jack Layton called for MacKay to be a “big enough man” and apologize even if he didn’t actually say what he said because “people believe they heard him say certain things,” while Liberal MP Judy Sgro upped the apology ante by claiming “the fact that he refuses to apologize to the women of Canada frankly is a complete disrespect for himself” — not only threaten to pre-empt the opportunities for this country’s stand-up comedians (their best lines will have all already been said with a straight face) but they also distract us from real issues.
Like Afghanistan. Like climate change. Like cuts to literacy programs. Like our made-in-Washington foreign policy. Like attacks on our civil liberties. Like… well, like almost anything else.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as, Reparations, a novel published this spring by HarperCollins.
Mulroney and the media… old columns
I've been writing about media coverage of Brian Mulroney and the Airbus scandal for years (most recently in the Sunday Daily News of Jan. 28, 2007). Here are some of the earlier columns as well as a link to a magazine profile of Mulroney I wrote for the Financial Post magazine in 1978 between his first failed leadership bid and his second, successful one..
The $300,000 question
(February 19, 2006)
If you want to know what Canada’s media considers important these days, take a brief gambol through Google’s database of Canadian news sources.
On Wednesday, I plugged the words “cartoon” and “Muslim” into the search engine and, 0.5 seconds later, Google spat back links to 9,990 stories in its Canada News library, most of them published in the past week. When I typed in “Gretzky” and “gambling,” Google found 6,030 stories in 0.19 seconds.
But when I entered the names “Mulroney” and “Schreiber,” it took the computer search engine all of 0.04 seconds to scour its complete collection of Canadian news sources and find a grand total of just 13 recent stories.
One of those was from an alternative online newspaper in British Columbia. Another was from the New Socialist, which referred to the latest twist in the never-quite-dead Airbus affair only in passing as part of a clearly more important story about how David Emerson had made the leap from Liberal cabinet minister to Tory cabinet minister without breaking a sweat or bothering to ask his constituents what they thought. (“Emerson” and “Harper,” by the way, produced 907 hits in 0.13 seconds.)
So what gives?
The week before, on Feb. 8, CBC-TV’s The Fifth Estate broadcast a full-show documentary called “Money, Truth and Spin.” The program — which featured the first sit-down interview with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian lobbyist whose friends included any number of prominent Canadian politicians — neatly connected some of the missing dots between our former prime minister and Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts.
It should have been very big news.
A quick recap. Soon after Mulroney left office, Schreiber told The Fifth Estate, he was approached by Mulroney’s ex-chief of staff Fred Doucet. Doucet explained to Schreiber that Mulroney needed money to help ease his transition back into private life. So Schreiber withdrew $300,000 from a Zurich bank account code-named “Britan” (for Brian) and doled it out in cash to Mulroney during three face-to-face meetings in Canada and the U.S. during 1993 and 1994.
The money came from a fund Schreiber controlled that had been set up to pay “grease money” to those who helped Airbus sell its jets to Air Canada.
In 1995, word leaked out that the RCMP was investigating Mulroney’s connection to those secret Swiss accounts and any role he might have played in Air Canada’s purchase of those jets.
Mulroney — who, for Machiavellian reasons too complex to go into here, was the most likely source of that leak — immediately launched a public relations offensive and sued the federal government for $50 million. He had soon won a groveling apology from the federal government, a $2-million settlement and, effectively, an end to the Mounties’ investigation.
During the legal proceedings in that lawsuit, however, Mulroney did testify under oath. He claimed he barely knew Schreiber and had had no business dealings with him.
But in 2003, when Mulroney’s $300,000 worth of non-business business dealings with Schreiber finally became public knowledge, a Mulroney spokesperson claimed the money was for consulting services Mulroney had provided in connection with a pasta business Schreiber was starting up.
Perhaps the most bizarre — and revealing — moment in last week’s documentary came when host Linden MacIntyre asked Schreiber what Mulroney actually did for the $300,000. Schreiber’s laugh lasted 10 seconds or more. “What had he done for the money?” Schreiber repeated MacIntyre’s question. “Well, I learned to my great surprise that he worked with me on spaghetti.”
Accept all the usual caveats. There is no evidence yet that Mulroney himself knew the cash he pocketed came from an account set up to distribute secret commissions in the Airbus sale. And Karlheinz Schreiber — who is fighting extradition to Germany where he faces criminal charges — is almost certainly looking out for his own best interests.
But even accepting those caveats, this is explosive stuff.
At the very least, there are suggestions that our former prime minister may have lied under oath about his relationship with Schreiber. And there are unanswered questions about what Mulroney really knew about the source of the cash he took.
Brian Mulroney is apparently sunning himself in Florida, recovering from his recent health problems and taking frequent phone calls from our new prime minister.
He is not, however, taking calls from the press.
But that’s OK. Canada’s mainstream news media, which has long seemed reticent to even touch this story — when the Globe and Mail first disclosed the fact of the $300,000 payments, it buried the revelation deep in the middle of a feature series that seemed primarily interested in exposing journalist Stevie Cameron as an RCMP source — still don’t seem interested in pursuing it.
Why is that? Good question.
Mulroney doth protest way too much
Sept. 18, 2005
So poor, misunderstood Brian Mulroney is “devastated” and “hurt” because his good friend, best-selling author Peter C. Newman, “betrayed” him. Newman’s betrayal? He assumed Mulroney meant it when he gave Newman complete and total tape-recorded access to his innermost ravings — not to mention a warehouse full of his government’s minutes and memos — so he could write the definitive, “warts and all” account of Mulroney’s prime ministership.
Mulroney didn’t really intend him to do any such thing, of course. He expected Newman to deliver a sanitized version of The Life of Brian — in which Mulroney stars as the poor electrician’s boy from Baie Comeau who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, vaulting over obstacles and villains to become the greatest prime minister Canada has ever known, better certainly than that bastard Pierre Trudeau, not to forget a primo world statesman and all-round fine fellow. The fall of the Berlin Wall? That was Brian’s doing. The invention of the Internet? Oh, sorry, that was Al Gore.
Mulroney assumed — on the reasonable basis of a career’s worth of deference from a lap-dog press corps in Ottawa — that Newman would know enough not to quote his profane and paranoid pontifications directly and, perhaps more importantly, that Newman would find a way to put Mulroney’s puffed up boasts (“Nobody has achievements like this, Peter. I can say that to you objectively. You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none…”) and slimy personal attacks (Mulroney’s successor, Kim Campbell, lost the 1993 election because she was too busy “screwing around” with her Russian boyfriend) into Newman’s own well-chosen and supportive words.
Now Mulroney, through his mouthpiece, Luc Lavoie, is trying to make it sound as if the 98 recorded, transcribed interviews Mulroney had with Newman over the years were just friendly, not-for-publication chats between best buddies. “For a man like this,” Lavoie said of Newman, “to tape him without his knowledge and use it this way is nothing short of betrayal.”
At least Mulroney isn’t claiming he never met Newman, which is what he said about me after I wrote a magazine profile of him back the late seventies. The Brian Mulroney who is front and centre in Newman’s new book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, is most definitely the man I remember from the afternoon and evening I spent listening to him rant. “If Joe Clark wins the (upcoming) election, I’ll eat this plate,” he told me over dinner. I dutifully wrote it down in my notebook while Mulroney watched me. We were most definitely on the record. A few minutes later, he was boasting that Rene Levesque’s Parti Quebecois “wouldn’t have won [the 1976 provincial] election if I was the leader” of the Tories.
After he’d had the chance to think about what he’d said, Mulroney tried to convince me not to publish the story. When it appeared in the Financial Post Magazine, in fact, he claimed he’d never even met me. (The reality was that it had taken me three months to get my audience with Mulroney; he’d even asked his good friend, Peter Newman, then the editor of Maclean’s, to vet me before he agreed to sit down with me!) Luckily for me, I had a receipt with Mulroney’s name on it to show for my time with him…
I only discovered later that the vain, profane, paranoid Mulroney I met that day was well known among the press gallery in Ottawa. But no one — until Newman — has ever written about that Mulroney.
Which makes it all the more ironic that Mulroney spews a good deal of venom in Newman’s book attacking the Ottawa press gallery for failing to appreciate his greatness. He calls them a “phony bunch of bastards,” which clearly is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The truth is that, for most of his career, the national press gave Mulroney a free pass. Even after he left office, Mulroney has enjoyed the benefits of a quiescent press. Consider just one recent example: Mulroney has never been pressed to account for the $300,000 he accepted from Karl Heinz Schreiber, the German businessman caught up in the Airbus scandal, soon after he returned to the private sector, ostensibly to lobby on behalf of another Schreiber enterprise. The Globe and Mail, which—to its credit — broke the original story a few years ago, seemed almost embarrassed by it, and has never done any serious follow up. Neither did any other mainstream media outlet.
And this week, of course, The Globe and Mail quickly weighed in with an apologetic, puzzled editorial asking, Why Hate Mulroney So?
“Brian Mulroney deserves much better,” wrote the Globe.
With enemies like that, who needs friends?
Brian and Karl’s excellent pasta adventure
Nov. 18, 2003
At first, I thought it must be one of those legal you-can’t-say-that-or-I’ll-sue-you-for-all-you’re-worth-and-then-I’ll sue-you-for-your-grandchildren’s inheritance kinds of stories.
Sort of like the last time Brian Mulroney sued us all for $50 million bucks because the Mounties had mucked about with his good name.
Or, sort of like Charles and the servant and — Oops, we can’t talk about that either. Besides, Prince Charles has already issued a statement completely, absolutely and unequivocally denying that anything happened, even though, of course, no one had yet publicly claimed anything had happened because, if they did, they’d end up in court faster than you could say, “Charles did what! To whom?” Not that he did, of course. He said he didn’t… do … whatever it was he didn’t say he didn’t do … So…
Confused?
Me too.
But not nearly as befuddled as I was last week after I read the three-word, huge-type headline slapped across the front Monday morning’s Globe and Mail.
The Globe, it seemed, had uncovered a juicy, newsy story worthy of its headline. Surely, I thought, every other media outlet will be all over this. There’ll be follow-ups. The TV talk shows will be thick with ethics experts and political scientists pontificating on the larger meaning of it all.
And… And —
Not a word. I watched the TV newscasts. Nothing. I scanned the local papers. Not a word. I even “googled” Canadian online news sites to see how they were reporting this revelation. Nada neither.
Maybe he’s filed suit already, I thought. Or gone to court to get an injunction banning further publication.
At first, I imagined I might have to write this column with a bag over my head and render that headline as “Schreiber _ Mulroney.”
Just so no one would sue me.
But then I figured I would have to make it clear that the _ didn’t stand for what Prince Charles didn’t do to the valet, or whoever it was he didn’t do it to, or with, or …
It was too confusing.
So I called a few editor friends. No, they told me, they knew of no legal reason why no one had followed up on the Globe’s story. One Halifax editor suggested it was “an old story… It pops up on the wire,” she said, “but only as ‘play’ it’s receiving [in other papers], and [Canadian Press] is not matching…”
An old story?
Where have I been?
But now that I know it’s not a legal lip-zip, let me tell you what the Globe actually said.
“Schreiber Hired Mulroney.”
Schreiber, of course, is Karlheinz Schreiber, the German-Canadian middleman who was at the centre of the infamous Airbus affair back in the mid-nineties. There were allegations he’d paid illegal commissions to senior Canadian officials to grease the sale of Airbus jets to Air Canada back in the late eighties. When the RCMP linked Mulroney to Schreiber in a letter to Swiss authorities seeking access to bank accounts it said might be connected to the deal, the former prime minister quickly launched a preemptive libel suit against the federal government. Ottawa apologized and paid Mulroney’s legal and PR fees.
During the discovery stage of the libel suit, Mulroney testified: “I never had any dealings with him [Schreiber].”
Which was technically true. He “never had” dealings while he was prime minister. But, as the Globe story publicly disclosed for the first time, “the former prime minister accepted some $300,000 in retainers” from Schreiber “shortly after he left office.”
Whoa!
It turns out the Globe wasn’t even the first to discover this. In fact, the National Post’s Philip Mathias had confirmed the very same story in late 2000 or early 2001, but that newspaper had refused to publish it because… well, according to the Globe, the Post was in the middle of “its campaign of bemoaning the so-called victimization of Mulroney… on the one hand, while puffing him on the other, particularly when doing so cast the current prime minister in a less positive light.”
Wow.
Insert the usual disclaimers here. Mulroney claims the money was for “his assistance in promoting a fresh-cooked pasta business Schreiber had started in Canada,” was paid after Mulroney left office and was all, as the Globe notes, “perfectly legal.”
Still… It casts a new and damning light on Mulroney’s carefully parsed testimony about his relationship with Schreiber. And red-flags all sorts of ethical questions about why a former prime minister would get into business with someone with Schreiber’s controversial reputation.
Questions, one would have thought, the rest of Canada’s news media would have been eager to ask last week.
So why haven’t they?
Good question.
If Mulroney didn’t, who did? Don’t ask
(April 29, 2003)
Would that Donald Marshall, Jr., had had such good media friends in such high and mighty media places during the 11 long years the poor, young Native man spent languishing in Dorchester Penitentiary for a murder he didn’t commit.
Last week, there was much joy in national mediaville when the RCMP quietly announced it was ending, without laying any additional criminal charges, an eight-year probe into allegations kickbacks were paid to key players — including possibly even Prime Minister Brian Mulroney — in connection with the $1.8 billion sale of 34 Airbus passenger jets to then-government-owned Air Canada in 1988.
The editorial deep thinkers at the better-dead-than-Liberal-red Globe and Mail weighed in with their assessment that the whole sordid affair had been handled in an “inexcusably slipshod manner.”
Never to be out-shocked and appalled, their opposite numbers at the more-right-than-right National Post declared themselves greatly “relieved for Mr. Mulroney” that the “witch hunt” was finally over. It had all been a “baseless, unjustifiable intrusion on Mr. Mulroney's post-PM life, one bordering on harassment,” the Post’s editorial thundered. “Mr. Mulroney is to be congratulated for the calm, gentlemanly way he has endured: He could be calling for heads to roll and for the public vaults to be opened further to pay him for his stresses. That he is not is a testament to his decency.”
Oh, puh-lease.
In 1996, Mr. Mulroney’s PR flunkies used a leaked translation of a sloppily written federal Justice Department letter to Swiss authorities — a letter, logic dictates, they probably leaked themselves — that simply asked the Swiss to cooperate with the RCMP probe into the Airbus allegations, in order to try and bludgeon the Mounties into deep-sixing their whole investigation before it even got underway.
Though it partly worked — the government was forced to apologize for suggestions in its letter and Mulroney got a cool two million of taxpayers’ dollars to pay for his lawyers and PR machine — the RCMP pressed on with its investigation anyway.
Much to the annoyance, of course, of those same national newspapers. On the basis of what seems little more than its own substantial gut feeling, the Globe in 1999 concluded that “no such crime had been committed” and the Post stomped its feet and demanded that the investigation “must be formally and publicly closed” immediately.
The irony in all of this is that neither newspaper seemed much interested in pursuing what Globe and Mail columnist Hugh Winsor decorously referred to as “loose ends.” One of those loose ends — to me, at least — remains especially intriguing: whatever happened to the millions of dollars in hidden commissions and lobbying fees Airbus and other German industries paid to Karlheinz Schreiber in order to grease Canadian sales of their products.
Schreiber, a German middleman — whose chief talent seems to be his facility for making friends with politically powerful people such as former federal cabinet ministers Liberal Marc Lalonde and Tory Elmer MacKay, and former Tory provincial premiers Frank Moores and Peter Lougheed — is currently in Canada fighting attempts to extradite him. German authorities want to bring him home to charge him with evading $20 million in taxes on the hidden commissions he received for promoting, among other ventures, the Airbus sale to Air Canada.
Why would Airbus funnel millions of dollars into the pockets of Schreiber, a man of no known airplane expertise? As a tip for being a nice guy? Or so he could spread some of that cash around to other lobbyists and the appropriate decision makers?
German prosecutors, in fact, allege that that is exactly what Schreiber did in similar situations in Germany. They claim he made payoffs to German businessmen and politicians, including former Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Did he do that in Canada too? What really happened to the millions he received for each airplane Airbus sold?
We will probably never know.
While it is certainly a relief to know that the RCMP has now decided there are no grounds for charging our former prime minister in connection with any of this, it is troubling nonetheless to realize we may never find out whether any of the cash Schreiber received disappeared into the pockets of any other Canadian politician, or bureaucrat, or lobbyist.
Not that anyone in the editorial offices at the Globe or the Post is probably losing much sleep over that.
Perhaps they simply misheard that old journalistic invocation to “afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.” They thought it said, “Comfort the affluent.” And they did.
So Karlheinz Schreiber wants his money back.
Jan. 6, 2000
Karlheinz, you may recall, is the generous, outgoing philanthropic German-Canadian lobbyist. . . oops, businessman, who certainly did not attempt to bribe . . . er, influence . . . uh, do anything he shouldn’t have for any Canadian politician in exchange for anything whatsoever in connection with the sale of Airbus airplanes to Air Canada back in the eighties.
The maker of those planes simply paid Karlheinz millions of dollars in commissions because he is, without a doubt, a nice guy who plays well with his political friends. It was certainly not — perish the thought — because the plane manufacturer expected him to spread any of that money around to the right people in Canada in order to grease the deals it wanted done.
Perish that thought right now.
It’s not Karlheinz’s fault he just happens to have good friends in high places. Friends like former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney and current Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien. Not to forget — lest we forget — some of his other many good political friends like former Liberal cabinet minister Marc Lalonde and former Tory cabinet minister Elmer MacKay, who each stepped forward with $100,000 to bail him out of jail last fall after Canadian authorities arrested him on a German warrant in connection with piddling allegations of tax evasion, bribery and breach of trust there.
The Germans claimed he’d fled to Canada to try and evade answering their questions about why he hadn’t paid $20 million in lawful German taxes on hidden commissions he’d received for, among other things, peddling Airbus airplanes to Canada. They wanted Canada to extradite him back to Germany so they could have a chat with him about that money.
Karlheinz says the Germans have got it all wrong. He says he came to Canada because he likes it here. And of course there’s nothing to those scurrilous allegations. But no, he doesn’t want to go back to Germany right now to set them straight.
Sounds reasonable to me. After all, if Karlheinz’s word is good enough for the editorial writers at both the Globe and Mail and the National Post, it sure as hell should be good enough for thee and me. Not to forget the RCMP
Back in October just after Schreiber’s arrest, you may recall, the Globe and the Post – putting aside their faux newspaper wars for a day in order to speak as one on this issue of pressing national concern – both demanded that the RCMP finally abandon its silly investigation to determine whether former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney or any other Canadian politician ever received bribes or kickbacks in connection with Air Canada’s purchase of 34 Airbus planes in 1988.
“No such crime was committed,” declared the Globe.
“The case must be formally and publicly closed,” harmonized the Post.
We’re sure they know what they’re talking about. Still, it’s hard for those of us in the cheap seats not to be curious about the way in which the other half of this story is currently playing itself out in Germany where Schreiber is at the centre of a scandal that threatens to lead to criminal charges against former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Kohl has been accused of accepting secret and illegal gifts, including from Karlheinz Schreiber. And there are allegations — hotly denied by all concerned, of course — that those gifts were intended to influence government decisions.
All of which sounds eerily similar to the allegations the Globe and the Post insist the RCMP is wasting its time, and our tax dollars, investigating in Canada.
The latest twist in the German version of this story came yesterday when Schreiber told the National Post he wanted a more than $750,000 political contribution he gave Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union back in 1991 returned to him immediately. (Perhaps he needs the cash to pay his lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, who promised this week to wage yet another of his famous legal wars to the death against Germany’s request to extradite Schreiber. But that’s another column for another day.)
Karlheinz insists — again — that his accusers have got it all wrong. He was simply making what he considered a normal political contribution to Kohl’s political party. There was certainly no connection whatsoever between his modest, if secret, three-quarters-of-a-million dollar gift and the fact that, one year earlier, he’d lobbied the German government to approve a $400 million armoured car sale to Saudi Arabia. How could he possibly have known a few silly buggers — including three senior party officials — would keep his cash for themselves, making his totally legitimate party contribution look like a bribe when it certainly wasn’t?
Of course he couldn’t.
That’s why he wants his money back.
And of course his was just a normal political contribution. It is apparently common practice in Germany for political donors like Karlheinz to meet their German political contacts in restaurants in small Swiss towns so they can discreetly hand over their small donations in cash stuffed into envelopes. Which can then be deposited in secret bank accounts and left to collect dust (and interest) for a year before being divvied up — in secret again — among a few party functionaries. And no one ever expects anything in return.
Only in Germany, you say? We can only hope.
Oct 22, 2006: Politeness about poverty
Politeness will not end poverty
My colleagues over in the editorial department at the Daily News got our collective knickers in a righteous knot this past week over exactly what is the oh-so-polite and proper way to express one's... well… one’s discontent with the seeming failure of our political betters to manage to accomplish anything more meaningful than make promises they don't keep, or "talk, talk, talk" about the absolutely critical, highest-priority, job-one importance of wrestling poverty into submission.
Which is what led the paper, in a Tuesday editorial about a protest by the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty, to harrumph: Antipoverty Group Makes Wrong Point.
The day before, about 20 members of the coalition had briefly taken over a local welfare office, chanting slogans to bring attention to their demands, which included doubling current income-assistance rates, pegging welfare to the Consumer Price Index, making those on student loans eligible for financial aid and ending the claw-back of the wages of income-assistance recipients. Although one protester was charged with assault, the demonstration itself was generally peaceful and the group dispersed when police asked them to.
Coalition spokesperson Keli Bellaire said that the brief occupation was a reaction to the group's ongoing, never-ending frustrations dealing with the provincial Department of Community Services. "They don't do anything. They talk and talk, and they won't change," Bellaire told reporter Stephane Massinon.
While conceding that the group's demands deserved "serious consideration," our editorial went on to call the protest itself a "reckless and dangerous publicity stunt," and said it would not help their cause. By contrast, the paper praised Oxfam Canada's recent Hunger Banquet that "graphically demonstrated the widening gap between rich and poor" as "helpful." The day before, in another editorial, the paper was equally effusive in describing Nova Scotians' participation in an International Stand Up Against Poverty campaign as "a worthy cause -- and an urgent one as well. The more attention this matter gets, the better."
But the problem is not our lack of attention to the issue of poverty; the problem is our lack of action to end it.
You will remember that in 1989, our parliamentarians unanimously committed themselves -- and us -- to eliminating child poverty by the year 2000. On July 21, 2006, Campaign 2000: End Child Poverty in Canada, an umbrella group of more than 120 earnestly polite antipoverty groups, wrote yet another polite letter to Canada's political leaders reminding them that over 1.2 million Canadian children -- one in six -- still live in poverty. According to UNICEF, in fact, our child poverty rate is the nineteenth worst among 26 OECD nations.
Two months ago, the National Council on Welfare, an advisory group to the federal government, published a report showing that, even adjusting for inflation, the incomes of most welfare recipients are now lower than they were 20 years ago. To cite just one close-to-home example, the annual social assistance income of a person with a disability in Nova Scotia declined from $11,241 in 1991 to just $8,897 in 2005, a drop in constant dollar figures of 20.9 per cent.
Council chairperson John Murphy rightly described the situation -- politely, of course -- as "shameful and morally unsustainable in a rich country."
The Council pointed out it would take $21.6 billion to bring all low-income Canadians up even to the poverty line. That may sound like a lot, but compare it to Canada's gross domestic product of more than $1.2 trillion, and Murphy's characterization of our response to poverty in our midst as “shameful” becomes more understandable — and more shameful.
Just as it is shameful for Premier Rodney MacDonald -- whose government is first in line to shell out tax dollars to profitable multinational corporations like Michelin, and who, along with the rest of his legislative colleagues, is in line for a significant salary increase -- to dismiss out of hand the coalition's demands by claiming "we only have so many dollars and we have to live within our fiscal framework."
And shameful too for those of us who live in glass editorial houses to insist that those who speak out on behalf of the poor should continue to entertain us with Hunger Banquets and other polite reminders of poverty while we collectively continue to do nothing to deal with the issues they politely raise.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as, Reparations, a novel published this spring by HarperCollins.
Oct. 15, 2006: Was Qana a War Crime?
When is a war crime not a war crime?
Forget for the moment Stephen Harper's gratuitously partisan smear of "virtually all of the candidates" in the federal Liberal leadership race as somehow "anti-Israel" for not agreeing with him that Israel must be right even if it is wrong.
Forget too the predictably wounded, angry — and possibly even genuine – outrage of those same candidates as they attempted to twist Harper's attack back to their own political advantage.
Forget even Michael Ignatieff's own weasel-worded attempt to extricate himself from yet another mess of his own making.
Let us consider instead what Ignatieff, the front runner in the Liberal race, actually said last Sunday that sparked the current furor. And -- more importantly -- let us ask ourselves whether what he said then (before he changed his mind) is, in fact, true.
Ironically, Ignatieff was trying to explain away an earlier gaffe in which he’d said he wasn't "losing sleep" about the deaths of more than two dozen civilians during an Israeli air strike this summer on the Lebanese town of Qana. "This is the kind of dirty war you're in when you have to do this,” he told the Toronto Star at the time.
After expressing regret last week in a TV interview for those earlier insensitive remarks, Ignatieff said: "I was a professor of human rights and I am also a professor of the laws of war and what happened in Qana was a war crime and I should have said that."
What really did happen at Qana?
Israel claimed it targeted Qana because more than 150 rockets had been fired into northern Israel from the town in the previous two weeks and because its intelligence indicated Hezbollah guerrillas were hiding inside a particular building with rockets and rocket launchers.
So, at 1:15 a.m. on the morning of July 30, 2006, Israeli war planes fired two missiles into the three-story building, which collapsed, killing 28 civilians, including 16 children who'd sought shelter there.
Red Cross rescue workers, who arrived on the scene later that day, reported that none of the dead was a fighter and that no arms had been found in the building. Despite the fact that all four roads leading into the town had been cut off by Israeli bombs, neither Human Rights Watch researchers who visited the town the next day, nor the dozens of international journalists, rescue workers and international observers who picked through the rubble, reported seeing any rocket launchers, spent ammunition, abandoned weapons or other evidence of Hezbollah military presence there.
Several days later, one of Israel's top war correspondents even conceded "it now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."
Despite that, an Israeli Defense Force's investigation into the incident quickly absolved itself of blame for the deaths, and insisted "the attack would not have been carried out" if they'd known civilians were in the building.
The Israelis pointed out they’d warned all civilians to flee days before the attack.
But the International Committee of the Red Cross replied that simply “issuing advanced warning to the civilian population of impending attacks in no way relieves a warring party of its obligations under the war rules and principles of international humanitarian law."
Those laws say combatants must do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.
The week before, however, the Israeli defense minister had conveniently "redefined" Hezbollah to include all civilians — presumably including the nine-month old bombing victim — who had not left south Lebanon.
The problem, according to other reports, was that it had by then become as dangerous and difficult for civilians to flee along the bombed-out highways as to remain. The Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, reported on two incidents, including one on June 24, 2006, in which the Israelis had ordered the villagers of Taire to leave their homes and then, "as their convoy of cars and minibuses obediently trailed northwards, the Israeli air force fired a missile into the rear minibus killing three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other civilians."
Human Rights Watch, a respected independent monitoring group that has accused both Israel and Hezbollah of committing war crimes during the conflict, said what happened in Qana "was not an accident. It was the natural outcome of a policy of not distinguishing between civilian and military targets. If you have a daily small massacre of civilians, you're going to end up with a big one sooner or later… Such consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime."
It may not be politic for Michael Ignatieff to state the obvious, but it is still obvious.
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Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as a novel, Reparations, which was published this spring by HarperCollins.
Oct. 8 column: Sunday Shopping
'Bold' leadership or caving to reality
I couldn't help but wonder whether my usually button-downed, clear-headed colleague David Rodenhiser had been smoking something illegal (perhaps in preparation for a screening of Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
) when he sat down at his computer to write his Thursday column on Nova Scotia’s new Sunday shopping non-law.
David praised Premier Rodney MacDonald's decision to collapse like a pricked balloon in the face of the ruling by the Supreme Court that his Sunday shopping regulations were discriminatory and beyond the powers of his provincial cabinet as "the right decision... perfectly in keeping with one of the primary principles of conservatism." And then he went on to anoint the head of the government that had created those discriminatory, dumb-as-a-door-post regulations in the first place as not only a "bold" leader but perhaps so brilliantly "Machiavellian" as to have orchestrated the whole dog’s breakfast to achieve this week's results.
Please pass me a hit of whatever it is you’re doing, David.
Methinks my fellow scribbler gives a desperate, floundering leader of a desperate, floundering government way too much credit for still more desperate floundering.
No matter which side of the Sunday shopping divide you find yourself on, the fact is the MacDonald government juggled this issue with all the grace and dexterity of an armless man.
It is true, as David points out, that MacDonald did not create the Sunday shopping conundrum; he inherited it from the previous government — one in which he was, of course, a minister. During last fall's provincial Progressive Conservative leadership campaign, MacDonald had an opportunity to put forth his own policy on Sunday shopping. He chose not to. During last spring's provincial election campaign, after it became clear that the big supermarket chains were prepared to defy the province's exemption-laden Retail Business Uniform Closing Day Act, our by-then premier once again had an opportunity to demonstrate those "primary principles of conservatism." He didn't.
Instead, when faced with the reality that the supermarkets were using the government's own loopholes against it by creating stores-within-stores-within-stores, the newly elected government showed its visionary mettle by creating a new and even more discriminatory loophole, and, of course, much lucrative if useless employment for way too many lawyers.
When Supreme Court Justice Peter Richard did what virtually everyone expected him to do and ruled that the "cabinet cannot discriminate either as to the size of the retail outlet or the corporate structure of it without the requisite regulatory power," Premier MacDonald did not so much show leadership as recognize reality when it slapped him yet again in the face.
As David points out, the premier did have options. He could have brought in new legislation to try and do what he had failed to do with regulation. But he had to know he could not have gotten it passed in the current minority legislature. Or he could have attempted to bumble through, allowing Sobeys and Superstore to use the court ruling to continue to open their jerry-built stores on Sundays, while hoping against hope that the Wal-Marts and their big-box brethren did not decide to widen the war. Which he had to know they would.
So he did what he did. He caved. And tried to make it sound like bold leadership.
The only surprise is that my friend David drank the Kool Aid. Or whatever…
If our premier wants to show real leadership, he might begin by following suggestions in a letter sent to him this past week by Jim Turk, the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. In it, Turk calls on the government to fire the entire board of the Capital District Health Authority for perpetrating “one of the most flagrant injustices faced by a clinical faculty member in Canada” in the Gabrielle Horne affair, and to bring in new medical disciplinary regulations to prevent such a “travesty” from happening again.
Horne, a “globally pioneering” medical researcher spent the last four years in a Kafkaesque limbo thanks to the board’s many and various failures — not to forget the government’s failure to “accept responsibility for fixing the situation.”
The fiasco not only destroyed Horne’s career and research but has also cost Nova Scotians millions in wasted legal expenses that could — and should — have been spent on health care.
And the costs will only keep rising if the board — which recently blamed the victim while finally reluctantly admitting it had no case against her — is allowed to continue to run amok.
Will the premier show leadership here? Don’t hold your breath… or, maybe, do…
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as a novel, Reparations, which was published this spring by HarperCollins.
Review of “Reluctant Genius”
Reluctant Genius
The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell.
By Charlotte Gray. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 448 pages, hardcover.
Did Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone and change our world forever? Or does that honour more properly belong to Elisha Gray, an electrician, inventor and founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company who filed a caveat — an intention to file a patent — for a similar device with the U.S. Patent Office just two hours after Bell submitted his application for a “speaking telegraph?” Transforming that timing quibble into potentially more sinister intrigue, Gray’s design idea mysteriously appeared as a written addendum to Bell’s typed patent application. There were dark hints, even then, that Bell — an “intuitive” inventor — had an inside source who leaked Gray’s design to him.
Even if you don’t buy that conspiratorial view, there are those — including the Italian Academy of Sciences and many Italian-Americans — who argue we must unravel the evolution of telephony backward to determine its true paternity. In 1860, 16 years before Bell’s patent, Antonio Meucci, an Italian-born American inventor, demonstrated a crude telephonic device which, though never patented, was described in an article in a New York Italian-American newspaper. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives, mindful of the Italian-American lobby, passed a resolution arguing Meucci’s “work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.” (Later that same year, Canada’s Parliament jumped into the fray with a counter resolution crediting the invention solely to Bell, a Scottish-born American citizen who summered and worked in Cape Breton for parts of 37 years and whose beloved Baddeck estate-museum is still a major tourist attraction.)
And that’s not even to consider the contributions of other would-be phonic papas like Johann Philipp Reis, the German inventor who demonstrated his version of a “telefon” the same year as Meucci, or Thomas Edison, Bell’s bitter American rival, whose work advanced telephonic technology.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised there is controversy — even grassy knoll-like conspiracy theories — about the origins of one of the nineteenth century’s most important and still-ubiquitous inventions. The telephone, as author Charlotte Gray rightly notes, “changed the world forever… It liberated the individual… was easy and safe to use, and, unlike the telegraph, anybody could use it. It had a profound impact on both personal relationships and the social fabric of society.”
Having said all of that, Charlotte Gray’s Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell isn’t a whodunit about credit for inventing the telephone. That debate, in fact, gets relatively short shrift in her fascinating new biography of the man most of us still associate with the telephone, but whose inventive passions embraced much else as well.
Reluctant Genius is, instead, a love story, a tale of the all-encompassing — and critically important — relationship between Bell, a brilliant, obsessive, compulsive, insecure, mercurial, magpie-minded and often hypochondriacal “reluctant genius,” and Mabel, his practical, protective, devoted deaf wife and steel-willed life’s partner. If not for her, Bell might never have become even the disputed father of the telephone.
That Gray chose to approach the story of Bell’s accomplishments from the perspective of his familial relationships shouldn’t surprise us. One of Canada’s most popular personal biographers, Gray’s previous books — Sisters in the Wilderness about pioneering sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Trail, Flint and Feather about Native poet and performer Pauline Johnson, and even Mrs. King about the mother of our late, strange prime minister — all share a sharp focus on the personal lives of even public Canadian women in a way some more conventional historians still blithely dismiss as “private history.”
Gray makes no apologies. As she explained in an essay she wrote at the time of the publication of Sisters, “a good biography tells two stories: the life and the social and political context in which the life was lived… A biography engenders a thrilling intimacy between reader and subject. We peek behind the public achievements to touch the daily life of an exceptional individual… Do worldly achievements come at a price? Are hidden lives important or interesting? Are character flaws more interesting than strengths? What insight into my life can I gain by looking at someone else’s?”
Reluctant Genius is, by Gray’s criteria — by anyone’s — a very good biography. Set against the backdrop of the inventive, industrial, intellectual ferment of post-Civil War America, it tells the story of a society in transformation, and of Bell’s important if often conflicted and sometimes reluctant role in that revolution. It is also a compelling human story about two very different individuals who found strength in a personal relationship that helped make their — and our — public history possible.
Bell’s fascination with the human voice, which was at the root of his obsession with figuring out how to transmit sounds over wires, was bred in the bone. His grandfather, Alec, a shoemaker-turned-actor, was a teacher and “corrector of defective utterance.” His often over-bearing father, Melville — probably George Bernard Shaw’s model for Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion — was a self-taught elocution teacher and champion of Visible Speech, a series of symbols he created to represent sounds. His mother, Eliza, with whom he was extremely close, was deaf as the result of a childhood infection.
Young Alec spent much of his own childhood serving as a prop for his father’s public demonstrations of Visible Speech or responding to his frequent challenges to his sons to invent devices like a “speaking machine.”
After the deaths of his two brothers in early adulthood — they succumbed to tuberculosis in dank, sooty, nineteenth-century Edinburgh — Alec’s parents impetuously relocated what was left of their family to the bracingly restorative climate of Canada.
While the rest of the family settled in Brantford, Ontario, Alec moved to Boston where he landed a series of jobs teaching deaf children. Which is how he met Mabel Hubbard, the attractive Brahmin daughter of a Boston patent lawyer and entrepreneur, who’d lost her hearing to scarlet fever when she was only five.
At the time they met, Alec was 25, Mabel 15. She initially “did not think him exactly a gentleman;” his primary interest in her was the income he earned tutoring her, which enabled him to devote more time to his increasingly obsessive fascination with harnessing the telegraph to carry the human voice.
He wasn’t alone. Bell was well aware others were trying to accomplish similar things, and the competition “unnerved” the already neurotic, insomniac young man, driving him stay up all night fiddling with his wires and instruments. One of his landladies became so worried about Bell’s lack of sleep — and its impact on his health — “she got into the habit of cutting a few inches off each of his candles, forcing him to go to bed earlier.”
In the fall of 1874, the Hubbards invited their daughter’s tutor to what became a pivotal tea party during which Bell and Gardiner Hubbard accidentally discovered their mutual interest in the possibilities of telegraphy. Hubbard wanted to challenge the near-monopoly of the Western Union Corporation, and was desperately looking for an inventor to come up with a way to transmit multiple messages over telegraph wires. The two formed a partnership that helped underwrite Bell’s research.
Far from liberating Alec, however, Hubbard’s interest only complicated his life. He spent his days teaching the deaf and his nights on his inventions, all the while fending off his own father, who wondered what this telegraph nonsense had to do with Visible Speech, and his mother, who wanted to redirect her son’s energies back to his true vocation, improving the lot of the deaf. To complicate those complications, Alec “began to see Mabel, now seventeen, in a role other than that of an eager pupil.” He became as obsessive in his pursuit of her as he was in his telegraphic inventions, much to the chagrin of Mabel’s parents who had hoped for a better match for their daughter.
They eventually relented, agreeing to allow the scattered Scotsman to pursue their daughter’s hand if he could demonstrate he could support her properly. That, of course, meant completing work on the telegraph for Mabel’s father. But Bell, as he often did, got sidetracked, infuriating his future father-in-law and threatening to scuttle the marriage.
Mabel, who had by then also realized “I loved him better than anyone but Mamma,” gently steered her fiancé back to the invention he was supposed to be working on and, later, smoothed the waters when her father, without telling Alec, filed an application on his behalf for a patent on the speaking telegraph.
That controversial patent changed everything. For starters, it sparked an explosion of commercial interest in Bell’s invention that cleared the way for Alec and Mabel to marry.
To protect the fledgling Bell Telephone Company and prevent Western Union from continuing to pursue its own telephone ambitions, Gardiner Hubbard filed a patent infringement lawsuit in 1878. But by then, Alec — chagrined by insinuations he’d poached the work of Gray and others — declared himself “sick of the telephone.” He would, he told Mabel, return to his real love, teaching the deaf, and “waste no more time and money on the telephone… Let others endure the worry, the anxiety and the expense.” But without Alec’s testimony, it was clear Hubbard’s suit wouldn’t succeed. Again, it was Mabel’s “quietly willing him to join her father in the fight to save their company” that melted Bell’s resolve.
Thanks to Bell’s authoritative, methodical testimony outlining the events leading up to the patent submission — and, perhaps even more important, the damning disclosure of an 1877 letter from Elisha Gray, in which he congratulated Bell for inventing the telephone and confessed he didn’t think his mere description of the idea “should be dignified with the name invention” — Western Union quickly settled, paving the way for the success of the Bell company, which suddenly had a monopoly on what was already “a wildly popular invention.”
Although it is clear Gray believes Bell deserves credit for the telephone’s invention, she does not allow herself to get sidetracked by the debate — then or now — over it. Instead, she uses it as a way to highlight Alec’s own ambivalence to what he had wrought.
At 33, Alexander Graham Bell was rich and world famous, all thanks to the telephone. But his own interest in it never revived; he left it to others, including Edison, to refine his invention.
Instead, he filled his notebooks with new ideas for switchboards (an idea he didn’t bother to patent because “it would turn all of those poor girls out of their jobs”), phonographs, an underwater distress signal, an apparatus for transferring brain waves between individuals, another for transmitting speech using light waves instead of wires, hydrofoils and, oh yes, ideas for manned flight. After the Bells decided to establish a summer home in Cape Breton, Bell began to breed sheep to study genetics. He dabbled in the then-popular science of eugenics. When an assassin’s bullet lodged dangerously near U.S President James Garfield’s spine in the summer 1881, Alec threw himself into an obsessive if ultimately unsuccessful three-month effort to develop a metal detector to help doctors locate the bullet.
“Bell’s gift as an inventor,” writes Gray, “was creative leaps of the imagination rather than… rigorous research.”
Mabel’s gift to Bell, on the other hand, was to provide the cocoon of stability in which “the genius of his mind was allowed to flower and the potential for instability in his temperament was never allowed to explode. Their union would provide him with a rich, well-rounded family life, a safe haven in which he could reach for his dreams.”
Gray, who had access to an incredible array of primary sources, including stacks of “vivid, intimate, colourful, poignant” letters between Alec and Mabel, makes a compelling case for this connection between Mabel’s facilitation and Alec’s accomplishment.
How true is it? That’s harder to say. As Gray herself has noted, “biographers presumptuously impose a recognizable plot line on the messy, incoherent details of a life.” And the Bells’ story is very much in keeping with Gray’s own past perspectives as a biographer. But it rings true.
In an era when too many biographers feel comfortable making up dialogue or even, in the case of Edmund Morris’s controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, creating pivotal characters out of the whole cloth of imagination, Charlotte Gray is very much a traditionalist who plants herself “firmly on the ‘fact’ side of the border” between fiction and non-fiction. “I don’t invent. But I take known facts, and imagine.”
In the case of Bell’s intriguing relationship with the young Helen Keller, for example, Gray describes Mabel’s ambivalence to it, which is clear from her own writing, but is careful not to go too far down the path of assumption so far as Alec’s unspoken feelings are concerned. In the end, she surmises only that Alec’s fascination with Keller was “probably a mix of paternal affection and an undercurrent of sexual attraction that he himself would not have recognized (let alone acknowledged).” Such restraint adds to the reader’s comfort level with the credibility of the overall story.
Gray also does an excellent job of assembling just the right telling details. How better to illustrate Bell’s neuroses, for instance, than to recount the moment when “he privately assuaged his own unspoken fears about his firstborn child[‘s hearing]. A few days after his daughter’s birth, he stole into Mabel’s room, and standing behind the canopied bed, he blew a loud blast on the trumpet. He later told a friend that ‘Mabel never moved, but the little one flung out its arms and legs and shrieked in terror.’”
At one level, Reluctant Genius fits clearly within Gray’s usual biographical parameters, but it also represents, in a number of ways, an important departure. Its ostensible subject is a man, and one who is already far better known than the subjects of her previous biographies. Perhaps even more important from a marketing perspective, Bell, despite his Canadian connections, is an American whose story is much more likely to resonate with American book buyers than the Strickland sisters or Pauline Johnson. Which would be a good thing. Charlotte Gray — and this moving, human story — both deserve a wider audience.
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Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King’s College, is the author of five nonfiction books. His first novel, Reparations, was published in 2006 by HarperCollins.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.