Media and Mulroney (Nov 15, 2007)
Canada’s media have some answering to do
There are still way more questions than answers. The first, and most important, of course, is why did Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, accept $300,000 in cash in brown envelopes at clandestine meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian influence peddler?
A second question is when did Stephen Harper, the current prime minister of Canada and a recent friend of Mr. Mulroney’s, first discover that Schreiber was claiming the arrangements for the $300,000 payout were made while Mulroney was still prime minister, and what did Harper do about it?
But there’s a third question — not much asked on editorial pages. How and why did Canada’s paper-trained parliamentary puppy press gallery and their bosses in most major news organizations manage, for close to a decade, to not only ignore but also actively, dismissively dismiss what will ultimately be one of the great scandals in Canadian political history?
That last question, one hopes, will not be part of the public inquiry Stephen Harper has now commendably, if belatedly, set in motion — it will have more than enough on its plate — but it is our subject today.
And it should be the subject of soul-searching in most major newsrooms in the country.
While there were a few exceptional exceptions — the CBC’s dogged Fifth Estate (though not its national news division), the late-awakening but now finally-fully-in-the-game Globe and Mail and the much-maligned freelance journalist Stevie Cameron pretty much exhausts the short long list — the reality is that Canada’s news media embarrassed themselves by their kiss-the-canvas collapses on this story.
In 1995, conveniently on the same day the story leaked that the RCMP was investigating Mulroney, Schreiber and former Newfoundland premier-turned-premier-lobbyist Frank Moores in connection with the 1980s sale of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada, Mulroney launched a pre-emptive multimillion dollar lawsuit against the federal government.
Perhaps predictably, the news media chose to focus on the politics of the battle and steer clear of the substance of the allegations to avoid being drawn into Mulroney’s legal crosshairs.
But, in fact, they did much more — and less — than that.
They even applied editorial pressure on the government and the RCMP to shut down the police investigation. “No such crime was committed,” declared the Globe in January 2000. “The case must be formally and publicly closed,” chimed in the National Post.
They didn’t seem eager to find out how Karlheinz Schreiber — already facing charges in Germany for bribing politicians and tax evasion — had distributed $8 million worth of schmiergelder (grease money) Airbus had handed him to help grease the sale of their jets to Air Canada. Or why Schreiber had set up 10 secret Swiss bank accounts with crudely coded names of Canadian political figures.
Except for the Fifth Estate, no journalist asked what Schreiber meant when he boasted to the German magazine der Spiegel that “I could create the most horrible Watergate here in Canada when I want to.”
Instead in 2000, when the RCMP abandoned their investigation, the national editorialists pronounced themselves “relieved for Mr. Mulroney,” and thankful that the “baseless, unjustifiable intrusion on Mr. Mulroney's post-PM life, one bordering on harassment,” was finally at an end.
In 2003, when the Globe inadvertently tripped over the fact of the $300,000 payment, it did its best to slip it under the rug, burying the news in the 26th paragraph of the third installment of a series that actually focused on attacking journalist Stevie Cameron for her “vendetta” against Mulroney.
No wonder there were only two stories in the week following the revelation, one of which was a largely self-congratulatory report by the Star’s ombudsman, praising its lack of coverage of the Globe revelations.
In 2006, a week after The Fifth Estate broadcast a full-show documentary featuring the first sit-down interview with Schreiber, which neatly connected some of the missing dots between Mulroney and Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts, I entered the names “Mulroney” and “Schreiber,” into Google Canada’s news library and came up with a grand total of just 13 stories about the Fifth Estate’s revelations. (That compared with nearly 10,000 hits about the Danish Muslim editorial cartoon controversy and more than 6,000 dealing with Wayne Gretzky’s connection to an alleged gambling ring, both of which were in the news the same week.)
Now that it is clear just how badly the news media blew this story, perhaps Canada’s major media organizations will engage in the kind of self-examination the New York Times offered its readers after reality caught up with its woeful early coverage of the war in Iraq. Perhaps…
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Nov 11, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
November 11, 2007
Between a rock and an empty place
The Digby Courier is reporting what it calls “a noticeable increase in real estate for sale” in Digby Neck in the wake of last month’s joint federal-provincial panel report rejecting a proposed basalt quarry and marine terminal there.
An American company, Bilcon, wanted to develop the 120-hectare quarry to supply two million tons of rock a year for the next 50 years to New Jersey.
But the proposal badly split the community. Some supported it and its promise of close to three dozen fulltime jobs in an area already decimated by the collapse of the fishery. But others, with equal fervour, opposed the very idea, claiming it would ruin the environment and destroy their way of life.
Now that the review report has come down so unequivocally against the project, supporters are left with the fading hope they can pressure federal and provincial environment ministers — who have the final say on whether to approve the project — to just say yes.
They staged a two-hour “Start-the-Quarry” rally recently during which “car after car and truck after truck honked in support of the rally message.”
“I honestly can't see how they can turn this quarry away,” longtime Centreville resident David Graham told the Courier, but then added: “To be quite honest, I've even been thinking about selling… If things continue getting worse, we're not going to have anything around here.”
A final decision on the quarry is expected to be announced within the month.
This week’s health care alert
It hasn’t a good couple of weeks to get sick in a number of communities in Nova Scotia.
Last week internists who staff the intensive care unit at South Shore Regional Hospital in Bridgewater withdrew their services to protest a recent deal with the department of health they claim doesn’t deal with their key issues: physician recruitment and retention, as well as compensation.
What that’s meant is that the hospital isn’t admitting new critically ill patients; they’re being transferred to facilities in Capital Health instead.
The week before, the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre was shipping its ICU patients off to Moncton or Halifax because of the same dispute.
The internists there decided to switch to a new, more restricted on-call schedule after they hit an impasse in negotiations with the health department.
Meanwhile, in Shelburne, the scene of numerous earlier emergency room closures, the illness of a doctor forced the Roseway Hospital to shutter its ER department for a day recently. And South West Health admitted it “anticipates that there may be an additional emergency department closures until such time as this physician is recovered.”
And in Pugwash, North Cumberland Memorial’s emergency department was closed during daytime hours three times recently “because no physician is available to provide the necessary medical coverage.”
No word yet on whether Premier Rodney MacDonald plans to introduce legislation outlawing doctor shortages.
If we build it, they will stay
Last year, residents of Greenfield, Queen’s County, feared that their desperately-needing-to-be-replaced, more-than-60-year-old elementary school — which served just three dozen local students — would have to close.
Knowing the province’s financially strapped Education Department was unlikely to ante up money for a new school, area residents decided to set up their own community non-profit society, fundraise for “a compelling out-of-the-box proposal for a community-built school” and build it themselves.
They’re doing just that. The foundation has been poured, the building framed in and crews are ready to begin work on the school’s interior. “We’re making really good progress,” reports project manager Pat Jones.
Though the school is valued at $1.25 million, the Greenfield Community Resource Centre Society Inc. — which is acting as its own contractor and is using donated lumber — hopes to complete construction for just $950,000. The province, in a unique arrangement, has agreed to lease the community-owned building for $72,000 a year for the next 20 years.
The two-classroom school is expected to welcome its first pupils in September 2008.
Tale of two ports
While Yarmouth tourism operators worry about their future in light of a disastrous 2007 season, officials in Portland, Maine, are preparing to open a “beautiful” new $20-million terminal in the heart of the city’s tourist district.
The new Ocean Gateway terminal is specifically designed to cater to cruise ships and international ferries like Bay Ferries’ Yarmouth-Portland service.
Two years after the Scotia Prince abandoned its daily summer runs between Nova Scotia and Maine because of what it called unacceptable conditions at Portland’s old International Marine Terminal, the city is clearly doing whatever it takes to keep the new operators happy.
And it is succeeding.
Portland is not only winning the battle of Maine ports with Bar Harbour — this summer, Bay Ferries reduced its number of sailings to Yarmouth from Bar Harbour — but Portland has also become the ferry’s supply centre of choice. It buys all its fuel and provisions there.
To rub salt in Yarmouth’s wounds, Bay Ferries’ schedule — departing Portland early in the morning and returning in the evening — now favours their hotel and tourist operators instead of the Nova Scotia town’s.
“It worked out very well for us,” understates Portland’s Transportation and Ports Director Captain Jeff Monroe.
He’s currently in negotiations with Bay Ferries on a long-term contract to use their new terminal.
Which raises the question: What are provincial tourism department officials doing to counter Portland’s new-found aggressiveness?
No apple for Karen
Karen Casey, Nova Scotia’s chief schoolmarm, gave her unruly students, the members of the Strait Regional School Board, a one-week extension to complete their assigned homework. But then warned them there could be consequences if they didn’t do as they’re told.
They listened… sort of.
Last month, the education minister sent a letter to the board, pointing out that it “is not behaving in a manner in keeping with the best interests of students,” and admonished them to “show respect for others [and] not pursue a procedure calculated to embarrass another board or staff member.” She then issued five directives designed to improve their deportment.
If they didn’t comply, she waved the big stick: she had the authority, she pointed out, to “appoint a person who shall carry out such responsibilities and exercise such authority of the school board as the minister determines.”
Though it was not lost on board members that the courts had recently upheld the minister’s right to fire the Halifax school board last year, five of the 12 board members still initially voted against complying with the minister’s order. By this week’s meeting, however two of those nays had become yeas and the motion — to change the board’s bylaws and code of ethics —received the required two-thirds majority to formally approve it.
But the issue isn’t over yet. Later in the meeting, board member Brenda Gillis announced she intends to introduce a motion at next month’s meeting to abolish the code entirely.
“I think we’re being stifled, and I think we’re allowing ourselves to be stifled,” Gillis said.
Uh-oh.
Oh, no, not them again
Truro town council, which refused to fly a gay pride flag from its flagpole this summer, is now saying no to a request from the Northern AIDS Connection Society to raise an AIDS awareness flag this month — even though it had previously agreed to do so.
Council said yes in July but then — after the gay pride flag flap — hastily came up with a new, cover-their-butt policy to reserve town flagpoles for municipal, provincial or national flags only.
So no AIDS awareness flag.
Councillor Raymond Tynes, who also, ironically, heads up the town’s affirmative action human rights committee, was unrepentant. “I’ll stand behind any decision I’ve made,” he declared.
Whatever that means.
Al McNutt, the chair of the AIDS group, told the Truro Daily News the town is “going backward. With all the hoopla and the chaos over the gay flag, they’re just going to start this over again.”
No kidding.
In my backyard please
While residents in other parts of the province debate whether they want wind farms — and just how many kilometres from their own homes they want them located — a Masstown farmer is installing wind turbines in his backyard.
Glen Jennings, whose poultry farm boasts 12,000 laying chickens producing 10,000 eggs a day, eventually hopes to generate enough wind power to run his farm, his house and his father’s house. So far, the three turbines — costing $20,000–$28,000 each —are generating 75 per cent of the farm’s electrical needs.
“Twenty years ago a project like this would have been inconceivable,” Nova Scotia Power’s Margaret Murphy told those attending the turbines’ official turning. Now, thanks to dropping turbines costs, skyrocketing oil prices and growing environmental concerns, “projects like this one will inspire others.”
Jennings own inspiration? “If I had a quarter for every time I chased this hat across the field I’d probably be retired,” Jennings told the crowd gathered to celebrate the launch.
Remember this
A Nova Scotian soldier, who was wounded in Afghanistan last year, is home in River Hebert talking with local school children and attending today’s Remembrance Day events.
Master Corporal Mark Brownell, who joined the army after graduating from River Hebert District High School, served as a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia before being deployed to Afghanistan in 2006.
On Aug. 3 last year, he suffered shrapnel wounds in a grenade attack that killed three of his comrades in one of the bloodiest days of that conflict.
He was to speak to the students about “the culture and kids of Afghanistan,” as well as the Canadian mission there. His message, as he earlier told the CBC: “The people of Afghanistan need us over there … if we're not there, it's going to get worse.”
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST CITIZEN, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, CAPE BRETON POST, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, SOUTHSHORENOW.COM, TRURO DAILY NEWS, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Mulroney and the money
We need an inquiry now
“This is not a route that I want to go down,” our prime minister declared last week in response to Liberal calls he appoint an inquiry to find how, why and what-for Karlheinz Schreiber, the German-Canadian wheeler-dealer lobbyist and influence peddler, handed former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney $300,000 in cash in 1993 and 1994.
But then Stephen Harper went even further, adding ominously: “I don't think that if the Liberal party thought twice about it, it is a power they would want to give me.” If he was forced to investigate Mulroney, his mentor, Harper explained, he might just have to launch his own probes into the business dealings of former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And who knew where that could lead? Even suggesting the need for such an inquiry, suggested Harper in his best imitation of a thuggish schoolyard bully-boy, was “really extraordinarily dangerous.”
Earth to Stephen Harper. Canadians aren’t interested in your petty playground politics. If there is evidence that either Chrétien or Martin had their fingers in the cookie jar or illegally used their power to influence decisions to benefit themselves or their friends, by all means, bring it on.
But even if such cases can be made, they do nothing to answer the still legitimate — and very troubling — questions about Brian Mulroney’s now well documented but still unexplained business dealings with Scheriber, a man he once claimed publicly he barely knew and had never had business dealings with.
That was simply not true.
Schreiber and Mulroney have known each other for 30 years. In the late seventies, in fact, Schreiber helped bankroll Mulroney’s campaign to overthrow then-Conservative leader Joe Clark and grab that prize for himself.
Certainly, that was not a small favour in political terms. And not one that could easily be forgotten
Consider also what we know — and don’t — about Schreiber, Mulroney and the mysterious $300,000.
During the late eighties, Schreiber’s lobbyist job description included spreading “grease money” to anyone who could help his German clients sell Airbus jets to Air Canada. In 1993, three years before Mulroney testified he barely knew him, Schreiber used one of those secret, Swiss grease-money accounts — this one code-named “Briton” which Schreiber says was a reference to Mulroney — to withdraw $300,000 in one-thousand-dollar bills, which he then stuffed into envelopes and doled out to Mulroney at various clandestine meetings around North America. Mulroney did not pay taxes on the $300,000 until years after he got it and then only after journalists had begun asking questions about the payments. Schreiber now claims the former prime minister’s advisors even tried to convince him to lie about what Mulroney had actually done to earn his money.
To complicate matters — and make the need for an inquiry even more obvious to all but the most partisan — we also now know that Mulroney’s blatantly disingenuous (to be kind) declaration that he had only had coffee “once or twice” with Schreiber and that he “had never had any dealings with him” helped convince the federal government to turn tail and run from Mulroney’s massively hyped civil suit against it, publicly apologizing for maligning his good name and agreeing to pay him $2.1 million to make it all go away.
When it finally became clear last year — thanks to diligent investigative reporting by the CBC’s Fifth Estate, one of the few media outlets to take this scandal seriously — that Mulroney had … ahem … not been entirely forthcoming about his relationship with Schreiber, non-political officials in the federal justice department began an investigation to determine whether there were grounds to seek the return of the settlement they had paid Mulroney.
Those inquiries were summarily squashed by Harper’s justice minister, raising even more questions, including whether Harper’s government is engaged in continuing political interference in the case.
While the same sycophantic parliamentary puppy press gallery that has done its best to downplay this story for years was at pains again last week to make clear there are still no dot-to-dot connections among Mulroney, Airbus and the $300,000 — “There is no evidence that Mulroney knew that the source of the money he got from Schreiber was potentially tainted,” as Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert wrote for the majority — the evidence is already damning enough. We have a right to know the whole story. And Harper has a duty to make sure we know it.
This is not a matter of partisan politics but of public trust. Unfortunately, our prime minister, as is all too usual with him, seems to have confused the two.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Revisiting Khadr (Nov 1, 2007)
Choosing values
So let me see if I have this right.
The U.S. State Department has promised immunity from prosecution to a group of rogue American private security agents who were involved in an alleged massacre in west Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September. Seventeen unarmed Iraqis were killed and two dozen others wounded in that attack, which witnesses say was unprovoked.
On the other hand, this same U.S. government remains bullishly determined to prosecute Canadian Omar Khadr for allegedly killing one U.S. soldier and wounding another in Afghanistan in 2002 during what was, in fact, a firefight between armed U.S. forces and almost-as-armed Afghani fighters.
This does not compute.
Or perhaps it does.
In the topsy turvy, enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend, what-me-worry-about-reality world of American geopolitics, it must all seem perfectly reasonable.
And, of course, equally explicable in Stephen Harper’s Canada. We’ll get back to Harper.
Let’s start with the Americans. During the 1990s, the U.S. government supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, in the process helping to pave the way for the Taliban takeover of that country. After 9/11, the Americans invaded Afghanistan in order to wipe out the now evil Taliban and kill or capture the satanic Osama — without ever once acknowledging their complicity in creating the mess in the first place.
The American government also supported — at the same time, incredibly — both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran during their bloody, decade-long war with each other, only to turn on each of them (Saddam became the Butcher of Baghdad, Iran a member in good standing of George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil) when it became convenient to do so for American foreign policy purposes.
That shouldn’t surprise, I guess, considering that this administration still can’t comprehend the striking similarities between those brave American lads who drop bombs on unwary, unseen civilians from thousands of feet in the air and those cowardly terrorist insurgents who plant improvised explosive devices along roadsides to kill and maim unsuspecting American soldiers.
And that doesn’t understand the incongruity of disparagingly referring to non-Iraqi insurgents as “foreign fighters” while forgetting that that is how most Iraqis see them.
Not that we have much to brag about in the area of intellectual or moral consistency in our foreign policy.
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with the Dalai Lama, partly to exchange small talk and white Tibetan silk scarves — the one made for the Dalai Lama was embroidered with the Canadian maple leaf — and partly to make a political point with the Chinese government about Canada’s unhappiness with its well-documented human rights abuses in Tibet.
This week’s get together with Harper was the first time the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader has met formally with a Canadian prime minister in his own office.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jason Kenney, Harper’s secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, was quick to praise his boss.
“This prime minister, obviously, is someone who has placed a real emphasis on human rights and Canadian values in our foreign policy,” he told CTV.
Uh, yes… but what about Omar Khadr? Oh, him.
Khadr, who is a Canadian citizen, was just 15 when he was captured by the Americans in Afghanistan and whisked off to the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison compound where he has languished, without trial, for five years.
While other countries — including such steadfast American allies as Britain and Australia — have publicly protested the detentions of their citizens at Guantanamo and even managed to get them released or at least returned to their home countries, Canada has been worse than silent on Khadr.
The Harper government, in fact, is still fighting to prevent Khadr’s lawyers from seeing secret files it compiled when the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Department of Foreign Affairs interrogated Khadr — without a lawyer — shortly after he was captured. Canada passed on summaries of those sessions to the Americans.
Last May, the Federal Court of Appeal ordered the government to hand over to the court uncensored copies of all records relevant to the case, but Ottawa refused and is now appealing that decision.
One of the key issues, incredibly, will be whether Khadr, as a Canadian citizen, actually has the right to a fair trial under the Charter of Rights.
Khadr’s Edmonton-based lawyer, Dennis Edney, says Ottawa’s refusal to disclose the information “shows the extent to which Canada has been prepared to violate the rule of law when it comes to Omar Khadr.”
A prime minister “who has placed a real emphasis on human rights and Canadian values in our foreign policy?”
Only, it seems, when it suits our other interests.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.
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