The problem is that we already know what he is going to say, and even — thanks to the usual carefully parceled out hints from his high-priced, prepare-the-way PR team — the broad strokes of how he is going to say it.

When he appears before a parliamentary ethics committee this morning to explain away how he came to take $300,000 in cash from German-Canadian lobbyist and influence peddler Karlheinz Schrieber, Brian Mulroney will be flanked by his dutifully doting family. This will, of course, include telegenic son Ben, the Canadian Idol TV star, and loyal, loving wife Mila. (Mila, it will inevitably be noted by one of the TV commentators, convinced Brian to curb his woe-is-me drinking after he’d lost his first leadership bid so he could focus all his prodigious energies on becoming the prime minister he was meant to be. Which he eventually accomplished, it will probably not be noted, with a little financial help from Karlheiinz.)

Mulroney will inevitably invoke the memory of his own late father, Ben Mulroney, Sr., a working stiff who understood the value of a buck and the importance of a man’s reputation in this world, and who raised his son right.

Brian will then cast himself in his usual role as the poor electrician’s boy from Baie Comeau who, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work — and, oh, yes, the love and support of the family you see behind him (close up, please) — rose to occupy the highest office in this great and glorious land of ours.

And how gosh-darn proud he is of that.

Which is why it is so important for Canadians to know their former two-term, back-to-back-majorities prime minister is not a crook.

Yes, yes, we’re getting to the guts of it now.

No, not quite yet…

Brian Mulroney will then remind us once again that he does not come from a wealthy background like some pampered, Nazi-sympathizing wastrels he could — but won’t — name (take that, Pierre Elliott Trudeau); that he worked his way to the very top of the Iron Ore Company of Canada through good connections and long lunches; that he earned buckets full of money, flew in a company jet and had his own personal chauffeur; that he had to take a whopping cut in pay and circumstance in order to serve his country as prime minister (not that he’s complaining, of course, but those are the facts); that, by the time he left Ottawa after 10 incredibly successful years in office — he won back-to-back majority governments, you may recall, the first time in Canadian history that a Conservative prime minister had achieved such distinction, and he… but he digresses — Brian Mulroney was still a relatively young man with a large and growing family who all needed to be fed, clothed and educated in the finest private schools and universities America had to offer.

It was at this traumatic, difficult, uncertain, vulnerable time that the Evil Karlheinz Whatshisname approached him to entice him to serve as his legal representative in a number of totally legitimate future businesses that Schreiber was in the process of cooking up. What businesses? Pasta, maybe… I think he mentioned pasta…

Since Mulroney had no job to go to and no prospects to speak of (other than a gazillion offers of appointments to multinational corporate boards of directors and multi, multi-thousand-dollar invites to share his wisdom with various and sundry well-heeled groups), he reluctantly, hesitantly, warily agreed to take on Schreiber, who he only knew vaguely as a Conservative party supporter to be a client and accept a small retainer from him to represent those legitimate business interests in the future and blah blah blah…

How was he to know that the guy would try to pay him in cash? With money he got for peddling Airbus planes to Air Canada? At secret meetings in hotels. And before he’d even quit his job as a member of parliament.

Mulroney was shocked, of course, but he accepted the envelope so as not to insult the man. And he kept taking envelopes stuffed with cash because… well, that was a terrible mistake. Brian Mulroney knows that now.

It was — it’s mea culpa time — a colossal mistake, the biggest boo boo in his long and distinguished career… Did he mention the back-to-back majority governments?... The important thing is that it really, really was a mistake, an oversight, a goof of the sort anyone might make, and that Brian Mulroney is not now nor ever has been a crook…

Whew…

Listening to Brian Mulroney finesse the facts later today will almost make me long for more of Conrad Black’s brutally arrogant, I-did-it, so-what honesty.

Almost.

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.

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.

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.

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.