So what was the money for?

That is the question for which we still have no conclusive answer, despite countless millions of dollars spent on RCMP investigations, legal proceedings, an out-of-court libel settlement and, most recently, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s tightly circumscribed (No Airbus please, we’re Canadian) but nonetheless reputation-damning-to-hell $16-million public inquiry.

Thanks to that inquiry, we now know that the $300,000 (or $225,000, depending on which liar you choose to believe) in cash-stuffed envelopes convicted German tax evader Karlheinz Schreiber secretly handed over to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at meetings in Montreal airport hotel rooms and New York coffee shops came from Airbus Industrie.

We know Airbus, the gigantic European aircraft manufacturer, paid Schreiber $25 million to peddle—by whatever means necessary—its planes to Air Canada at a time when Brian Mulroney was the prime minister of Canada.

Thanks to Schreiber’s friendships with two Nova Scotians— Elmer MacKay, a Mulroney cabinet minister who generously relinquished his seat temporarily so Mulroney could get elected after he won his party leadership in 1983, and Fred Doucet, Mulroney’s college-days confidant turned political fixer turned chief of staff turned well-connected lobbyist working for, among others, Schreiber—we now also know the German-born bribe-master had what Oliphant described as “almost unlimited access to Mr. Mulroney while he was prime minister.”

We know Doucet-the-lobbyist wrote letters to Schreiber-the-bribe-master seeking the latest on the cash Schreiber was shelling out in Airbus “commissions.” We now know one of those letters was written the same day Brian Mulroney accepted his first cash payment drawn from Schreiber’s Airbus Industrie grease-money account.

And we know that it was Doucet who arranged that clandestine rendezvous where the envelopes began crossing palms.

Given all of that, is it really fair to say, as Justice Oliphant does, that “there is no evidence to demonstrate that Mr. Mulroney had any knowledge as to the source of the funds paid to him by Mr. Schreiber?” Adds the judge: “The only way to link Mr. Mulroney to the Airbus matter is to speculate or to endorse the concept of guilt by association.”

While Oliphant understandably concludes he can’t go there, he does not publicly ask why—given what he has already learned—he was explicitly forbidden from asking the real questions that might have finally answered the only remaining question that really matters: What was the money for?

Only in Canada could we be so uninterested in learning where $25 million in bribes went, and for what.

On June 9, 2009—one year ago next week—Nova Scotia voters took a flying leap of faith and fate, sweeping out a tired Tory government, sidelining the faint comeback hopes of a still-recovering Liberal party and handing the keys to office for the first time ever to the New Democrats.

It is probably fair to suggest Darrell Dexter’s historic majority victory seemed at the time—even to many traditional Liberal and Conservative voters—a hopeful, optimistic sign of change in a province in desperate need of a few.

Today, though the jury is far from rendering a final verdict on Dexter’s first term, it is equally fair to suggest much of that optimism has dissipated.

What went wrong?

Some of it was inevitable, of course. The NDP’s actual performance could never have matched the sweet imaginations of its most long-suffering true believers, or even the more modest hopes of nervous switch voters.

There is no magic wand to rein in runaway health costs or keep emergency rooms open when there are no doctors to staff them. And governments sometimes make difficult decisions—turning off the taps for the Yarmouth-Portland ferry, fixing the pension mess, deciding whether to fund a new convention centre—many voters won’t like.

The fact the new government almost instantly abandoned its own solemn, cross-its-heart-and-hope-to-die campaign pledge not to raise taxes or cut programs, could not help but feed public cynicism, but I think it’s fair to say most of us expected that. And saw it as wiser than the alternative.

What we didn’t expect was that Darrell Dexter, so sure-footed in opposition, would lose his common-man touch in office.

His handling of the unanticipated MLAs expenses scandal, for example, was ham-handed. His own free-spending ways, along with his reluctant retreat from his insistence the public should pay his bar society fees, came to symbolize legislative entitlement at a time when the NDP was trying to prepare Nova Scotians for much needed tax increases and program cuts.

Thanks to the political distraction/public obsession with the expenses scandal, the NDP has seemed to lose control not only of its agenda but also of its temper. NDP Chief of Staff Dan O’Connor’s recent public spat with the Chronicle-Herald over an anonymous posting he made to their website, for example, indicates how frustrated they have become.

This was not the first year the NDP had hoped for either.

If ever there was a time for the NDP to—in the immortal words of Stephen Harper—“recalibrate,” it is now.

At first blush, it seemed like one of those tawdry, too-strange-to-be-true tabloid tales. In April 2008, a 38-year-old Digby County school teacher named Nicole Ryan was charged—along with her 70-year-old father—with trying to hire a hit man to murder her husband.

Because I follow most court cases from the comfortable periphery of my morning newspaper, I’ll confess this sordid story quickly slipped back beneath my radar as it wended its usual slow-cooker way through the judicial system.

Which may explain why I was shocked in late March to learn the judge in the case had acquitted Ryan because, he said, she was under “duress” at the time—even though she had admitted to agreeing to pay an undercover Mountie $25,000 to do the deed.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard, a month later, that the crown had decided to appeal the acquittal, claiming the trial judge had erred in law by failing to consider whether hiring a hit man was a “proportionate” response to whatever duress she was under.

But now that I’ve finally read Justice David Farrar’s 26-page decision, I have no problem with his conclusion. Instead, I have an entirely different problem—and question.

Let’s start with Michael Martin Ryan, He’s a nasty piece of business, “a manipulative, controlling and abusive husband [who] sought at every turn to control the actions of his wife.” He cut her off from family, friends, even co-workers, put a gun to her head on several occasions, threatened to kill her and their daughter, then “dig a trench and put them in and pile garbage on top.” When Ryan suggested a divorce, he warned: “Don’t test me, I will destroy you before I get a divorce.”

When she did finally move out, the threats only intensified. She charged him with uttering threats. The charges were dropped. She called the RCMP nine times, victim services 11 and 9-1-1 once. On February 17, 2008, her husband showed up at her school, sat menacingly in her car. The Mounties were called. They told her it was a civil matter; there was nothing they could do.

Instead, six weeks later, having failed Nicole Ryan at every turn, the RCMP decided to mount an expensive, sophisticated sting operation, using an undercover officer to entrap a desperate, frightened woman into committing a crime for which she could be charged.

Why?

Unfortunately, that question won’t be addressed during the upcoming appeal. But it’s a question that needs to the answered—if not by the Mounties, then certainly by the province’s justice minister.

****

Read the complete decision.
 

The morning after the big semi-reveal—the auditor general had turned over to the RCMP expense-claims files on one current and four former MLAs, but he wouldn’t say which ones to avoid compromising the criminal investigation—CBC Radio Information Morning’s political panel weighed in.

The panelists—veteran freelance journalist Ralph Surrette and former newspaper editor and Tory cabinet minister Jane Purves—both have well-earned journalistic credentials for fighting political corruption. That may be why what struck me most about their comments was their undertone of unease at the seemingly insatiable media appetite for—and public obsession with—this scandal, to the detriment both of more important issues, and also of public faith in elected officials.

The reasons for their unease quickly became apparent.

Within hours, Kevin Gaudet, spokesperson for a self-appointed lynch mob—also sometimes known as the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation—was telling a reporter our legislators should forget the niceties of due process, innocent until proven guilty and all that inconsequential stuff, and expel forthwith any member even suspected of finagling or fudging an expense from the legislature.

“Perhaps,” he suggested—his tongue unfortunately not in his cheek but his foot firmly planted in his mouth—“that would raise the bar of integrity.”

Indeed.

In the same article—hopefully in response to a hypothetical question from the reporter and as a comment on tactics rather than ethics—Acadia University political science professor Ian Stewart mused on the likelihood that Independent MLA Trevor Zinck is the single still-sitting member of the legislature whose expenses the Mounties are now investigating. If that’s the case, Stewart argued, the other MLAs could easily bounce him from the seat to which he was duly elected as “a cost-free way of attempting to show they are on top of the integrity issue and they’re responding to the public’s outrage.”

Fanning the outrage flames, Gaudet weighed in with the self-fulfilling suggestion that the MLA expenses scandal “fuels speculation by the voting public, taxpayers, that too many politicians are a bunch of crooks and thieves.”

I’ve covered Nova Scotia politics for 40 years. I’ve met a few crooks and thieves. Most MLAs aren’t. But they are human; thanks to lax legislation and less oversight, some found it too easy to confuse private benefit with public interest. Outrage over the expenses scandal was a wake-up call; this winter’s legislative reforms make the system more transparent and less susceptible to expense-fiddling. Outrage worked.

But now it’s time to let the criminal process work. And move on to other more serious—and expensive—political screw-ups. P3-schools, anyone.
 

Our All The President's Men

Part page-turning thriller, part indictment of contemporary pack journalism, part thoughtful meditation on the human cost of the passion for truth, Journalist Harvey Cashore's The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter's Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal is essential (and entertaining) reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the shocking and still under-reported details of the biggest Canadian political scandal of the twentieth century but also the painful truth about how badly our political system too often really works.

The book is full of larger-than-life characters—from the wily, always-looking-out-for-number-one Karlheinz Schreiber, to the bullying, always-looking-out-for-his boss Luc Lavoie, to the mysterious but plugged-in insider “Tower,” who knows the Airbus deal doesn’t pass “the smell test” and points Cashore in directions that will ultimately help him prove it.

But it is Cashore himself—and his often frustrating, career-making-and-breaking, personally-costly 15-year-odyssey to discover the Truth—who is the real central figure in this compelling drama.

If “Tower” is Canada’s “Deep Throat,” then Harvey Cashore is our Woodward and Bernstein. And The Truth Shows Up is our All The President’s Men.

High praise indeed—but deserved.

Can anyone explain why Nova Scotia Liberals—this province’s natural governing party for much of the last century—seem so hell-bent on shooting themselves, their leaders and their chances of forming the next government flush in the face?

Consider the last time there was a majority Liberal government in Nova Scotia.

In 1993, John Savage swept a tired Tory government from office, winning 40 of the legislature’s 52 seats. By 1997, however, Savage had been ignominiously forced from office, not by voters but by unhappy members of his own party. Why? Because Savage had actually begun to do what he’d promised to do—clean up the province’s corrupt patronage system—and eliminated some entitlements fellow Liberals felt entitled to.

Under Savage’s successor, bland, visionless, veteran federal MP Russell MacLellan, the Liberals squandered their advantages, stumbling and bumbling their way to opposition.

In 2000, MacLellan quit. It took party members two years to find a replacement but when they chose one, it seemed they’d gotten it right.

Danny Graham was bright, articulate and articulated a progressive liberal vision. But when Graham’s wife became terminally ill less than two years later, Graham had to step down to take care of his young family.

And the Liberals stepped right back in it, choosing the ineffably incompetent Francis McKenize, whose freefall 2006 election campaign reduced the party to nine seats in the legislature, his own not among them.

So MacKenzie quit. If you’re counting, that’s four leaders, not to forget two interim leaders, in a little over a decade, resulting in the election of 31 fewer MLAs.

The prize that current leader Stephen McNeil inherited with his second-ballot victory over fellow MLA Diana Whalen in April 2007 was hardly glorious.

How’s he done?

His record is mixed. He ran a strong 2009 election campaign, but his efforts went largely unrewarded, the voters having already decided to try someone else. The Liberals gained just two seats, enough to make it the official opposition. As opposition leader, McNeil’s still finding his feet.

But he has time. If he’s allowed that luxury to develop and mature—like Darrell Dexter and John Hamm before him—McNeil could very well lead his party to power someday.

This weekend in Antigonish, Liberal party members will vote on McNeil’s continued leadership. He’ll probably survive the review, but—thanks to too many malcontent party mischief makers—emerge the worse for the fight.

Which means the Liberal party will continue to do what it seems to do so well.

Do itself in.