Our new governor general and the greasy Airbus affair
David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era.
But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice to be represented once again in the corridors of ceremonial powerlessness.
Johnston is, of course, a lawyer. Better yet, a legal scholar. A specialist in securities law, something happily impenetrable to the rest of us.
He played hockey at Harvard. Of course Harvard. Better yet, he captained its hockey team. At 69, if you believe his gushing friends, he still possesses the speed and finesse of a young Yvan Cournoyer.
He is a former principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, one of Canada’s most venerable institutions of higher learning, and now a soon-to-be former president of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s most leading edge—can you say particle physics?—groves of academe.
Of course—of course—he is an excellent family man. Married to the same woman forever. The same woman, it should—and will—be said, who is accomplished in her own right, but will not seek her own limelight like… well, no need to mention John Ralston Saul or Jean-Daniel Lafond.
And the kids? Five of them. All girls. All grown. All overachievers. Did we forget the seven grandkids?
Lovely.
Uh… but there is this one nagging footnote to his resumé that’s hard to forget—or forgive.
David Johnston is the person most responsible for the fact we wasted $14 million on a public inquiry to discover what we already knew about Brian Mulroney—that he is a pathological prevaricator of the first order—but not what we actually wanted to know—which is who really got how much of that $20-million in Airbus grease money?
That Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose Johnston—among all the boring old white guy academic overachievers available—to set the sharpened pencil-point-narrow terms of reference for the inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair says much about Stephen Harper’s prescience.
And perhaps too much about David Johnston’s willingness to go along.
Which is why he will make an ideal governor general... for Stephen Harper.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The question that matters goes unanswered
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.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Much truth in “The Truth…”
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.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Mulroney-Schreiber (Dec 20, 2007)
Why we still need an inquiry
According to the most recent public opinion poll, most Canadians don’t want a public inquiry into the strange, fact-is-fantasy, fantasy-is-reality, no-really, tall tale of Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, Sleazy Karlheinz Schreiber, the incredibly shrinking $300,000, the sadly bloating $2.1 million, the globe-trotting lobbying effort on behalf of world peace, light tanks and the dietary benefits of pasta in fighting obesity to a who’s who of conveniently dearly departed world leaders, and… oh yes, the Airbus affair and that $20 million in grease money Schreiber once spread around political Canada like jam on toast on behalf of his corporate clients.
Oh that…
The Globe and Mail’s resident contrarian, Margaret Wente, wrote this week that we should all just move on. William Kaplan, the lawyer-journalist who once wrote a book proclaiming Mulroney’s innocence, discovered he’d accepted $300,000 in cash payments and then turned around and wrote a second book criticizing him, agrees. “We should probably call it a day,” writes the obviously weary Mr. Kaplan.
Brian Mulroney, perhaps not surprisingly, now shares that view.
Prior to last week, Mulroney had loudly proclaimed he wanted a full-scale public inquiry to clear his name (almost as loudly, it should be noted, as his chief spoke-spinner had once insisted our former prime minister never took money from Schreiber).
But then Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Mulroney his public inquiry, and Mulroney got called to testify before the Commons Ethics Committee, and… oops.
Mulroney may have belatedly realized a public inquiry with a judge, lawyers and testimony-under-oath might not turn out to be another fawning memoir-promotion in high-definition, low-content, full colour with the likes of Lloyd Robertson. Or even another talk-until-they-drop partisan parliamentary committee appearance.
A real public inquiry could subpoena Mulroney’s bank and tax records. It could follow the Schreiber money trail to that secret Swiss account code-named “Briton,” then trace it back to Canada and on to The Pierre hotel in New York, even into that secret New York safety deposit box where Mulroney says he kept the cash. Records there could show exactly when the box was opened, how many times it was visited, etc. The inquiry could tell us how and when what was left of the cash came back to Canada, even whether the man who gifted us the GST actually paid it on what he now says he belatedly claimed as income.
A real public inquiry might compare Mulroney’s claims about his meetings on behalf of Schreiber with all those late and/or unidentified world leaders with any records — transcripts, notes, recollections of others present — that still exist in order to determine whether Mulroney was telling the truth about what he did to earn his $300,000… er, $225,000 retainer.
A real public inquiry would force Mulroney’s many friends and enablers — including key friends-of-both like lobbyist Fred Doucet — to testify under oath about Mulroney’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber.
No wonder Mulroney doesn’t want a real public inquiry.
And no wonder his many media apologists don’t want one either.
But what about the rest of us?
According to a recent Harris-Decima poll, only 32 per cent of Canadians now want Harper to call the public inquiry he promised.
That’s not to suggest they think Mulroney is telling the truth. The same poll showed only 21 per cent believed Mulroney was telling the truth when he testified last week.
Perhaps they believe they already know all they really need to — or will ever find out — about what actually happened. Perhaps they think an inquiry will cost too much and change too little.
Which is true — and not. The process of reform in politics is slow and inevitably stuttering. But it does happen. Stephen Harper’s Conservative swept into office on a promise to clean up after the sponsorship scandal. Their Public Accountability Act doesn’t go nearly far enough, but it is a step.
Beyond better legislation, the key to discouraging political bad behaviour is the knowledge there is no statute of limitations on misdeeds. The sponsorship inquiry took us back a decade; this inquiry could answer the still largely unasked questions about which politicians got what and why from Schreiber’s $20-million “grease money” accounts.
Politicians and their media apologists have been quick to say there’s no need for a public inquiry, no need to dredge up the past because it’s in the past and could never happen again.
Don’t buy it. There are only two pauses between a politician and scandal — legislation and the fear of getting caught.
Bring on the public inquiry.
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
Anticipating Mulroney (Dec 13, 2007)
Waiting for Brian
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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
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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.
Buy his books at Amazon.