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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]