BRIAN MULRONEY: WHO, ME?
posted on May 21st, 2009 - Filed in Uncategorized - No comments »Looking back 33 years, we probably got our first whiff of a political oil slick in Brian Mulroney’s wake after the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention in Ottawa.
Mulroney was a Tory back room player in those days, but had never before run for public office. It was perhaps indicative of his uncontained hubris that as a comparative unknown he presumed to claim the Conservative throne with none of the customary electoral initiations such as running for the town council in Baie Comeau, or campaigning for a seat in the Quebec National Assembly. No, Mulroney would go for the top right off the bat, and so embarked on a leadership campaign in which he flung around an estimated half million dollars to enlist Tory convention delegates and their votes.
Courtesy Getty Images
At the time, $500,000 was an unprecedented sum, far more than the budgets of any of the other 10 contenders, and Mulroney was accordingly and derisvely nicknamed the “Cadillac Candidate.” Large amounts of cash, then as now, seemed not to be a particular concern for the man who would later become Prime Minister of Canada.
But not in 1976: Mulroney finished third as a westerner named Joe Somebody or Other, also known as Joe Who? and also known as Joe Clark, ran up the middle of the pack, and to the astonishment of his party and the nation took over as leader from Robert Stanfield. Three years later, Clark/Who?/Somebody or Other was Prime Minister, only to lose his job within six months by careless handling of a confidence motion in the House of Commons.
But that’s another story. The point here is that in the weeks following the 1976 Progressive Conservative convention, 10 of the 11 leadership candidates filed detailed expense reports. The eleventh, Brian Mulroney, did not. The inference, it seems to me, is clear: even then, Mulroney had a cavalier attitude toward money and the public’s right, and indeed the party’s right to know how, and on whom it was spent. But Mulroney’s subalterns insisted – no doubt with his approval – that funds consumed in pursuit of leadership are private funds, as opposed to the financing of a general election which must by law be a matter of public record.
The man remains true to his principles, such as they are. During six days of testimony before the Oliphant Commission about his business affairs, Mulroney retreated time and time again to the contention that just because he accepted three envelopes, each laden with $75,000 in cash, from a German-Canadian weapons and influence peddler named Karlheinz Schreiber, and just because he didn’t declare the $225,000 total as income until six years later, and just because he actually didn’t pay tax on the full amount but only on half, he’s done nothing wrong. The payments were strictly private transactions between private individuals, and let’s not fuss about the fact the money was handed over in hotel rooms. No cheques, no paper trail, no nothing.
Besides, Mulroney says he kept his distance when people started asking questions about the cash, what it was for, what he was supposed to do to earn it. My lawyers handled that, they did everything, or the lawyers and accountants together did everything. MOI? He sounded like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nooothing.”
Mulroney took the money (Schreiber insists the final amount was in fact $300,000) and squirreled it away in safes at his home, and in a New York bank and then let it sit until German authorities issued an arrest warrant for Schreiber on suspicion of fraud and influence peddling. At that point, in 1999, Mulroney decided Schreiber might not be such a good fellow after all, and perhaps it’d be best to come clean, sort of, about the money.
(Not everyone had looked upon Schreiber has somebody who might be a useful ally. Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, for one, and two time federal cabinet minister John Crosbie for another were fully aware of Schreiber’s activities, and issued clear instructions to their staffs that at no time, not ever, should Schreiber be allowed anywhere near their offices).
Ordinary people with a sense of right as opposed to wrong (and that would include the vast majority of us) would under no circumstances accept envelopes jammed with cash from somebody we know, or somebody we don’t and then stash it. That’s what Mulroney did, though, but during the whole of his evidence before Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant the former PM draped himself in a cloak of righteous indignation, denied he’d done anything illegal, denied his dealings with Schreiber left a fetid odour hanging in the air (and over his legacy, whatever that may now be), and fell back repeatedly to the now familiar assertion that the whole sordid business is rooted in some sort of relentless, but largely undefined conspiracy against him and his family.
Brian Mulroney is 70 years old now and he looks every day and inch of it. The eyes are handgrips for dark, puffy bags, the legendary chin has nearly doubled and frequently sags, the waistline has gone from taut to slack, the stride is hesitant and slow.
The 18th Prime Minister of Canada, as matters currently stand, will not be found to have done anything illegal, but on the question of ethics that oil slick has now expanded into a vast reeking pool which will stain his record for all time. Brian Mulroney has no one to blame but himself, though, because he was the one who first turned on the tap, way back in 1976.
