Brian Mulroney Media Room

Pat MacAdam on Brian Mulroney

 Email To Friend |  Print |24/05/09

From today’s Ottawa Sun:

When I look back at Brian Mulroney’s roller-coaster life since his 1993 resignation, I think of phrases from Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven.

Brian has been hounded by malicious innuendos “down the nights and down the days….down the arches of the years; down the labyrinthine ways.”

We have been friends since September 1955, at St. F.X. He was Brian or “Bones.” When he was sworn in as prime minister 29 years later, he became “Sir” or “Prime Minister” — as a mark of respect. He still has that respect.

One of his cardinal virtues is he has always been there for family and friends. When his father died, he became the breadwinner for his mother and brother and sisters.

He ensured his mother was comfortable in an apartment in the Gleneagles, up the hill from Sherbrooke St.

After his leadership loss in 1976, he had his pick of senior positions — Standard Brands, NHL presidency, et al. When he shook the plum tree, Iron Ore Company of Canada was his choice.

I sometimes ask myself why he would want to leave IOC for politics. When he cut his deal with Iron Ore, Bob Anderson, IOC’s chairman, asked if there was “anything else.”

Brian’s answer was that every director around the boardroom table was a millionaire and he would like to be one too.

Passed!

I have no idea what his salary was at IOC but I suspect he took a 50%-75% cut to serve as PM. At IOC, he had a private air force — a seven-passenger DeHavilland 127 jet, an executive Viscount and a fleet of other prop planes.

He had memberships in exclusive clubs and access to a smashing trout fishing camp in Labrador, accessible only by floatplanes. The camp had two guides on staff and their wives provided us with gourmet meals.

He was the toast of Montreal. One day, Brian, MP Bob Coates and I walked into the Beaver Club at the Queen E. and every head in the room snapped up.

At a Toronto fundraiser for Claude Bennett, he joked he was in politics for “the recognition.” He said it was an exhilarating feeling to walk through a hotel lobby, see heads turn and hear people say: “There goes Bryce Malooney.”

Four years later, in 1980, we were in Bucharest, Romania, pitching iron ore pellets and concentrates at the invitation of Nicolae Ceaucescu. Our 20-minute audience stretched beyond an hour.

Ceaucescu said: “Mr. Mulroney, when Richard Nixon was here, he was in disgrace. He lost the presidency to John Kennedy and California governor to Pat Brown. He sat in that very chair you are sitting in. He didn’t give up. Don’t you give up either. Mr. Mulroney.”

Two years ago, Brian and I were in a limo in New York. He was taking a shuttle to Washington to have breakfast with Sen. Ted Kennedy and I was returning to Ottawa.

He mused, wistfully, “New York is my town.”

I can understand why Caroline, Ben, Mark and Nicholas attended American colleges but I always thought Brian and Mila would move to New York because most of Brian’s professional life was in the U.S.

I was with him in New York when he delivered a speech to a packed audience of agri-bankers in the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center. It was a balmy evening. I dismissed our driver and we walked five blocks back to the St. Regis Hotel.

Every 10 feet some smiling person who wanted to shake his hand stopped us.

“Who are these people, Brian? Canadians?”

“No, Americans.”

“How do they recognize you?”

“Don’t forget, J.P., I was prime minister for nine years and I delivered the eulogy at Ronald Reagan’s funeral.”

I was tempted to say “maybe they mistook your chin for Jay Leno’s,” but I didn’t want to rain on his Fifth Avenue parade.

Back in the hotel, he fielded phone calls from Condoleezza Rice and Ted Kennedy. Then, he asked me if I had seen the New York Times that day. There was an article about a blue-chip committee of 30 former U.S. presidents, senators and governors past and present and leading Fortune 500 CEOs formed to raise money for a 9/11 memorial.

The names of Martin Brian Mulroney and a British peer were the only non-Americans on the list of 30.

I was with him in Washington for a speech to a roomful of pension fund managers — clients of the Thayer Group. There was probably $300 billion-$500 billion in the room.

William Cohen, Thayer’s chairman, mayor of Bangor, Maine congressman, senator and former secretary of defence, introduced Brian. I was stunned by the powerful introduction. I looked over to make sure Brian hadn’t passed away between the soup and the salad and Bill was delivering his eulogy.

Next up was Thayer director Jack Kemp, Buffalo Bills quarterback, congressman, cabinet secretary, vice-presidential candidate. He out-did Bill Cohen praising Brian. Then came President George Bush the elder’s campaign manager, Frank Zerbe, another Thayer director. He left Cohen and Kemp behind with his eloquent praise. My head would have exploded.

I will never know why Brian didn’t move to New York to soar with the eagles instead of remaining in Canada to walk among the turkeys at the Oliphant inquiry.

James Ferrabee: Mulroney earns his rest

 Email To Friend |  Print |23/05/09

There are many more losers than winners at the inquiry into former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber.

The list of losers start with Brian Mulroney, battered and bruised after 15 years of attacks on his personal integrity in books, on TV and in parliamentary committees. None of it has to do with his time in office so it is not a probe of his policies while prime minister.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a loser because he launched the inquiry and commanded his caucus members not to speak to Brian Mulroney. Treating Mulroney as an outcast angered many of his MPs and in doing that, Harper made an enemy of Mulroney and damaged his own position as Conservative party leader..

The media is a loser for printing articles or broadcasting stories whose sole aim was to bring down Mulroney whether or not the evidence justified the charges. The media will print a correction from time to time, but will rarely admit when they are wrong.

Elected officials in Canada are losers. They include cabinet ministers in Ottawa and the provinces, mayors of small communities, school board members, anyone who wants to serve the public good in government. The hounding Mulroney received will scare away bright and ambitious people from serving in these positions.

The Canadian people are losers because they paid millions of dollars for inquiries and parliamentary hearings where the same questions are asked and the answers offer almost no new information.

The only winners are the opposition Liberal, New Democratic and Bloc parties who will take advantage of the split in the Conservatives at the next election. Whether or not they organized the 15-year-long vendetta against Mulroney, they are taking full advantage of Mulroney’s troubles to win votes.

Mulroney has his faults, like all of us. He is loyal to his friends who often got him into trouble. He enjoys friends who are rich which he is not. It is difficult to compete with them on a prime minister’s pension.

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Conrad Black: Oliphant/Mulroney is nothing like Frost/Nixon

 Email To Friend |  Print |23/05/09

The comparisons in the Canadian media between Brian Mulroney’s appearance at the Oliphant Commission and Richard Nixon’s encounter with David Frost are almost entirely unfounded. Nixon had a more tenuous claim to innocence of wrongdoing, and although the interviews were sold as “the only trial Nixon will ever face,” he was not a sworn witness.

It is scandalous that Brian Mulroney is still being harassed over these accusations, 17 years after leaving office. He has acknowledged that it was not an image-building act to accept suitcases of cash, and to be late declaring them on his income tax return. But he had left office and there has never been any evidence that he did anything inappropriate to promote the unlikely “Bear Head” project being championed by his financial benefactor, Karlheinz Schreiber.

The Canadian government should not have been manipulated into public hearings by an amiable scoundrel like Schreiber, and Stephen Harper should not have alienated the sizeable number of Conservatives who support and admire the former leader. He was a very competent prime minister, and was the first Conservative leader since Sir John A. Macdonald to win two consecutive majority governments, and to defeat the Liberals in Quebec. (I discount Sir Robert L. Borden, who led a coalition to re-election in 1917, and John Diefenbaker, whose 50 Quebec MPs in 1958 were an outright gift from premier Maurice Duplessis.)

Publicly telling caucus members not to speak with a former prime minister of their own party is pretty shabby and ungrateful treatment of someone who deserves every presumption of legal, if not optically impeccable, conduct.

The Schreiber saga is an entertaining farce, orchestrated by his resourceful lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, as he recovered Schreiber from the airport where a platoon of Mounted Police were about to put him on an airplane to Germany after his last appeal was rejected. The government had to avoid seeming to deport an accuser of a former prime minister, but all these matters should have been, and I presume, were, dealt with by normal police investigations. So the government could (and should) have just released the police report without comment, conducted Schreiber to his reluctant homecoming and spared Brian Mulroney a sequel of the disgraceful Airbus persecution.

This seems to be the kernel of the problem, a demented insistence that the money from Schreiber had to do with Airbus. I am not an expert on this case, but I have heard of no evidence of that, and

Schreiber is certainly imaginative enough to claim it if he could. The Airbus allegation was a partisan smear job in which the federal police were effectively directed by a gonzo Globe and Mail reporter. Brian Mulroney was quite right not to volunteer anything about Schreiber to the government’s lawyers. He was answering hostile questions about Airbus from people desperately trying to justify the government’s false accusation that he had taken a bribe. He was not giving a stream-of-consciousness musing on his career with confessional overtones, and Justice Oliphant’s question about why he did not reveal the Schreiber connection to his interrogators was bizarre. The answer is obvious and there is nothing wrong with it.

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Toronto Star on Mulroney’s legal fees

 Email To Friend |  Print |22/05/09

Editorial from today’s Toronto Star:

The fuss over the federal government’s payment of former prime minister *Brian* *Mulroney*’s $2 million in legal fees arising from the Oliphant inquiry is misplaced.

A public inquiry is a massive undertaking. A judge presides over it, but under him or her is a wide array of lawyers and researchers digging into files and conducting tough cross-examinations of the subjects of the inquiry, who are often former senior office holders like Mulroney. Furthermore, it is not a trial (Mulroney stands accused of no crime) but a search for information. The conclusions drawn from the inquiry are generally political (whom to blame) or policy-oriented (how to avoid a reoccurrence). It is only right, then, that the government pay the legal expenses of the subjects of the inquiry, both to protect their interests and to assist in the fact-finding.

There is also ample precedent for this. For example, the legal fees racked up by former prime minister Jean Chretien during the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal were paid by the government.
So, too, were former premier Mike Harris’ fees during the Ipperwash inquiry.

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Live Tweeting - Mulroney’s sixth day

 Email To Friend |  Print |20/05/09

As Mr. Mulroney takes to the stand for the sixth day, Joseph Lavoie will be covering the action from Victoria Hall.

Linden MacIntyre: No evidence to support wrongdoing

 Email To Friend |  Print |20/05/09

On last night’s episode of Politics, Linden MacIntyre told Susan Bonner that

If there was something wrong it has to do with the fact that the $225,000 could be demonstrated to have been a reward for things that happened when Mr. Mulroney was the prime minister, whether or not he made them happen - I mean it could be as innocent as that.

[...]

There is no evidence to support anything like that. [emphasis added]

Twenty years of reporting and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted.

Globe Editor’s Glass House

 Email To Friend |  Print |19/05/09

Responding to the Editor of the Globe and Mail’s open letter attacking Brian Mulroney today, his spokesman Robin Sears said,

“In 2003, the Globe and Mail entered into discussions with Mr.Mulroney’s representatives, received documents from them, conducted followup interviews with some of those named in the documentation, and assigned reporters to develop the story handed to them. On the instructions of their then new editor, Edward Greenspon, the inquiries were cancelled, the story killed and the real reasons for the decision refused despite several inquiries.

The closest the editor came to full disclosure was the claim that the evidence “could not be corroborated in time.” This following less than a week of inquiry, and from a newspaper whose idea of sufficient corroboration on their version of this story, up to this point, had been the world of a convicted felon and a police informant.

Before the Globe accuses anyone else of seeking to suppress news they might offer their readers an opportunity to examine the materials in their possession and explain the reasons for their determination to keep them hidden.”

Live Tweeting - Day Five

 Email To Friend |  Print |19/05/09

Mr. Mulroney takes the stand again today. You can get updates right here throughout the day from Joseph Lavoie.

SPECTOR CONTRADICTS HIMSELF… AGAIN

 Email To Friend |  Print |19/05/09

The curious treachery and contradictory testimony of one of Mr. Mulroney’s most senior appointees continues.

Despite having twice testified under oath that he was told to kill the Bear Head project by the former prime minister, Norm Spector again yesterday contradicted himself to Canadian Press reporter Jim Brown.

Before the Ethics Committee on February 5, 2008, the former prime minister’s Chief of Staff and choice as Ambassador of Israel, said, “when presented with the facts, Mr. Mulroney did not hesitate to do the right thing and declare Bear Head dead.”

Before the Oliphant Commission last month, the long-time Victoria, B.C. retiree said, that Mr. Mulroney, upon having been informed of the escalating costs of the projects, “looked at me and said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, the project is dead.’” (Commission transcript, April 30, 2009, line 26738).

Mr. Spector was tasked by the former prime minister to end the Cape Breton project when informed the public subsidies required had climbed to over $100 million.

Mr. Spector testified before the House of Commons Ethics Committee and the Inquiry about the steps he took to implement the prime minister’s order:

“That conversation took place on a Sunday, and Monday morning, the first thing in coming to the office, I called Mr. Fowler and I called Mr. Tellier to relate the nature of the conversation that I had with the Prime Minister, and I then also told my Deputy Chief of Staff, Mr. Grauer, about the substance of the conversation.” (Commission transcript, April 30, 2009, line 26770).

Norman Spector, a three-time appointee by Mr. Mulroney and former B.C. political advisor to Premier Bill Bennett first turned against his Mr. Mulroney in his collaboration with Toronto writer Bill Kaplan on his book, “A Secret Trial.”

Reacting to his latest outburst Mulroney spokesperson Robin Sears said, “His conflicting testimony and frequently re-edited accounts make this latest attack on the former prime minister as “evasive,” somewhat ironic.”

Belleville Intelligencer: Mulroney’s vision was on grand scale

 Email To Friend |  Print |18/05/09

Michael Den Tandt wrote the following in Friday’s Belleville Intelligencer:

Great men make great mistakes, they say. Does that make Brian Mulroney great?

He made some whoppers. He also — like him or loathe him — strove greatly and in some respects achieved greatly. Leaders of his ilk are history now. We are the poorer for it.

[...]

And yet his policy vision was grand. Sheath your skinning knife for a moment and think about it.

He opposed apartheid, vigourously. He was the only western leader to take up this torch in any meaningful way and was belittled for doing so by none other than Lady Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of Britain.

He brought us free trade and the GST. Free trade marked a dramatic, even epochal leap forward for Canadian prosperity, Canadian job growth and the Canadian economy. The GST, reviled though it was at the time, was the cash cow that later allowed a Liberal finance minister, Paul Martin, to right the nation’s finances.

Remember acid rain? Mulroney was ahead of his time on the environment.

Meech Lake and Charlottetown? Canadians of that era didn’t want the “community of communities” (to borrow Joe Clark’s earlier expression) embodied by these failed accords. Yet where are we now? The House of Commons recognizes the Quebecois as a nation within Canada. Meech’s “distinct society” clause pales in comparison. Agree or disagree, here too Mulroney was ahead of his time.

Like Trudeau before him, Mulroney played politics on the battlefield of big ideas. And we so hated big ideas by the time he quit that small ideas took over, entirely. Enter Jean Chretien in 1993. Enter Stephen Harper in 2006. Both are pragmatic incrementalists and neither had, nor has, a discernible vision for Canada.

Mulroney was a big thinker and a big doer. Nothing, not Schreiber and not our modern political culture, which loves to hang ‘em high, can take that away.

Read the full story here.

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