Brian Mulroney Media Room

Mathias:Oliphant findings won’t sate the scandal-lust of Mulroney haters

 Email To Friend |  Print |02/06/10

The following was published in the June 2, 2010 edition of The National Post

The witch hunt against the 18th prime minister of Canada — the “Airbus affair” — is over (perhaps). And the people who tried for a quarter of a century to find Brian Mulroney guilty of heinous corruption have failed. Meanwhile, this wild goose chase has cost $30-million of public money and consumed huge quantities of political oxygen, often suffocating more vital matters.

Airbus has been probed by the RCMP (twice), by the CBC (for 15 years), by the House of Commons Ethics Committee and by the $16-million Justice Jeffrey Oliphant Commission. At times, Mulroney’s treatment has descended into a public degradation ritual. But all this rage and spending has produced little more than Oliphant’s finding that Mulroney’s conduct was “inappropriate” for a former prime minister. When the dust settles, historians will call the Airbus affair, “The Mouse that Roared.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE NATIONAL POST

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.

Read full story.

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.

Read full story.

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.

Read full article

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.

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.

Letter to the Editor: Mr. Mulroney’s Answers

 Email To Friend |  Print |18/05/09

This letter appeared in Saturday’s Globe and Mail:

BRIAN PURDY
May 16, 2009
Calgary — I am no fan of Brian Mulroney, although I think he is the subject of a grotesquely prolonged witch hunt.

Having spent my legal career in many courtrooms, I accept Mr. Mulroney’s statement that he answered the question he was asked, and he was not asked about what happened at those coffee meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber. Any competent courtroom counsel would have posed an open-ended question about what was discussed. It is a routine technique to close off all subsequent claims by a witness that he was not asked about something.

Mr. Mulroney knows, and was no doubt counselled, to answer what was asked, not what wasn’t. He is on solid ground to say he wasn’t asked and so didn’t talk about the money transactions with Mr. Schreiber.

That’s not wiggling, or evasion.

Kelly McParland:Brian Mulroney’s friends in the press

 Email To Friend |  Print |17/05/09

Brian Mulroney may or may not convince the inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber that he’s the injured party, but he’s never going to win over the reporters covering the show.

Reviews of his performance to date (four days on the stand, two under questioning by his own lawyer, two under questioning by chief counsel Richard Wolson) have ranged from skeptical to hostile, with no small amount of mockery in the mix.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Mulroney’s Press Gallery treated him with just as much hostility as today’s gallery treats Stephen Harper. (Once, on a foreign trip, I got stuck in an elevator with a dozen Galleryites as they plotted how to catch Mulroney saying something stupid on camera. “He always says something stupid when he’s out of the country,” one said.) Mulroney returned their loathing.

It’s remarkable that the feeling should linger to this day, even among reporters too young to have covered Mulroney as Prime Minister. But survey the coverage of his testimony this week and it’s tough to find a sympathetic voice.
The Globe and Mail had a major hissy after one of Mulroney’s aides accused its reporter of giggling while Mulroney was recounting the devastating effect on him of the Airbus Affair, claiming Mulroney used it to divert attention from the holes in his testimony:

Read the full story.

Ivison: One Central Fact Shines

 Email To Friend |  Print |17/05/09

Anyone can support me when I’m right, I want people who will support me when I’m wrong, Sir John A. Macdonald is reported to have said.

As his testimony before the Oliphant inquiry entered its fourth day, Brian Mulroney was undoubtedly discovering that the band of people loyal enough to support him through thick and thin is dwindling rapidly.

One former Progressive Conservative told me that there is still a residual sympathy for the former prime Minister because of who he is and what he achieved. “It reminds us of a time when we liked the leader. But all the legalism and ‘because they didn’t ask me’ stuff is starting to tell,” he said.

Given the problems politicians have been having with nannies of late, Mr. Mulroney will be delighted to know that not only does he have at least one staunch supporter, it turns out she’s his former nanny. A lady calling herself “Nancy” posted a comment to CTV’s Web site yesterday, saying that Mr. Mulroney had treated his staff with respect and paid them well. “I believe he was a very good prime minister. He made a mistake he admitted to and I forgive him. He is nice,” she wrote.

That might be a stretch for a great many Canadians left shaking their heads at the testimony at the inquiry into Mr. Mulroney’s business dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber. Yet, amid the fog of obfuscation, one central fact shone through yesterday that will, one suspects, spare Mr. Mulroney from the ultimate indignity of conflict of interest allegations while he was still in office. Testimony repeatedly came back to the fact that, no matter how much access Mr. Schreiber was able to secure through Mr. Mulroney’s friends, Fred Doucet and Elmer MacKay, the former prime minister ultimately decided to turn down Canadian government involvement in the Bearhead project to build light armoured vehicles.

After leaving office and adopting business practices that are more usually associated with Tony Montana in Scarface, Mr. Mulroney’s contention that he was “the fellow that cancelled the [Bearhead] project” stands as a matter of fact. He met Mr. Schreiber twice in the month before leaving office and could still have rammed the project through if he was of a mind to do so. He was later hired by Mr. Schreiber, who had spent years lobbying him to green-light a project that would have earned him hundreds of millions of dollars. But as Mr. Mulroney said, it is “preposterous” to think that he could have achieved something as a private citizen that he had neglected to do as prime minister.

Read full story.

Search