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

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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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