Brian Mulroney Media Room

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.

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.

Brian Stewart: When Brian Mulroney was great

 Email To Friend |  Print |14/05/09

I worked abroad for most of the 1980s and, whenever the subject of Canada came up with diplomats and foreign politicians, I’d hear the phrase, “We like your man Brian.”

[...]

I’ve rarely dealt with Mulroney, outside of two interviews and a brief handshake at a public event. But I very much remember the time when the better parts of his nature roared through and he set in motion a chain of events that resulted in one of the greatest mobilizations of global empathy and humanitarian relief in the latter part of the 20th century.

The Ethiopian famine

It was early November 1984 and Mulroney had been in office only a few weeks when the first CBC images of mass starvation in Northern Ethiopia gave him a restless night at 24 Sussex.

Stephen Lewis, the former Ontario NDP leader and Mulroney’s surprise choice as UN ambassador, had also slept little after watching our story on The National. “I’d never seen anything like these images,” Lewis recounted years later. “I was completely dumbstruck by them.”

That following morning, Lewis remembers, his first phone call came from an emotional Mulroney asking what the UN was doing about the disaster. When Lewis replied it was doing nothing, there was a pause and then a quick let’s-do-it commitment by the prime minister that would launch both men onto the world stage.

In the absence of action elsewhere, Mulroney told Lewis that Canada was going to lead a worldwide rescue mission in Ethiopia and he immediately dispatched his new ambassador to New York to stir up the General Assembly.

Within days, in his maiden address, Lewis galvanized the General Assembly into taking action on African famine, demanding nothing less than “a Herculean effort on the part of all member nations.”

Days later, the UN and Red Cross launched what was at the time the greatest single humanitarian relief effort in history, to save an estimated seven million facing starvation in Ethiopia, along with a further 22 million others across the continent.

Read the full story here.

Search