The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 4)

(Continued from Part 3, previous blog post)

In its history, the renowned Knox College founded in 1844-45 by the Presbyterian Church in Canada once had a prominent leading role in the free-church and anti-slavery movements in Canada.

A main founder of Knox College was Rev. Dr. Robert Burns, a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of the leaders of the 1843 Free Church movement in Scotland (the “Great Disruption”), who was invited to Toronto in 1844 to start the Free Church movement in Canada, became minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and led the founding of Knox College. ¹¹⁸

The first Principal of Knox College – a position begun in the 1850s – was Rev. Dr. Michael Willis, a colleague of Burns and also from Scotland, who when became the principal was already the founding president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. ¹¹⁹ The anti-slavery history in Canada at the time was mainly known for the “Underground Railroad” – a network of anti-slavery Americans and Canadians who smuggled black slaves from the American South to freedom and settlement in Canada. ¹²⁰

As much as being a part of the anti-slavery history, though, Knox College of Toronto is not related to (and should not be confused with) Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Located at a town that was the centre of anti-slavery activity in the state of Illinois and a “Freedom Station” on the Underground Railroad, this liberal-arts Knox College had been founded seven years earlier in 1837 by a group of anti-slavery advocates led by Presbyterian minister George Washington Gale, starting out as a bible-training college with an odd name, Knox Manual Labour College, for the reason that students worked on the farm to support their educations; this Knox College’s establishment had the approval of Abraham Lincoln among other state legislators, and subsequently it was the ‘historic’ site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate – one of a series of political debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas – for election to the U.S. Senate; Lincoln lost the election but the debates propelled him to national fame and in two years’ time election to the U.S. presidency, defeating Douglas this time. ¹²¹ Abraham Lincoln also received a honorary degree from this Knox College – his first and the college’s first honorary doctorate. ¹²²

Even now, Knox College in Illinois continues its tradition of being part of the politics for change and progress, proudly making it known to Americans: the college observes that when John Podesta, former Bill Clinton Whitehouse chief of staff and leader of the transition team for newly elected President Barack Obama – the first African-American President in U.S. history – appeared on the TV program The Colbert Report (on January 29, 2009, which happened to be a special day for me, and when I posted my first blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), Obama, Podesta and the show’s host Stephen Colbert all had received Knox College honorary degrees. ¹²³

But even so, back in early 1863 when Abraham Lincoln was succeeding in his historical achievement leading Americans to abolish slavery – although he had not decidedly won the Civil War – the Canadian contributions to the cause, especially those by Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis of Knox College in Toronto, were singled out by George Brown – a fellow Scot and founder of The Globe and Mail newspaper – for congratulation for a mission accomplished: ^{124, 125}

“… Now we have an anti-slavery president of the United States. Now we have an anti-slavery government at Washington. Now we have an anti-slavery congress at Washington. Already slavery has been abolished in the District of Columbia. At last a genuine treaty for the suppression of the slave trade has been signed at Washington with the government of Great Britain, and for the first time in her history the penalty of death has been enforced in the republic for the crime of man-stealing. Then, the black republics of Hayti and Liberia have been recognized by the United States as inde­pendent powers; and, even more important still, the vast territories of the United States have been prohibited by law from entering the republic except as free states. And the climax was reached a month ago when Abraham Lincoln, as President of the United States, proclaimed that from that moment every slave in the rebel states was absolutely free, and that the republic was prepared to pay for the freedom of all the slaves in the loyal states. The freely elected government and legislature of the United States have proclaimed that not with their consent shall one slave remain within the republic.

Was I not right, then, when I said that we ought to rejoice together to-night? I congratulate you, Mr. Chairman (Rev. Dr. Willis), on the issue of your forty years’ contest here and on the other side of the Atlantic on behalf of the American slave. I congratulate the venerable mover of the first resolution (Rev. Dr. Burns), who for even a longer period has been the unflinching friend of freedom. I congratulate the tried friends of emancipation around me on the platform, and the no less zealous friends of the cause throughout the hall, whose well-remembered faces have been ever present when a word of sympathy was to be uttered for the down-trodden and oppressed. …”

Of special interest here is that George Brown who made the above-quoted speech in 1863 soon after the proclamation of emancipation by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, had also (with his father Peter Brown and with Robert Burns) founded the Presbyterian Record magazine; this fact is mentioned in the September 2005 article quoted in detail earlier (“A united effort crowns righteousness”) about Stevie Cameron and her Out-of-the-Cold program as well as about Chinese Presbyterians; in addition, George Brown as a politician later became one of the founding fathers of Canada (Fathers of the Confederation). ¹²⁶

The late Rev. Edward Ling’s son Winston Ling, vice president of finance and administration at Tyndale University College & Seminary since 1995 – as earlier mentioned – whose wife Stephanie has been a governing board member of Knox College in Toronto as well as a board member of the Scott Mission for the needy, had for many years been the executive vice president of finance at (the former) Crownx Inc., holding company of the Crown Life Insurance Company, the Extendicare Health Care group, and the Crowntek Group, working under then president Michael Burns and chairman David Hennigar from the owners: Toronto’s Burns family of Burns Fry Ltd. fame (today part of Bank of Montreal Nesbitt Burns), and the Jodrey family of Nova Scotia. ¹²⁷ I found the Burns and Burns (i.e., the financial Burns family and Rev. Robert Burns) associations in the Winston-Stephanie Ling couple quite interesting and even intriguing, and once asked Winston if the Burns family were related to Rev. Robert Burns; but the answer was: not that he knew of, Michael Burns was Anglican – in fact a recent Chancellor of (the Anglican) Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. ^{128, 129}

My question to Winston is pertinent here even if not everyone in Rev. Edward Ling’s large family is necessarily familiar with a historical Burns connection: my great-great-grandfather, namely Rev. Edward Ling’s medical-doctor-and-Presbyterian-minister grandfather (as discussed earlier in the context of a Toronto Star article about Rev. Ling, and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), who had been born in or around 1849, the year the first Protestant church in his home region of China was founded in his humble village by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, in around 1860-61 became a Christian when he was a young pupil tutored by Rev. William Burns at the school of that church and was baptized by Rev. Burns ¹³⁰ – that was 100 years before the cornerstone for the first Chinese church building in Toronto, with a school-style architecture, was laid under the leadership of businessman and church elder Edward Ling in 1960, who then went to Taiwan in 1961 to study to become a pastor. ¹³¹

The Rev. William Burns in China in 1861 was the person Canadians had known as Rev. Robert Burns’s young nephew, William Chalmers Burns, who in 1844 had accompanied Robert Burns to visit Canada, where Robert Burns stayed to lead the free-church movement and found Knox College. They and William Chalmers Burns’s fellow young preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne were enthusiastic members of the Scottish Free Church movement led by Thomas Chalmers, and when visiting Canada the young W. C. Burns was already internationally known as the remarkably incredible revival preacher of Kilsyth, having drawn crowds as large as 10,000 to his spiritual-revival sermons in 1839. ¹³²

William Chalmers Burns was born in 1815 in the same year the Swiss Basel Mission was founded in Basel, Switzerland, which as a Lutheran foreign mission subsequently had strong influence over British foreign missionary work – particularly that of the Anglican Church – for the next several decades. ¹³³ In 1847, Burns became the first official foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, going to China in the same year as the two first Basel missionaries to China, Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler. ¹³⁴ In 1860-61, Rev. William Burns was invited to the Ling family’s home village in the Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong province to visit the first Protestant church of the region founded by Rev. Lechler in 1849, which had been left with only 13 disciples on their own in 1852 when Rev. Lechler was expelled by the regional government and returned to Hong Kong. ¹³⁵ Rev. Burns preached and taught school in the same house where Rev. Lechler had done so, and revived and took under his spiritual wing this local church. ¹³⁶

Rev. William Burns died several years later in 1868 at the age of 53, up in the unfamiliar Northeast of China (i.e., Manchuria, homeland of the imperial Qing-dynasty ethnic people), exhausted, nearly alone amongst a small group of Chinese worshipers but still full of the spirit that had set him apart. ¹³⁷

In or around 1896, the second medical hospital to be founded by the English Presbyterian Mission in the southern coastal Shantou region of China was named the William Burns Memorial Hospital in his honour; by this time, the young-pupil Ling baptized by Rev. Burns had long ago completed studies under Doctor William Gauld at the first hospital of the Mission founded by Gauld, practiced as a medical doctor in this hospital for decades and was about to become a Presbyterian preacher, while a fellow doctor Lin (Ling and Lin were actually the same family name, in a village where the majority were of this family name and distantly related) – son of the person who had invited Rev. Burns to revive the village church left there by Rev. Lechler – would become the principal of this second hospital; in recent decades the site has been the campus of a regional school of public health. ^{138, 139}

Prior to his life journey in China, William Chalmers Burns was in Canada from 1844 to 1846, preaching in churches in different part of the country. In the Woodstock area of Ontario (Oxford County) Rev. Burns baptized a baby born in 1844 – the year he arrived in Canada – by the name of George Leslie Mackay. ¹⁴⁰ Little Mackay grew up with W. C. Burns as his idol, studied at Knox College in Toronto and at other Presbyterian institutions, became the first foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church in Canada (and became a medical doctor), following the example of his idol to China and following his idol’s footsteps to do missionary work in the Shantou (Swatow) region; but after arrival Mackay decided to sail across the sea to take a look first at the island of Taiwan, and once he saw the Tamsui town in Taiwan he knew instantly Taiwan would be his home, where today a large Mackay Memorial Hospital (in the capital city Taipei with branches including in Tamsui Township) stand in testimonial of his contributions to his adopted homeland – even if the hospital originally was not named for him but after a Captain Mackay of Detroit whose wife donated money for his clinic on the condition that the hospital be named that way. ¹⁴¹

Rev. Dr. Mackay died at the age of 57 in 1901 in Taiwan, after a fruitful and fulfilled life, whose achievements beside the medical hospital included founding around 60 churches with thousands of coverts, founding the Oxford College – forerunner of Taiwan Theological College and Seminary where  in the 1960s Rev. Edward Ling studied to become a preacher – and serving as the elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1895; the Canadian missionary assisting him in his later years and then succeeding him was one Rev. William Gauld (apparently unrelated to the British Dr. William Gauld in the 1860s in Shantou across the sea). ^{142, 143}

Burns, Mackay, Mackay & (not closely or necessarily related) Mackay, William Gauld & (unrelated) William Gauld, Burns & (unrelated) Burns, what interesting ‘inspirations’ around!

The town of Tamsui in Taiwan which Mackay felt in love with at first sight and chose as home was by the Chinese name 淡水, meaning ‘freshwater’; it had been an important seaport on international trade routes, with prior Spanish and Dutch colonization and missionary work dating back to the San Domingo Fort and church in 1629, and has been referred to as “Venice of Taiwan”. ¹⁴⁴ In contrast, the village housing the first Protestant church in the mainland region of Shantou across the sea – a region Mackay had gone to as inspired by W. C. Burns – was a small fishing village named Yanzao (Yam-tsau), or 鹽灶, meaning ‘salt pan’, where Rev. Lechler had stayed only three years before he was expelled in 1852; in fact, even the port city of Shantou not long before that point had been a fishing village in the same county. ¹⁴⁵

An English missionary book published not long after Rev. William Burns’s visit to the Yam-tsau church in 1861, told of the story of local children flocking to him and singing his Christian hymns during the Chinese New Year, at the same time when a clan-feud with a neighbouring village were engaging two hundred militia men in the defense of this village (and obviously most of the attention); and to travel to that village the missionaries had to contend with robbers on the road. ¹⁴⁶

A moving tale indeed. Even today the Yanzao village is known in China for a unique type of annual ritual – held on the twenty-first and twenty-second days of the Chinese new year – in which an idol of Chinese god is paraded in palanquin under heavy protection and the large crowd fight to drag him down to the ground, something – just like any other ritual of idolatry type – most local Christians do not take part in and the older Christians do not go anywhere near. ¹⁴⁷

The purpose, or morale, of the preceding, long-winded family history digression in this blog article about Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and Stevie Cameron, is the illustration that in the proud history of Canadian Presbyterians there was a long period from 1843-44 to the end of the 19^th century when, inspired by Scottish Presbyterians, the Church was split into two, the Established Church and the Free Church, with the former then overseen by and beholden to the government and the landownership, while the latter independent and democratic in its religious affairs, governing, and finance: ¹⁴⁸ in this historical division, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto where Stevie Cameron has been an elder and founded the Out-of-the-Cold program, was the centre of the Established Church in Canada, from which the Free Church led by Rev. James Harris, broke off, founded Knox Presbyterian Church as its new centre, ¹⁴⁹ brought over Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis (among others) from the Scottish Free Church, founded Knox College, and became active also in anti-slavery activity.

The Chinese Presbyterians in Toronto have been associated with the Free Church tradition, and with the heritage of William Chalmers Burns from Scotland and in China. They have also been associated with the early heritage of Swiss Basel missionaries in China, who made efforts to separate missionary work from the state of being tainted by unscrupulousness under German missionary Karl Gutzlaff – who had taken part in the opium trade himself and in the Opium War as a British colonial official – and to expose some of the problems in Gutzlaff’s organization Chinese Christian Union. ¹⁵⁰

It was a moving history, even if it wasn’t quite that of Knox (Manual Labor) College in Illinois with its association with Abraham Lincoln; and this history provides a new level of context to certain criticism of Stevie Cameron related to her Presbyterian background, “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”. However such if true of Ms. Cameron was not what many Canadian Presbyterians have been; besides, one should note that Ms. Cameron’s personal choice (who grew up in Belleville outside of Toronto, studied at UBC in Vancouver and worked for the federal government in Ottawa before becoming a journalist in Toronto ¹⁵¹) did lead to the opening of the once-privileged St. Andrew’s door to even the homeless, and that as a journalist-author her pursue to expose corruptions associated with Brian Mulroney has been relentless, albeit – with the Gutzlaff controversy in mind – not as hard-hitting or as all-encompassing as the work of academic-author Chalmers Johnson on recent American history – which has been noted in an earlier part of this blog article.

The legacy of Brian Mulroney, in his known propensity to associate with persons of corrupt or unsavoury repute and in the yet-unclear depth of his political problems of ethics and conduct relating to business interests close to or lobbying his government, may in the end be compared to some of the more notorious in the recent history of the western, Judeo-Christian, democratic world. Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.

The conclusion would again appear to be that not only there was no political vendetta against Mulroney on the part of the RCMP or the Liberal government, which he has alleged, but that the long-running saga was mostly a media circus despite that – as previously shown – very serious and nagging questions still exist as to the nature of the Airbus Affair, the depth of corruption and Mr. Mulroney’s real role in them.

However I am not ready to conclude such but would next illustrate that the Chretien government and the RCMP did likely have their own agendas in seeing the criminal investigation against Mulroney be launched and be ongoing for an extended period of time (from 1995 to 2003), and that although neither wanted to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair both had an interest to see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era.

In November 1997 in his first media interview after winning a legal settlement with the federal government over the libel issue, Mr. Mulroney alleged that there had been pressure from Liberal justice minister Allan Rock to prosecute him since 1993: ¹⁵²

"Allan Rock arrives (in Ottawa) in 1993. The first thing he does as minister of justice is to write to the RCMP, conveying gossip about me personally to the commissioner of the RCMP requesting an investigation. Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it. These are clear signals by a new government to a national police force, and the signals say, it’s all right for open season on Mulroney”.

And Mulroney further stated the Liberal government must have been behind the RCMP in branding him a criminal in a letter to the Swiss authorities:

"If anyone believes that this could take place without the knowledge of the minister of justice or the knowledge of the solicitor general or the knowledge and approval of the commissioner of the RCMP or the knowledge of the PMO [i.e., Prime Minister’s Office] anybody who believes that, I wish them well in Disney World".

While the Chretien government at the time denied any involvement in the RCMP investigation, I would give Mr. Mulroney the benefit of the doubt on his points quoted above. My analysis of press archives has suggested to me that such were likely the case, however that it was not obvious vendetta against Mulroney but a part of the incoming Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas during 1993-1995 to include a criminal investigation of Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, and that the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities.

First, one notes that when Jean Chretien stepped down as prime minister in December 2003, he had completed a decade-long reign in which he won three back-to-back majorities – among the most Canadian prime ministers have done in history – in elections in 1993, 1997 and 2000, ¹⁵³ and that big anniversaries and personal milestones in politics were important for the high-achieving Chretien, who in August 2002 when announcing his plan to step down after his was challenged by long-time leadership rival Paul Martin, set a time of February 2004 – well past the ten-year mark in power – for retirement. ¹⁵⁴

On the date of the 10-year anniversary of his election to power, Saturday, October 26, 2003, Chretien celebrated by visiting the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali – India’s equivalent of Christmas, basking in happiness among over 100,000 revellers and accompanied by natural resources minister Herb Dhaliwal, one of several Sikh Canadian Liberal MPs, while in Ottawa in the House of Commons a motion put forward by the Bloc Quebecois was to be voted on that Tuesday to force Chretien to step down as soon as Paul Martin became the Liberal leader in November; but Mr. Chretien was still planning to attend the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria in December, and he survived the motion, notifying new leader Paul Martin on November 18 that he would leave office on December 12 after returning from Africa – an unusually long time for a new Liberal leader to wait (for anything more than 10 days). ¹⁵⁵

The British Commonwealth summit turned out to be important as during that early-December event Zimbabwe under leader Robert Mugabe withdrew from the Commonwealth due to continued opposition from western democratic nations against ending suspension of its membership – in place after Mugabe was accused of rigging election in 2002. ¹⁵⁶ A Canada-EU summit after that, originally scheduled for December 17 in Ottawa (which would be right after Chretien’s resignation), was mysteriously cancelled by then EU president, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who also refused to meet with Chretien sooner in Europe, so Chretien paid a farewell visit to France with his large family accompanying him, and then as his last official foreign-relations function he received Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Ottawa on December 11. ¹⁵⁷

Now, taking notice of Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones, one recognizes that on April 22, 2003 when the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the day happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election, an election that would turn out to be historic as the Tories under Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell would be reduced to only two seats and without official-party status – the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history. ¹⁵⁸

 

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The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1, previous blog post)

If I have painted a picture of the RCMP and the former Chretien Liberal government reacting rather than leading in the Airbus Affair investigation into possible corruption of former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, then who have been the driving forces behind the events that have dogged and irked Mr. Mulroney for so long and may still reignite?

When the Mulroney conservatives ascended to power in 1984 on a platform of economic privatization and free trade with the United States, and were perceived as practising politics more closely identified with that of the rightwing Mr. Ronald Reagan in the United States and Mrs. Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the connections between the conservatives’ politics and their business and personal lifestyles naturally became subjects of scrutiny by the traditionally left-leaning Canadian media. ³⁷ Since that early days the press media have regularly exposed facts as well as innuendos, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate TV program has relentlessly pursued some of the harder topics. ³⁸

Mulroney’s approach to politics in the end proved extremely unpopular with most Canadians. The Progressive Conservative Party he had led for ten years, 1983-1993, nine of which as prime minister with two consecutive terms of parliamentary majority, a party once led by the founding prime minister of Canada Sir John A. MacDonald, in the October 25, 1993 election under his successor, the first female Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell, won only two parliament seats. ³⁹

Oppositions to Mulroney’s politics from the sprawling federal government system and its affiliates came even sooner, as in the 1988 election his party’s candidates were already wiped out from the national capital Ottawa and its surrounding urban areas in Eastern Ontario, keeping only one parliament seat in a rural riding; such sentiments were apparently not merely partisanship as his government had been rocked by a never-ending string of scandals resulting in the firing or resignation of eight cabinet ministers in a short time-span from 1985 to 1988. ⁴⁰

Given this background of history it is obvious that it was politically appealing in 1995 for the Justice Department to take a hard line when it was approached by the RCMP to initiate cooperation with the Swiss authorities in the Airbus Affair investigation; as for the real story of how the Justice Department letter dated September 29, 1995 and signed by senior counsel Kimberly Prost – another woman – came to include the reference “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister”, it has never been adequately explained, i.e., who was, or were, behind the criminally accusatory language that would result in a $50 million defamation lawsuit from Mr. Mulroney and over $2 million of legal-settlement costs by the government. ⁴¹

In 1996 during his civil litigation with the RCMP and the Canadian government over the Airbus Affair, Mr. Mulroney’s side expressed the view that there was a vendetta against him in the Canadian media that contributed to the RCMP criminal investigation, and his lawyers subpoenaed three top Canadian journalists to testify to find out their roles in it, who were: author and former The Fifth Estate host Stevie Cameron, The Globe and Mail newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and Maclean’s magazine writer Mary Janigan; all happened to be women (in addition to the three female journalists, Mulroney’s lawyers also subpoenaed the executive assistant of then justice minister Allan Rock by the name of Cyrus Reporter). ⁴²

It is known that before the controversial letter to the Swiss authorities the RCMP had sent two investigators to Switzerland to interview Karlheinz Schreiber’s former accountant Georgio Pelossi, apparently oblivious to a requirement in the Swiss law for prior approval by the Swiss authorities; a Canadian judge later also ruled that Canadian judicial approval in advance was needed, which the RCMP had not obtained before requesting foreign authorities to search bank accounts (of Karlheinz Schreiber’s in Switzerland). ⁴³

It is also known that media materials provided to the RCMP had been crucial in the agency’s 1995 decision to revive the Airbus Affair investigation, and that author and journalist Stevie Cameron has been generally viewed as a key person in a tireless media campaign driving the investigation, not only through her articles, books and public speaking but also her communications with the RCMP, cooperating with the RCMP since 1988 and was later officially designated a “confidential informant” by the agency. ^{44, 45} Cameron however has been unwilling to be treated or viewed as in cooperation with the law enforcement – the RCMP in particular – out of safety concern for her family as well as concern about some of the ways in which the RCMP have operated. ⁴⁶

Not a surprise at all for Stevie Cameron to be casted as someone driving behind the RCMP Airbus-Affair criminal investigation, as she has been a leading Canadian journalist of anti-political-corruption repute ever since the early years of the Mulroney era. From a family of some background in the intelligence field, Stevie Cameron had apparently worked for a short time at the Communications Security Establishment – a Canadian intelligence agency she discussed at length in her 1989 book Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital – before becoming a food and lifestyles journalist; ⁴⁷ by the mid-1980s, Cameron had begun to take on assignments investigating political ethics and conduct, and she made her initial fame in this field through reporting on the lifestyles and related problems of the family of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in 1987 exposing the so-called Gucci-gate, i.e., Prime Minister Mulroney’s closet built to house 50 pairs of Gucci shoes, 30 suits and other personal furnishings. ⁴⁸

More intriguing among what Cameron reported in 1987 than the fact that the Progressive Conservative Party helped pay for part the Mulroney lifestyles, was that during those early years there were already prospects of a legal dispute with a legitimate businessperson who did services for the Mulroney family for their lifestyles, who was threatening to take the family and the government to court for money owned; but he was given career-ending threat not to pester Mr. Mulroney who being the national leader was powerful and influential. ⁴⁹

The Gucci-gate and related topics of lavish personal spending (of government and party money) by then Prime Minister Mulroney and his family became a hot topic before the 1988 election, pounded upon by opposition parties and journalists alike. One of the journalists who expressed outrageous opinions at the time was Canadian columnist Barbara Amiel based in Ottawa and in London, England, who commented with considerable disdain: ⁵⁰

“The problem with the Mulroneys, who are certainly bright enough to know this, is that they are still a little too lower-middle class, culturally speaking, to be able to accommodate their hungry social ambitions to this reality.”

Ms. Amiel even made a bold prediction that the many Gucci shoes would end Mr. Mulroney’s political career:

“It is an understandable failing but a failing that will bring them down. The ludicrous thing about Canada is that it is not the dreadful politics of Brian Mulroney nor his lack of principle in foreign and domestic policy that will be his undoing, but one pair of Gucci loafers too many.”

Well, Canadians all know that Mr. Mulroney was a tough leader who could not be so easily brought down by one pair of Gucci shoes too many, not in 1988 anyway, and apparently thus far has never personally lost in a general election or in the court of law.

Rather, and quite ironically, recently in 2007-08 it has been by this time Ms. Barbara Amiel’s dear husband of intellectual and trans-Atlantic fames, Canadian and international press baron Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, who was brought down for having – together with his associates – tens of millions of dollars too many in a way that constituted criminal fraud and not just lifestyle excess. ⁵¹

The Conrad Black case is an instance of ‘Chicago corruption’, which has been discussed in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, and which included the ongoing case of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who is represented by the same Chicago lawyer Edward Genson who defended Conrad Black. The standard views on the Black case are different, however, and they included opinions that Black’s was a case of American justice for a Canadian crime, as well as opposite opinions that Black was harshly targeted because he was non-American. ^{52, 53}

In any case, Ms. Barbara Amiel is fortunate that Lord Black’s high lifestyle with her as Lady Black, personally more extravagant than the lifestyle of the family of former prime minister Mulroney while in office, hasn’t contributed further misery to the life of Mr. Conrad Black in prison. ⁵⁴

Moving on from her 1987 lifestyle stories on then prime minister Brian Mulroney and his family, journalist Stevie Cameron hosted the flagship broadcast program of Canadian investigative journalism, The Fifth Estate, in 1990-1991. ⁵⁵

After the 1987 Mulroney-lifestyle stories Cameron also began to concentrate on a career as a book writer, specializing in investigative political journalism, and she has been growing her reputation ever since in this field, through a series of bestselling or award-winning books on subjects centred at corruptions in the era of the former Mulroney government, starting with, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital (1989; an introduction to political life and business lobbying in Ottawa, with a focus on the years of Mulroney’s first term in government, 1984-1988), then after the Mulroney era had ended, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years (1994; a book credited with bringing to public attention the Airbus Affair and contributing to the revival of the RCMP criminal investigation), then after the government’s 1997 legal settlement with Mulroney on his defamation lawsuit, Blue trust: the author, the lawyer, his wife, and her money (1998; the real-life stories of Montreal tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, whose father had been a British Columbia supreme court justice, and who was entrusted with supervising Brian Mulroney’s personal business affairs while Mulroney was prime minister, stories about Verchere’s manner of business, his Swiss and Vatican bank connections, his marital infidelities and dispute with his wife who was a successful computer-software businesswoman, and his ultimate suicide in August 1993 – only two months after his appointment as chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited by Mr. Mulroney the day before Mulroney was to step down as prime minister), and finally, The last amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the anatomy of a scandal (2001; a book co-authored with then CBC The Fifth Estate producer Harvey Cashore, describing various international business and political-bribery activities of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber). ⁵⁶

The last in the above series of books from author Stevie Cameron has been proven very credible by Karlheinz Schreiber’s own disclosures and revelations of facts in the last few years. Ms. Cameron’s reputation as a courageous and solid investigative journalist doggedly on the money trails of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber has been firmly established.

Ms. Cameron herself is also sure that the persons she has been chasing view her in this way as well, as she has been quoted as saying on November 13, 2007: ⁵⁷

“Would I be at the top of Mulroney’s list of journalists? You bet. In a letter Schreiber wrote to Mulroney on Jan. 29 this year, he said, ‘All my personal problems began with Stevie Cameron’s book On The Take and Allan Rock’s political witch hunt with the RCMP against you.’”

For Stevie Cameron, the story of Bruce Verchere, former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer, has continued to be a subject of intense interest, as Ms. Cameron posted a blog article about him as recently as on February 26, 2008; in her blog article, Cameron made it clear that when Mulroney was the Prime Minister he had a “lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland” (something Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied when Karlheinz Schreiber first said it in 2006-07, as mentioned in an earlier part of this blog article), and that as explained the day before on February 25, 2008 by Mr. Schreiber in front of the parliamentary ethics committee this lawyer was Mulroney’s tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, who was also his financial trustee while he was serving as prime minister. ⁵⁸

The reason for then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Canadian lawyer to be referred to as his lawyer in Switzerland is that Bruce Verchere was also the Canadian lawyer representing the Swiss bank where (in a branch in Zurich, Switzerland) Mr. Schreiber opened bank accounts for Airbus commissions and other funds including his now famous $300,000 given to Mulroney in 1993-94. ^{59, 60, 61}

While her books have been either bestselling or award-winning (receiving book-of-the-year accolades), Author Stevie Cameron’s relentless pursue of possible corruption on the part of former prime minister Brian Mulroney in the Airbus Affair has also drawn her criticisms, ridicules and even verbal attacks.

One major category of criticisms levelled at Cameron has been that she collected all kinds of information she could get, including innuendos, rumors and gossips, and presented them as facts against Mulroney, and that she was a “conspiracy theorist”, “gratuitous” or even “mean-spirited” targeting Mulroney; varying degrees of this view have been expressed by many of her critics, notably author William Kaplan, columnist Philip Mathias of the National Post/Financial Post newspapers and Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton. ⁶²

National Post columnist Gerald Owen went as far as comparing Cameron (and the American prosecutors in the Conrad Black case) to “ancient sycophants” bent on persecuting the rich and powerful out of envy more than out of justice. ⁶³

A second type of criticisms of Stevie Cameron has implied that she had a personal (i.e., family) grudge against Brian Mulroney because when Mulroney became prime minister in 1984 it ended the career of her husband David Cameron as a federal government official in Ottawa, “an assistant under-secretary of state” (i.e., assistant deputy minister) specializing in constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues. ^{64, 65}

Another category of criticisms of Cameron has touched on her Presbyterian background, hinting that she was a “self-righteous self-flatterer”, and yet in another view was of “Victorian sensitivity” and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment” – and that some of her writing sounded like “a Presbyterian spinster’s detailed account of an orgy in the choir loft”. ⁶⁶

A most interesting, rather lengthily outspoken and contemptuous attack on Stevie Cameron has come directly from Conrad Black, who was owner of the National Post newspaper in 1998 when he penned a review of William Kaplan’s book, Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada. Mr. Black referred to the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation as “a disgraceful abuse of police and ministerial powers”, stated that Stevie Cameron’s “pathological hatred of Mulroney was notorious”, and described certain controversy about Cameron to do with leaked RCMP information – which the government had used as reason for settling Mulroney’s libel lawsuit – as that Cameron “febrilely promoted” the RCMP criminal investigation and then “double-crossed” the investigator Staff Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald as well as the RCMP legal defence for the lawsuit because she was not willing to “identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges” in court: ⁶⁷

“Because she didn’t wish to have to identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges, she destroyed the feeble defence the government had against the man she had obsessively assaulted journalistically for years and she ratted on her police informant. Eventually, impartial history will have to record that for Brian Mulroney to have had such enemies was a badge of honor.

Justice was ultimately done, in that Mulroney was vindicated but most of the wrongdoers went unpunished. Only the RCMP sergeant paid with his job, doublecrossed by Ms. Cameron, the beneficiary of his misconduct, retiring the day before his disciplinary hearing, (with a full pension).”

Black also unabashedly declared that his notion of media ownership had much to do with power struggles directly related to the issue of how former prime minister Brian Mulroney should be treated by the media:

“The smugness of the public and the venality of much of the press are more worrisome. They are closely related. The publisher of the Toronto Star, the ne plus ultra of Canadian soft-left hypocrisy, unselfconsciously announced that he had "got away with" luridly partisan reporting of the case. Among the least distinguished journalistic performances were some of the Southam newspapers, especially the Ottawa Citizen (except for Greg Weston) and the Montreal Gazette. They are now under new management, for which this reviewer has some authority to speak. When tested next on such a fundamental question of justice, we will do better.”

Such barely veiled warnings from the powerful press baron Conrad Black prompted newspaper columnist John MacLachlan Gray to comment unambiguously that Black wanted to have Stevie Cameron “put in jail” and turn Canadian journalists into “toy soldiers”. ⁶⁸ Also in reaction to Conrad Black’s comments, The former RCMP Airbus Affair investigator Fraser Fiegenwald sent a letter to Stevie Cameron issuing a denial that he had been betrayed by Cameron in anyway. ⁶⁹

 

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The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)

(Formerly titled: The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation against former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and some community undercurrents against the RCMP)

The long awaited, long-overdue Canadian government inquiry into the Airbus Affair involving former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, and millions of dollars in commissions rumored to have included kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney personally from a 1988 sale of European Airbus planes to Air Canada – a hot topic of Canadian federal politics for well over a decade, ^{1, 2} – is finally getting started at the end of this March 2009. How exciting it is for the Canadian political scene.

Or is it?

Not really. A Canadian government public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant of Manitoba is indeed underway in its preliminary stage and the first phase of the inquiry into the facts will begin in late March in Ottawa. ³ But this inquiry is not about the Airbus Affair, only into allegations made by Mr. Schreiber in a civil lawsuit against Mulroney and during hearings held by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, in 2007-08, that he had a business service agreement in 1993 with Mr. Mulroney while the latter was still the prime minister, that he then in accordance gave Mr. Mulroney three cash payments totalling $300,000 during 1993-94 shortly after the latter had stepped down, and that Mr. Mulroney subsequently did nothing, or very little, to justify the payments. ⁴ Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings that he got into some sort of business consulting arrangement with Mr. Schreiber only after he had left the prime minister position, that he has fully done his part in the agreement despite receiving only $225,000 (rather than the promised $300,000) from Mr. Schreiber, and that there is no need for a public inquiry. ⁵

How boring it is to do something there no need, or only insignificant need for – even Justice Oliphant makes more than the money in question for his honourable work on the matter.

In fact, there might not have been any inquiry scheduled on any question about the ethics and conduct of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at all, despite the kind of things that have dogged him since shortly after he became national leader and continued through when he was leaving office in 1993 and making decision to accept money from businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. ^{6, 7, 8} Represented by renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, Mr. Schreiber has been under increasing pressure since after he became a criminally accused fraudster in Germany in 1999 (a far cry from the earlier days when he was once a district court judge in Munich) related to a corruption scandal dogging former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as well as to the Airbus Affair, facing deportation by Canadian authorities; but initially he continued to deny having any role in the Airbus Affair (or having given any money to Mulroney). ^{9, 10} Schreiber however began to realize that Mulroney was publicly turning negative toward him just as his political-connection fortune started declining – demonstrated in a CBC interview with Mulroney spokesman Luc Lavoie in October 1999 when Lavoie called Schreiber “the biggest f..king liar the world has ever seen” – and he decided to file a lawsuit to get $300,000 “compensatory damages” from Mulroney; that led to a media report in late 2000/early 2001 about Schreiber having paid Mulroney $300,000, and finally to November 2003 when Schreiber talked to one of the leading experts on the Airbus Affair, author William Kaplan, nonetheless emphasizing that the money was not part of any Airbus commission. ¹¹ The breaking of silence by Mr. Schreiber came about seven months after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had spent years investigating Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, had announced in April 2003 that the Airbus Affair criminal investigation against Mulroney was terminated without finding evidence for a criminal proceeding against Mulroney. ¹²

Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber then became more and more indignant as his lost one after another legal battle to avoid extradition to Germany where he is to face criminal charges; he made appeals to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he was adamant that he is not going back there without being given the opportunity to account how he was ‘ripped off’ $300,000 by the (former) Canadian prime minister he has been dealing with in his second homeland since the early 1970s, and he talked about “public trust”, “clean up” and “fundamental justice” versus “abuse of power”, “criminal activity” and “totalitarian Governments”. ¹³

But it would not be an easy demand for Prime Minister Stephen Harper for whom Mr. Mulroney has been some sort of a patron since 2003-04 when Mulroney encouraged a merger between Harper’s up-and-coming but largely western Canada-based Canadian Alliance and his old, practically unelectable Progressive Conservative Party; ¹⁴ and in any case Prime Minister Harper’s staff did not even forward Schreiber’s letters to the prime minister: by the time Mr. Harper learned about Schreiber’s allegation of Mulroney taking $300,000 from Schreiber but doing no work (the first time sometime in early November 2007 according to the prime minister’s spokeswoman Sandra Buckler), the Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee was already planning to fulfill Mr. Schreiber’s wish. ¹⁵

Prime Minister Harper then turned to an academic, Dr. David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, to advise him what to do while the parliamentary ethics committee hearings featuring Schreiber, Mulroney, Mulroney’s long-time aide Fred Doucet and others were under way; Dr. Johnston reported back that there should be a limited public inquiry based on Karlheinz Schreiber’s allegations about Brian Mulroney, but that there is no necessity to include the Airbus Affair in the scope of the public inquiry because the RCMP had spent years conducing a criminal investigation into that, found “insufficient evidence” and closed its file; Dr. Johnston referred to the Airbus Affair as “this well-tilled ground”. ¹⁶

A bit of Mr. Harper’s favor for Mr. Mulroney, and a lot of ‘RCMP’s done that’, no wonder the Oliphant inquiry will be so limited in what it examines, i.e., without the Airbus Affair.

But wait. It turns out the Oliphant inquiry could still be more than only about the $300,000 or $225,000 in dispute between the two gentlemen, Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney. The Terms of Reference of the inquiry, as decided by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the recommendations of Dr. David Johnston, say to examine the “business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney”, and that what those dealings were is within the matters the Oliphant Commission will determine. ¹⁷

Well, Airbus kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney, from Mr. Schreiber directly for some job by Mr. Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s chair? Mr. Mulroney couldn’t be that dumb, could he? ^{18, 19, 20, 21}

And so more of a bore it will be if others do not hear more surprises from Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber during these upcoming hearings of the Oliphant Commission.

Some people may raise objections to my above-expressed opinion right away, that maybe even the RCMP have beaten a ‘dead horse’ to death too many times, that there was indeed nothing there. For instance, when the RCMP in April 2003 announced termination of its Airbus Affair investigation, then Progressive Conservative MP, justice critic and leadership contender Peter Mackay, son of former Mulroney government’s solicitor general Elmer Mackay who has been a personal friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, commented, “It’s a sad comment that it took the RCMP this long to come to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to proceed”, and declared, “I see it as a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair”. ^{22, 23} Earlier, in August 1999 over two-and-a-half years after the Canadian government had settled a civil lawsuit with Mulroney, Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie made the accusation that there was a “political vendetta” behind the continuing RCMP criminal investigation (probably seeing that the investigation was going to continue well into the New Millennium). ²⁴

An obvious counter-argument to the views dismissing any questionable role on the part of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1988 Airbus deal or in the Airbus Affair, is that Karlheinz Schreiber himself used to be as righteous in his claim of not having had anything to do with the Airbus deal or any business dealing with Mr. Mulroney, and now in the past few years Mr. Schreiber not only stated openly that he had received millions of dollars of commissions from the Airbus company much of which he distributed to persons in Canada and that he had given Mr. Mulroney $300,000 (which was separate from the Airbus money), but also has become the greatest ‘crusader’ against Mulroney’s alleged abuse of public trust.

For instance, in an 1995 interview with Harvey Cashore of The Fifth Estate TV-program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – recalled by the CBC in October 1999 when its efforts to uncover the facts still did not receive cooperation from Schreiber – Mr. Schreiber said: ²⁵

“I have told you already, whether you believe it or not: I played no role at all. I played no role at all on the Airbus”.

And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: ²⁶

“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds "related to the Airbus deal" from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”

Such new and shocking revelation would make one wonder what else important Mr. Schreiber may have yet to disclose (even if in the case of the above accusation Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied it, stating that Mr. Mulroney never had a lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland). ²⁷

 

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