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 6)

(Continued from Part 5, previous blog post)

American James C. Kopp, long-time anti-abortion activist serving a life sentence since 2007 for the 1998 murder of Amherst, N.Y. abortion doctor Barnett Slepian, is a main suspect in the 1994 shooting of Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) abortion doctor Gary Romalis; a Canadian warrant for Kopp was issued for the 1995 shooting of abortion doctor Hugh Short in Ancaster, Ontario, though the prosecution has recently decided to stay the charges; Kopp is also a main suspect in the 1997 shooting of abortion doctor Jack Fainman of Winnipeg. ²²²

In the New York case, two anti-abortion activists harbouring and helping Kopp, Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, received light penalties. ²²³

As previously discussed, the Romalis shooting incident in November 1994 turned the Canadian medical community into showing strong support for justice minister Allan Rock’s stricter gun-control legislation, which was unveiled on November 30, 1994 and included a ban on military-type weapons, one of which – an AK-47 – had been responsible for wounding Dr. Romalis.

There has been no press report of any identified suspect in the second, knife attack on Dr. Romalis in July 2000, which took place at my former medical clinic headed by my family physician Dr. James K. Lai, where Dr. Romalis practiced after retiring from the VGH.

But recently on May 31, 2009, only days after the Canadian charges were dropped against Kopp in the Dr. Short case, American abortion doctor George Tiller, who had previously been shot and wounded and who had lectured to abortion providers in Vancouver at the invitation of Dr. Romalis, was gunned down in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, becoming the first dead doctor of anti-abortion violence in the U.S. after Kopp’s killing of Dr. Slepian; the main suspect, Scott Roeder, had been a member of an extreme Christian militia group, the Freeman movement. ²²⁴

When the gun-control bill was officially put to the legislative process in February 1995, it was on St. Valentine’s Day, “known as the day of the St. Valentine’s Massacre”, noted John Perrochio, president of the Canadian Firearms Action Council, referring to a rival-gang slaughtering in 1929 Prohibition-era Chicago, in which the killers dressed as policemen, and behind which control of illegal liquor from Canada by the notorious gangster boss Al Capone was apparently a motivating factor. ^{225, 226, 227}

The Chretien Liberal government’s gun-control bill immediately won praise from U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose own 1994 legislation on banning assault weapons had been lauded in Canada by Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, in the wake of the Dr. Romalis shooting in Vancouver; in a speech to the Canadian parliament, Clinton compared Canada’s move “to outlaw automatic weapons designed for killing and not hunting”, to universal healthcare Canada had – something Clinton had also tried to introduce in the United States but failed. ²²⁸

In the same speech in February, Clinton was even more passionate appealing for Canadian national unity, citing the words of Harry Truman in 1947 praising Canadian unity and progress, but Clinton also emphasized that the political future of Canada was “entirely” for Canada to decide; the latter position was comforting enough to the opposition Bloc Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard and his over 50 MPs in the House of Commons.

Lucien Bouchard had once been a Quebec-separatist friend of Brian Mulroney’s recruited into his government, who then split with him in 1990 near the time of the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord to give Quebec a “distinct society” status, founding the first separatist party at the federal level; in the 1993 election the party took over many of the former Mulroney Tory seats in Quebec. ²²⁹

Timing of Clinton’s appeal was significant, as a Quebec referendum on independence was being planned for the fall of 1995 by the recently elected Parti Quebecois government of premier Jacques Parizeau’s in Quebec, with support expressed by the government of France; with Bloc Quebecois designated the Official Opposition in the Canadian parliament, the Quebec sovereignty-independence movement – historically a mix of French ethnic nationalism and anti-colonial liberation ideology whose sympathizers and cheer leaders had included Charles de Gaulle of France – was reaching a new height; despite reservation expressed by prime minister Jean Chretien, Clinton during this official visit to Canada held a meeting with the leader of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ who was recuperating from amputation of his left leg and hip due to an 80%-fatal flesh-eating disease he had contracted on November 28, 1994 – one day after officially launching a Bloc Quebecois campaign for the referendum. ²³⁰

During that same spring of 1995, efforts by the media and by the RCMP to pursue former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s possible corruption were also expanding, following the October 1994 publication of Stevie Cameron’s book exposing Mulroney-era corruption. Cameron’s book had become not only a bestseller alongside books such as Open Secrets by Alice Munro, but a favorite Christmas gift. ²³¹

In January, the press reported that author Peter C. Newman living in a “Kitsilano tower” in Vancouver was writing a revealing book on the Mulroney era to be published in September 1995, that Newman had collected materials from Mulroney himself and persons in his circle including Frank Moores and Fred Doucet, and also obtained “proof” about certain controversial episodes involving Mulroney in the late period of the Meech Lake accord – in relation to Lucien Bouchard and to Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells whose final refusal to put it to a vote in the provincial legislature ended the accord. ²³²

Also in January, RCMP investigators Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald and Inspector Carl Gallant visited Stevie Cameron after listening to her talking about her book on the CBC Radio program The House; they told her that in 1988 there had been a brief FBI investigation on the Airbus sale to Air Canada but that the Canadian government and police had been unwilling to cooperate; she told them in return her experience that interviewing people in Europe had been more helpful. ²³³

In March, CBC’s The Fifth Estate aired an episode on the Airbus story, alleging that Airbus Industrie paid secret commissions to Karlheinz Schreiber to smooth the 1988 sale of Airbus A320 planes to Air Canada, and that Swiss bank accounts were opened by Schreiber for Frank Moores and for an unidentified Canadian politician; part of the information aired came from Cameron’s file she had gathered for her book, and all of the materials in her file were also reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the der Spiegel magazine in Munich, Germany. ²³⁴

But while Cameron’s book continued its popularity, other media venues and the public at-large continued to ignore the Airbus issue raised in the book and now being covered by The Fifth Estate. ²³⁵ The RCMP kept existence of the criminal investigation from public knowledge until November 1995 when a September 29 letter to the Swiss authorities caused extreme reactions from Mulroney, as previously discussed, and brought the issue into high media profile.

Meanwhile, the Chretien government encountered some serious opposition within the Liberal party caucus to the gun-control legislation, especially on the national gun registry – police registration of every gun and every gun owner in Canada. ²³⁶

The size of the Liberal internal opposition was a concern for Jean Chretien: in the first vote in the House of Commons which the Liberals easily won, 3 Liberal MPs voted against the bill, 49 of the 177 majority Liberal MPs (in a parliament of around 300 MPs) were absent and as many as 30 of them stayed away to show their opposition; at a caucus meeting before the vote Chretien had warned his MPs to vote with the party, and after the vote he quickly stripped all parliamentary committee positions from the 3 Liberals Benoit Serre, Paul Steckle, and Rex Crawford who had voted no regardless – despite their claims that they represented the anti-gun-control sentiments of their rural riding constituents. ²³⁷

Chretien also planned to enforce party discipline in the same manner with the hate-crime bill protecting minority rights (including homosexual rights) that was being processed through the parliament in parallel to the gun-control bill.

Compared to the previously discussed case of Stan Wilbee in November 1992, i.e., the lone Tory MP publicly calling for a leadership review on Brian Mulroney and asked to resign his B.C. caucus chair by justice minister Kim Campbell, that Wilbee in the end not only retained the caucus chair and kept his chair at the Commons committee on health issues but also got to embark on leading a new parliamentary probe into the HIV-tainted blood-supply issue, Chretien’s measures in April 1995 seemed harsh.

Comparison to Mulroney – on lack of democracy within the party – was evident: it was acknowledged by Liberal party whip Don Boudria who had often criticized Mulroney for “muzzling independent thought” in the Tory caucus, but who now denied that the Liberal party was doing the same; ²³⁸ also, mirroring in late January 1993 when then Tory house leader Harvie Andre told the media about a minority in the Tory party and caucus wanting Mulroney to resign (as previously discussed), Bob Speller, chair of the rural Liberal caucus who had advised rural Liberal MPs inclined to vote ‘no’ to skip the first vote instead, was reported as saying the 49 Liberal MPs who had not shown up for the first vote could vote ‘no’ in the final vote: ²³⁹

“Liberal MP Bob Speller, chair of the 60-member rural Liberal caucus, says the media wrongly focused on the three MPs: Benoit Serre (Timiskaming-French River), Rex Crawford (Kent) and Paul Steckle (Huron-Bruce).

More significant, he suggested, were the 49 Liberal MPs who abstained or
deliberately avoided the Commons vote.

“A majority of these MPs will take a stronger stand at third (and final) reading if there aren’t changes,” Speller predicted in an interview. “Many of these are new MPs who got elected on the basis of being able to stand up for their constituents.

“Now people are saying the government shouldn’t be silencing MPs for representing their constituents.””

Across the aisle from among the opposition Reform party, a lone MP (and future prime minister) Stephen Harper voted for the gun-control legislation in this first vote, as did one of the only two Tory MPs, Elsie Wayne. ²⁴⁰

Like the Bloc Quebecois led by Tory-breakaway MP Lucien Bouchard taking many formerly Tory seats in Quebec, the Reform party formerly represented by only one MP Deborah Grey and led by party leader Preston Manning outside the parliament, took most of the western Canada rural ridings (particularly in Alberta) from the Tories in the 1993 election, also winning over 50 seats and just two fewer than Bloc Quebecois. ²⁴¹ On conservative issues such as against gun control, the Reform party became the Liberals’ main opposition in the House of Commons – even though Reform had championed an anti-crime platform (as mentioned before).

Since before the 1993 election polls had consistently showed that a majority of Canadians, including most Albertans, supported stricter gun control, including mandatory gun registration: nationally, support for a gun registry was 86% in September 1993, and by late May 1995 with the legislation near final vote it was still 71% and higher than support for the full bill at 64%. ²⁴²

Despite the high poll numbers supporting it, besides the Reform party and the pro-gun groups there were other public shows of opposition to the gun-control bill.

One high-profile act of opposition came from Justice Jean-Claude Angers of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal, who wrote an open letter to prime minister Jean Chretien and the MPs, calling the gun-control proposal ”serious infringements of the rights to security and enjoyment of the person and to own property”; two law professors complained about his conduct to the Canadian Judicial Council, and Angers received a public reprimand from council chair, B.C. Chief Justice Allan McEachern, about his “highly partisan attack” on a proposal that could become law which he would often need to interpret and enforce; Angers did not receive any disciplinary penalty but he had been in the process of a transfer to the lower Court of the Queen’s Bench when he publicly aired his opinion. ²⁴³

Another high-profile act of opposition, that of backtracking from supporting, curiously came from the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which had become a strong public supporter of gun control after the shooting of Dr. Gary Romalis in November 1994: the association still stood by its support for banning military-type assault weapons, one of which had wounded Dr. Romalis, but changed its position on the gun registry – also the main point of contention for the dissident rural Liberal MPs – and questioned its effectiveness for violent-crime reduction; the reversal caught justice minister Allan Rock by surprise, but the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians continued to support the gun registry. ²⁴⁴

Within the notion of a universal gun registry a key point of contention was whether failure to register would be treated as a serious criminal offence or closer to a motor-vehicle registration violation; Allan Rock had earlier hinted at the possibility of a compromise, and after the CMA expressed to the Commons justice committee its new doubts on the gun registry, Rock suggested to the committee adding a category of lighter criminal penalties – outside of the Criminal Code – for some situations, and the committee quickly endorsed it. ²⁴⁵

In early June prior to the final Commons vote after which the gun-control bill would be sent to the Senate if passed, the Liberals were bolstered by announcement of voting for the bill from 3 Reform MPs, Ted White, Ian McClelland and Jim Silye, who made their decisions based on polling their constituents; Jim Silye’s position was especially significant because he was the Reform party whip in charge of enforcing party line on MP votes, but the Reform party allowed its MPs to vote their constituents’ wishes and though Silye was opposed to the bill his constituents at the riding of Calgary Centre favoured it. ²⁴⁶

On the other hand Stephen Harper, MP for Calgary West who had been the lone Reformer voting for it in the first vote based on a poll of 64% constituent support, now would vote no because a second polling of his constituents showed that although most still supported the gun registry, 60% of them did not like a potential 10-year jail penalty still in there for failure to register. ²⁴⁷

On June 13, the gun-control bill easily passed the Commons, with support from Bloc Quebecois; two day after, the hate-crime legislation also passed, with Bloc Quebecois support, ensuring tougher criminal penalties for crimes “motivated by hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, or mental or physical disability”. ²⁴⁸

The yes votes on gun-control from Jim Silye and the other two Reformers had been expected to compensate for the loss of votes from the 3 rural Liberal MPs who had voted no the first time, but the number of Liberal MPs casting final no vote increased to 9, and 4 other Liberal MPs voted no on the hate-crime bill; several days earlier there was also a lone Liberal no vote on the government’s budget-implementation bill, from justice committee chair Warren Allmand protesting budget cuts that reminded him of the Mulroney Tories’ cuts on spending for social programs; that came to a total of 14 Liberal MPs who openly dissented on important votes – in fact 15 had MP Rex Crawford not suffered a heart attack and missed the final gun-control vote – and a record high of vote dissent since the Chretien government began in November 1993. ²⁴⁹

After the budget vote in early June, Chretien had immediately moved to take Warren Allmand off his chair position at the justice committee, but unexpectedly Reform party whip Jim Silye refused to give his signature to expedite the removal, and also went public accusing the Chretien government of doing no better than the Mulroney government when it came to quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage. ²⁵⁰

Chretien was unfazed by the setback in demoting Warren Allmand, and unbending in demanding party loyalty. He praised the Liberal MPs who voted for the gun-control bill “against the very strong wishes of constituents who fiercely opposed the firearms law”, he declared that a vote against the government was a vote against him personally, and he told his MPs that if they did not follow the party line he might refuse to sign their nomination papers for the next election. ²⁵¹

Warren Allmand countered that back in April 1988 when 22 Liberal MPs signed a letter asking then party leader (and Chretien’s rival) John Turner to resign, they did not receive any punishment, and many of the Liberal MPs who had opposed Turner were now in Chretien’s cabinet; Allmand said Chretien was going too far in demanding loyalty. ²⁵²

So, on openly taking a position against the party leader at least Liberal MP and justice committee chair Warren Allmand faired as well in June 1995 – due to help from the opposition Reform party whip Jim Silye – as B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee had faired in November 1992 for reasons unpublicized (as noted previously).

A public-relations problem for prime minister Chretien in his hard-line stand on loyalty within the party caucus was that it had been his election promise in 1993 as party leader – written in the Liberals’ election Red Book – to allow more free votes by Liberal MPs following their constituents’ wishes, but that afterwards no free vote was allowed on government legislations; there were many other unfulfilled Red Book promises such as, according to Warren Allmand, protecting spending that helped disadvantaged Canadians. ²⁵³

The 13 Liberal MPs dissenting on the gun-control or hate-crime legislation had won the 1993 election in their ridings with promises of parliamentary voting to reflect the constituents’ wishes, and had been hailed as heroes at the time; it had been a Liberal Red-Book promise but now in 1995 they were condemned as “trained seals” by the party. ²⁵⁴

At this point of record-high Chretien Liberal internal dissent, John English, historian and Liberal MP for Kitchener, believed party discipline to be important to national unity for a country as diverse as Canada, but Newfoundland Liberal MP George Baker suggested that the British model should be adopted in which government MPs, like opposition MPs, were allowed to question the government during the Question Period in the Commons; in contrast, the rightwing Reform party MPs, including leader Preston Manning, were during this time practicing free votes or at least freely discussing their opinions on the issue. ²⁵⁵

Some political commentators, e.g., William Thorsell, noted that the Canadian parliamentary system vested too much power in the prime minister of a majority government, more than any other industrialized democracy did in the government leader, and that in most Canadian political party constitutions the party leader’s authority could not be easily challenged unless a full party convention was held; they also noted that democratic rights and freedoms as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (crowning achievement of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1982 Canadian Constitution) as the only reduction of the political power of the government – and “the single most “Americanizing” event in Canadian history” according to some – merely put the power in the hands of court justices appointed by the prime minister. ²⁵⁶

In hindsight, knowing Chretien’s personal focus on bettering Mulroney in consecutive majority election wins and in the length of governing – first achieved in August 2002 before announcing retirement and then capped with a 10-year celebration in October 2003 at the Sikh Golden Temple before stepping down (as discussed previously) – one can see that it was personally important for Chretien in 1995 to quash Liberal dissent that he viewed as posing a risk to his governing and to his future election chances, that Chretien was thinking beyond a few legislations – albeit major ones – and setting his sight on making historical milestones in Canadian politics for which his MPs simply should not compare him to his Liberal leadership predecessor, former prime minister John Turner, who had never won an election.

John Turner in fact shared some of the other Liberals’ misgivings about Chretien’s intolerance of democratic debate or dissent, and he later would also start to speak about it, in October 2000 less than 3 weeks after the death of Pierre Trudeau whom both Turner and Chretien had wanted to succeed and Turner did in 1984; Turner even praised the opposition Canadian Alliance – the Reform party with a new name in 2000 – for being more democratic: ²⁵⁷

“The Alliance is debating the issues,” Mr. Turner said.

“Whether or not you agree with the result of the debate or even the scope of the debate or even the subject of the debate, they are debating the issues.

“They’re opening up the system. And I believe the system needs opening up – beginning with the democratization of Parliament.””

In October 2000 when Turner heaped the above praise on the Reform party as a subtle criticism of Chretien, Chretien had wasted no time – after the mourning was over for Pierre Trudeau who had passed away of prostate cancer – to announce that he would call an election in which his campaign would emphasize Trudeau’s legacy; although election speculations had been around before Trudeau’s death, some cynics opined that Chretien must have known for a while Trudeau had been gravely ill, and was so eager to make electoral history as to take the opportunity of Canadians’ sympathy over Trudeau’s death to get his third majority term – without other urgent issues calling a new election sooner than any majority leader in history but former Liberal prime minister Wilfred Laurier in 1911 – over the relative inexperience of the new Alliance leader Stockwell Day and the split of conservative votes between the Alliance and the Tories – the latter again led by Joe Clark. ²⁵⁸

Chretien would win his third majority handily on November 27, 2000, garnering 41% of the popular vote – highest of his 3 times. ²⁵⁹

 

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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 5)

(Continued from Part 4, previous blog post)

At the beginning in late 1993/early 1994, the politics of targeting Brian Mulroney would have been understandably tricky to the incoming Liberal government given that Mulroney had just served for nearly nine years as a majority-government leader; however the new government soon got a change of guard at the helm of the RCMP when in February 1994 Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced the resignation of RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster to take effect in June, while justice minister Allan Rock was busy with other Liberal priorities such as banning discrimination of homosexuals. ¹⁶⁹

Appointed by Mulroney in 1987, Commissioner Inkster largely enjoyed a trouble-free seven years leading the RCMP, with a big part of the blames for controversies the RCMP was entangled in – particularly during 1988-90 over possible political biases in the Richard Grise affair (about certain timing in corruption investigation near the 1988 election time) and in the Doug Small affair (investigation into a 1989 federal budget leak) – shouldered by his second-in-command, deputy commissioner Henry Jensen. ¹⁷⁰

But within the RCMP, Inkster was perceived by some as uninterested in political investigations or even yielding to high-level political pressures: when the Airbus Affair investigation broke into the news in late 1995 it was revealed that back in 1990 when Commissioner Inkster ordered an inquiry by Ontario Judge Rene Marin into RCMP handling of a corruption investigation on Tory Senator Michel Cogger, at the time part of the initial 1989 Airbus-Mulroney investigation had been hidden under the Cogger case for fear of Mulroney government interference. ¹⁷¹

The price of Inkster’s resignation was high in early 1994: in November 1992 Mr. Inkster who had served from 1988 to 1991 as vice president for the Americas in the International Police Organization (Interpol), was elected as president of Interpol for a 4-year term – only the second Canadian to ever hold the top international police job. ¹⁷²

Imagine what kind of clout in the international law-and-order arena the new Chretien government would lose with the departure of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, whose Interpol appointment had been praised by the RCMP as “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP, even if within the RCMP there were different opinions about the Interpol: while Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, was enthusiastic about the benefit of computerized information hook-up in the plan, others pointed to examples of concern, such as in Venezuela where Interpol was expected to help track dissidents as criminals, or former Interpol drugs committee chairman Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader indicted in 1988 in the United States on narcotics charges, or former Interpol president Jolly Bugarin, crony of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, widely accused of a cover-up in the killing of Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983. ¹⁷³

On the other hand, by early 1994 Mr. Inkster never publicly expressed support for stricter gun control (as a quick survey of the press archives would reveal) despite passion for it from the new prime minister expressed during the election campaign; Allan Rock’s first public talk of tougher gun-control law started in April 1994 two months after announcement of Inkster’s resignation, and in contrast to Inkster the new RCMP commissioner Philip Murray in June on the day before taking over the job publicly expressed strong support for a full handgun ban suggested by Allan Rock. ¹⁷⁴

It is also interesting to note that Commissioner Inkster’s intent to resign was announced in February with departure in June, much like Mr. Mulroney had done a year prior as prime minister. ¹⁷⁵

The point is that if the change of guard at the RCMP gave the Liberal gun-control drive crucial momentum, it likely also bolstered whatever Liberal plan there was to pursue Airbus Affair investigation against Mulroney.

Even more intriguing is the fact that back on November 10, 1992 when Mr. Inkster was named president of Interpol, he got the job without competition: he became the only candidate when a second nominated candidate – from China – withdrew in favour of him. ¹⁷⁶

Now that’s worth pondering: with Mr. Mulroney’s diplomatic clout among western leaders, Mr. Inkster likely had been agreed upon by them; but a Chinese government non-compete gesture at a time when the June 4, 1989 violent military crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was still fresh in people’s minds? ¹⁷⁷ That had to be the result of some deal from Mr. Mulroney.

What is personally interesting is that the day when Norman Inkster was acclaimed president of Interpol happened to be the day when I first sent written press releases to the media – especially CBC-TV in Vancouver – criticizing Mulroney’s leadership in general and his conduct in the Charlottetown constitutional process, which had recently ended with the failure of the Charlottetown accord in a national referendum (an accord and failure previously discussed in the context of the role of David Cameron, husband of Stevie Cameron, in the Diane Wilhelmy affair).

In one of the press releases on this date, November 10, 1992, I called for B.C. Tory MPs to support their caucus chair Stan Wilbee who had publicly demanded a leadership review, I stated that a cabinet restructuring proposed by Mr. Mulroney should not be the priority but rather the priority was Mulroney’s fitness as prime minister, and I demanded that constitutional affairs minister Joe Clark give a public account of the damages to national unity and to the economy inflicted by the Tory government’s constitutional misadventure. The quote below is from a copy of my old press release – disclosed to me in an October 1, 2003 RCMP personal-information disclosure: ¹⁷⁸

“Mr. Stan Wilbee, MP for Delta, B.C., has spoken out publicly, criticizing Mr. Mulroney’s leadership and requesting a province-by-province Tory leadership review. The B.C. Tory MPs should speak out now in support of Mr. Wilbee, reaffirm their confidence in him as the B.C. caucus chair, and defy Mr. Mulroney’s threats of retaliation by means of cabinet restructuring or by any other means. … the most pressing issue facing the country right now, that of Mr. Mulroney’s fitness as the prime minister. … Before taking up any new tasks, Mr. Joe Clark needs to give the people of Canada an adequate explanation for the recent Charlottetown constitutional fiasco and a satisfactory account of the full extent of damages the latest constitutional adventure of the Tory government has done to both national unity and the economy.”

History as it happened has been that Mulroney’s leadership never became an issue of debate within the ruling Progressive Conservative party, though a few short months later in February 1993 Mulroney announced his resignation to take place in June; no accounting of the party’s constitutional policy was ever done, or if it mattered, as in the coming election the party was nearly wiped out.

As it happened, I also sent a copy of this press release to BCTV (then part of the CTV network, today part of the Global TV network). In the morning of the day of the B.C. Tory caucus meeting to discuss the fate of Stan Wilbee as caucus chair (November 17, 1992 as per press archives), who had drawn up a letter of resignation to hand in for his challenge of Mulroney, ¹⁷⁹ I phoned BCTV to follow up on my press release and told a news staff member about the caucus meeting in Ottawa, who replied that BCTV would send a camera crew there; later that day when I called again (likely in the afternoon) the same staff member said the camera was there right now; but when I called back the day after I sensed disappointment on the part of this BCTV news staff member, probably because it wasn’t as I had told him that the B.C. Tory MPs might turn against Mulroney’s leadership.

Regardless, I was disappointed that BCTV did not report on the caucus meeting it had camera footage on.  Brief press reports indicated that Stan Wilbee’s resignation was rejected by the caucus and days later Dr. Wilbee, a medical doctor and chair of the House of Commons subcommittee on health issues, also launched a parliamentary investigation on the HIV-tainted blood supply issue. ^{180, 181}

No detail of what transpired in that B.C. Tory caucus meeting has ever been reported by the media, but I have pieced together a scenario of known events starting from the loss of the Charlottetown constitutional referendum on October 26, 1992 to Mr. Mulroney’s February 24, 1993 announcement of resignation, as follows.

First, heading into a Tory national caucus meeting on October 29, 1992, Stan Wilbee and Bob Horner, MP for Ontario Mississauga West, were the only Tory MPs questioning Mulroney’s future as leader in the wake of the defeat of the Charlottetown accord; but Horner was quickly silenced by the support others, particularly justice minister Kim Campbell, expressed for Mulroney during that meeting. ¹⁸²

Immediately, Kim Campbell, MP for B.C. Vancouver Centre, requested Wilbee to resign his B.C. caucus chair position for the reason that Wilbee’s view on leadership did not represent other B.C. caucus members. ¹⁸³

But then the November 17 B.C. caucus meeting rejected Wilbee’s offer to resign as caucus chair; after that, Wilbee no longer called for a leadership review and would only state that Mulroney was unpopular in Western Canada but was better than leaders of the other parties: ¹⁸⁴

"He is unpopular in the West, but once you get into an election campaign, where people start to compare leaders, I think that he comes out far and away above the rest."

Wilbee said the above on January 31, 1993 after a national caucus meeting in which all were read “the riot act” not to speculate on leadership, by Mulroney personally. ¹⁸⁵

But before that, in early January there was a cabinet shuffle and Joe Clark indeed kept his constitutional affairs job (and was given a new cabinet-committee position), and the press wondered why he was staying on a “nothing job”; Kim Campbell got the best “plums” to become defence minister and veterans affairs minister. ¹⁸⁶

Also before that on January 18, Al Horning, Tory MP for B.C. Okanagan Centre (Kelowna), who earlier had praised Mulroney (“still head and shoulders ahead of” other party leaders) in a way similar to what Wilbee now did, took over as the only Tory MP to publicly challenge Mulroney, saying Mulroney should step down and predicting so. ¹⁸⁷

The discontent was spreading in January before it was gagged by Mulroney at month’s end, as a The Vancouver Sun article, “Minority dreaming of a Blue heaven after purge-a-Tory”, quoted Tory House leader Harvie Andre as stating on January 25 that there was a minority in the party and among the MPs who wanted Mulroney to step down: ¹⁸⁸

““There is no grassroots sense that the leader must go, but they all read polls too and certain people are undoubtedly worried about whether we can win or not,” Andre said in an interview Monday.

”However, I don’t think that’s anywhere near the majority, that’s a minority at this point.”

Andre adds that given Mulroney’s unpopularity and the government’s standing in the polls, the prime minister is no doubt contemplating his future.

”Goodness knows, he’d be inhuman if he weren’t thinking about it.””

The news article reported that a dozen Tory MPs during a caucus meeting over the weekend actively called for Mulroney to make his intention clear – though apparently in early 1993 as in late 1992 only one Tory MP (in each case from B.C.) openly challenged Mulroney’s staying as leader.

His warning to Tory MPs apparently worked, Mulroney became feisty and fiery during much of February, predicting a third-term majority under his leadership, calling it “triple crown” and taunting opposition leader Jean Chretien with it in the House of Commons. ¹⁸⁹

On February 20, just one day after Mulroney said he would seek re-nomination of MP candidacy in his riding, Mulroney’s long-time leadership rival Joe Clark, a former prime minister originally from Alberta, announced he would retire by the next election but in the meantime would continue with constitutional affairs – he had been hoping to negotiate a self-government accord for the Metis people. ¹⁹⁰

On February 24, Brian Mulroney announced his intent to step down in June after a new leader was chosen.

Stan Wilbee immediately resumed his criticism, stating Mulroney “has become a lightning rod for everything that’s bad”, and, “Sometimes you have to start with a clean sheet”; as well, Kim Campbell confirmed that she had been harbouring leadership ambition while Mulroney pondered his future: ¹⁹¹

“People have approached me and my staff offering support. My position is that there wasn’t a campaign until the prime minister made a decision to retire”.

Kim Campbell turned out to be the biggest winner – and the biggest loser – of the ambiguous, non-open pressure waiting on Mulroney’s decision, as she would be crowned Mulroney’s successor (i.e., without a lot of competition) and become the first female prime minister after having been the first woman as justice minister and as defence minister ¹⁹² – a real “triple crown” – but she would also suffer the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history at the hand of the Chretien Liberals.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that Campbell would lose her own MP seat, to Liberal Dr. Hedy Fry, former president of B.C. medical association and the first woman of color to be in the cabinet; the Vancouver area also elected Raymond Chan, the first Chinese-Canadian cabinet member, and Herb Dhaliwal, later the first (Sikh) Indo-Canadian cabinet minister and the one accompanying Chretien to the Sikh Golden Temple in India to celebrate their 10-year victory anniversary. ¹⁹³

As for the issue of native self-government rights, although the incoming Liberals and the outgoing Tories each agreed with the native people on their implementation in principle, the Tories held the view that there was no constitutional guarantee given the defeat of the Charlottetown accord, whereas Jean Chretien was firm on not holding “divisive” constitutional negotiations Mulroney had liked to do (which Pierre Trudeau called “can of worms”), preferred to focus on the economy, and announced a federal government agreement with the provincial governments that the native rights were already in the existent Constitution; however this Liberal constitutional position was not acceptable to Ovide Mercredi, national chief of Assembly of First Nations. ¹⁹⁴

The lesson from the above digression into the circumstances leading up to Mulroney’s decision to step down in February 1993? Brian Mulroney is never the loser – be it your luck or your bad luck.

Also note that Mulroney’s appointment of John C.  Major of Alberta – a lawyer in the law firm Bennett Jones Verchere headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere and a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber – to the Supreme Court of Canada happened on November 13, 1992, i.e., amid the tension of Stan Wilbee’s call for a leadership review, and that back in 1983 Schreiber had been involved in political maneuvers to oust Joe Clark and bring in Mulroney as Tory leader (the topic has been discussed in previous Notes, with attention to the fact that Justice Major later took early retirement on Christmas Day 2005 ahead of his turning 75 on February 20, 2006 – a date when my late father would have turned 73).

During that time, Kim Campbell’s oppressive stand against Stan Wilbee was consistent with her loyalty to Mulroney’s legacy as Tory leader.

For the core of her campaign team Campbell used many of the controversial figures who had helped Mulroney win his 1983 leadership, persons such as Frank Moores, who as discussed in previous Notes had served on the Air Canada board and whose role in the 1988 Airbus purchase had been questioned by the media, Guy Charbonneau, Tory senator and a known central figure dealing with money in Mulroney’s political circle, David Angus, another Mulroney appointee on the Air Canada board who had also provided Tory party funds for Mulroney family’s expenses exposed during the 1987 “Guccigate” publicity, and Peter White, a Conrad Black associate who had had a hand in the Richard Grise affair as Mulroney’s principal secretary in 1989 – a scandal regarding possible RCMP political bias in favour of Mulroney at the time of the 1988 election. ¹⁹⁵

Campbell was unwilling to distance herself from Mulroney despite projecting herself as wanting to change the way politics was done – even when confronted by CBC broadcasters Peter Mansbridge and Pamela Wallin at a Prime Time News interview on March 25, 1993, she refused to say why her policies would be different from Mulroney’s and strenuously defended the Mulroney government’s $5-billion CH-101 helicopter-purchase plan she had involvement in as defence minister. ¹⁹⁶

According to author Murray Dobbin, no later than in early December 1992 Kim Campbell had actually made a ‘secret’ arrangement with Mulroney to succeed him, while Canadians were in the dark about whether Mulroney would leave: ¹⁹⁷

“When Brian Mulroney met in early December 1992 with his Quebec lieutenant Marcel Masse… Mulroney asked Masse to take on the task of chaperoning Campbell around Quebec and organizing a few private dinners to introduce her to key business people, journalists, artists and other opinion makers. Masse agreed. And Campbell’s silent run for the leadership was underway.”

“… at a time when Canadians were still wondering whether Brian Mulroney would really resign, the man himself was already preparing Campbell for the crown and offering her the entire palace entourage. Masse would not only organize a series of private dinners for Campbell, but he would bring with him to Campbell’s side the entire organizing team that had helped Mulroney win the leadership of the Tory party.”

Any secretive maneuvering between Mulroney and Campbell in late 1992 should have raised suspicion that Mulroney wanted to pre-empt Joe Clark altogether – not just the prospect of a Clark comeback as leader but Mr. Clark as the ideological counterweight to him in Progressive Conservative politics – as there were serious media speculations that Clark might have a good election chance as leader should Mulroney step down. ¹⁹⁸ Subsequently, Mulroney’s announcement of pending resignation came on February 24 several days after Clark’s February 20 announcement of his intent to retire.

Despite “attractive” private-sector job offers, and turning down Mulroney’s offer for him to become Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Mr. Clark (who was still an MP) and wife Maureen McTeer soon became professors at the University of California, Berkeley – my alma mater of graduate study as previously mentioned in the context of author Chalmers Johnson – with Mr. Clark at the same political science faculty Dr. Johnson had been in and Mrs. Clark joining the public health faculty; within a few short months an election-defeated Campbell would join Clark in the academic world, going to teach at Harvard University. ¹⁹⁹

In November 1992 Stan Wilbee and Joe Clark were not the only potential victims of Kim Campbell’s ‘loyalty succession’ ambition: I myself was likely an actual victim.

The reader may notice that next to the “Nov. 10” date of the RCMP copy of my old press release quoted earlier, is a (RCMP) date stamp of “Nov 30 1992”, and within a line of fax mark at the bottom of the page – at the right-hand side slightly obscured by another (RCMP) date stamp of “Oct 21 1993” – the date of “11/30/1992” can be seen (the RCMP stamps and the line of fax-mark are on every page).

It turned out that in the morning of November 30 I had faxed several previous press releases – attached to a cover note – to the local constituency office of MP Kim Campbell in whose riding I was a resident, and in the afternoon two RCMP officers, one of whom introducing himself as Sgt. Brian Cotton, a detective from the UBC detachment, were in my city apartment to take me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment (and committal), citing something related to my prior dispute with my former employer UBC and the RCMP (a lawsuit by me had been mentioned at the start of the above-mentioned press release) as well as concern with my persistent communications with the CBC.

To the hospital, Sgt. Brian Cotton accused me of having “paranoid ideation”, and some UBC Hospital psychiatrists then determined my thinking as “delusional” and of “persecutory type”. But as everyone can read a copy of my fax received by Kim Campbell’s local MP office got into the hand of the RCMP on that same day – and not even by fax as there isn’t a second fax-mark line on this RCMP copy.

Police simply would not act this closely and quickly on a non-emergency mental-health case in apparent disregard for proper rules or conflict of interest: the officers were outside their normal jurisdiction area of UBC, the RCMP and UBC were defendants in a civil lawsuit by me over that prior dispute, and Sgt. Brian Cotton also rejected my response of going to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital for a ‘neutral’ assessment, citing pre-arrangement at UBC.

For the reader unfamiliar with the background of politics, before becoming a Tory MP Kim Campbell had been also a UBC faculty member, a lawyer at the law firm Ladner Downs, chair of the Vancouver school board, executive assistant to B.C. Premier Bill Bennett of the Social Credit party, and a Socred member of the B.C. legislature; she was originally from Port Alberni, B.C. ²⁰⁰

Within three weeks a mental-health review panel ordered my release. But in mid-January 1993 (days before Tory MP Al Horning came out saying Mulroney should step down), I was again under psychiatric committal – this time by Vancouver Police action – and again within a few weeks I was released by a review panel, in mid-February with Brian Mulroney still talking about winning a third majority.

To refer here to this part of history of personal efforts to help bring down Mr. Mulroney is not to accuse then RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster of having-forged/forging deals with the devils, but to show that the RCMP played political roles – in my personal experience in particular.

While Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business; and as if that had not been enough, prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico. ²⁰¹

Subcomandante Marcos’s criticism of Chretien was voiced at a time when Canadian native leaders had been expressing support for more rights (including land-title rights) for the Mexican Mayans in light of swift acceptance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the new Chretien government – an agreement that had been negotiated by the Mulroney government and had contributed to its unpopularity, and one that Chretien during the election campaign had talked about renegotiating. ²⁰²

To the Chretien Liberals who were shifting governing focus from human rights to trade, the concern from all this Mexican violence seemed to be security – in Canada there had already been similar angry crowd of unemployed construction workers in his hometown (riding) of Shawinigan shouting at Chretien and smashing a window of his constituency office – but on the other hand the security should not hinder a prime minister who took pride in being “close to the people”, according to solicitor general Herb Gray who would review the PM’s security arrangements with RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster and foreign affairs minister Andre Ouellet. ²⁰³

Such could only add momentum to the gun-control drive being launched by justice minister Allan Rock, and prime minister Chretien personally announced on the last day of a high-profile Liberal party convention in mid-May in Ottawa that he would instruct Allan Rock to proceed with stricter gun-control legislation to be introduced in parliament in the fall, after the convention unanimously endorsed a resolution on tougher gun control – sponsored by the National Women’s Liberal Commission. ²⁰⁴

Several days afterwards Chretien was at the Winnipeg convention centre attending a high-profile Liberal fundraiser, and there were not only around 200 native demonstrators outside chanting “We want jobs”, but also 29-year old Earl Kevin Jans wandering about in the convention centre and arrested for wanting to see the prime minister while carrying a pistol-like crossbow and three arrows ²⁰⁵ – proof that a handgun is not always necessary, given the precedent that with crossbow and hunting arrow Montreal student and author Colin McGregor had killed his estranged wife Patricia Allen (a Revenue Canada lawyer and daughter of retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen), on November 13, 1991, i.e., one year before the Stan Wilbee and John Major events near the end of the Mulroney era, and nearly two years before the Chretien era began. ²⁰⁶

Back in 1991 several weeks after Patricia Allen’s death, the Mulroney government’s weaker gun-control law that had been stimulated by the December 6, 1989 Montreal massacre – killing of 14 women at Ecole Polytechique (engineering school of the University of Montreal) by gunman Marc Lepine – passed the Senate on the eve of the massacre’s two-year anniversary (after it had passed the Commons earlier). ²⁰⁷

Fortunately for Chretien, by the fall of 1994 gun control would not be the only political issue stirring controversy with passion as Stevie Cameron’s major book exposing corruptions in the Mulroney years was scheduled for the same fall season; there were both excitement and nervousness awaiting for the upcoming fall books on Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney: ²⁰⁸

“Last year McClelland & Stewart’s big fall book was Pierre Trudeau’s own memoir, which sold more than 200,000 copies. This year it’s deja vu all over again, when M & S brings out the second volume of Trudeau And Our Times, by the Governor-General’s Award winning team of Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson. Subtitled The Heroic Delusion, it takes up the former prime minister’s career after the ‘74 election. A hot political book, awaited with trepidation by some, is On The Take: Greed And Corruption In The Mulroney Years by Stevie Cameron (Macfarlane Walter & Ross). Another book that will make Conservatives uncomfortable is The Poisoned Chalice: How The Tories Self-Destructed by David McLaughlin (Dundurn)”.

Some people were nervous also because, in Stevie Cameron’s view, with the departure of the Mulroney era’s corrupt reputation – which had been akin to Richard Nixon’s – also went the (first elected, but formerly controversial as mentioned in earlier Notes, and) reform-minded Speaker of the House of Commons John Fraser, while the return of the ‘heroically delusional’ Trudeau brought back the “secretive, institutionalized club” of Major-General Gus Cloutier – Sergeant-At-Arms of the House of Commons and an old friend of Jean Pelletier and Jean Carle now running Prime Minster Jean Chretien’s office. ²⁰⁹

In late October 1994 Stevie Cameron’s book on the Mulroney years came out and became an instant bestseller: it portrayed a damning picture of the greed, crime and corruption in the political circle associated with the Mulroney government, and of Mulroney turning a blind eye to the grease around him while living his extravagant lifestyle at the expenses of the party and the government; coming out around the anniversary of the Tories’ historic election debacle it served as a reminder how democracy could go wrong. ²¹⁰

 

(Read Full Article with Footnotes in Feng Gao’s Space) . . .

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(Go to Part 6, next blog post)

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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 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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