Vive Le Canada - Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, Greed, Ambition, and Canadian Fate (Part Two)

Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, Greed, Ambition, and Canadian Fate (Part Two)
by Robin Mathews

William Kaplan, A SECRET TRIAL, Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, and the Public Trust, McGill-Queen’s, 2004

A SECRET TRIAL, wasn’t, I believe, written because Kaplan suffered a change of conviction about Brian Mulroney’s present status as an innocent in the Airbus Affair. It is a book of greater seriousness than that. Kaplan is a sophisticated lawyer, author, labour mediator, and a serious thinker about the viability of Canadian democracy.

Three matters, especially, conspired to re-focus Kaplan’s interest on the Mulroney record and the role played in it by Stevie Cameron. First he discovered that Brian Mulroney had not been candid with him, had perhaps deceived him, and perhaps deliberately. Kaplan had “unprecedented and unlimited access to Mulroney’s files” (p. viii), and to his person, during the research and writing of his defense of Mulroney book entitled Presumed Guilty, Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada (1998). Kaplan recorded some of his conversations with Mulroney and quotes these to make his point in A SECRET TRIAL.

Kaplan concludes about the Mulroney/Karlheinz Schreiber relation: “I had been duped. Schreiber had been part of the Mulroney circle even before he [Mulroney] entered public life. In fact, he played an important behind-the-scenes role in Mulroney’s road to power.” (p. 13)

Even in reference to Mulroney’s answers during the Examination on Discovery for his libel suit against the Canadian government in 1996, Kaplan finds himself called upon to consider what perjury means and what the grounds are for an accusation of perjury. He concludes: “Only Mulroney can say whether these [his] answers, given under oath, were framed in such a way as to mislead.” (p. 24)

Secondly, and most unusually, a secret trial was being held, starting in 2001, in Toronto. For obvious reasons secret trials are rare, and, perhaps, should never occur at all. Any secret trial should evoke interest in a principled lawyer, even one not close to the trial’s concerns. But this one was close to Kaplan’s concerns. The secret trial was to consider, until then, sealed search warrants of 1999, of interest, seemingly, to nearly all of the principals engaged in the Airbus scandal investigations: Schreiber, Frank Moores, Mulroney, Harry Cashore and the CBC, and Stevie Cameron.

As Kaplan writes: “Some two years after the government and the RCMP settled with Mulroney and apologized to him, the Mounties had enough information to authorize a search.” (p. 38) All the warrants for search were sealed, and the application for warrants sealed too – to protect someone, an informer, what the public usually thinks of as a private person working for the RCMP. That kind of person is given, perhaps, the most thorough protection from identification in Canadian law because of the importance private people play in the pursuit of those engaged in unlawful activity.

As fate, circumstance, RCMP bungling, and Stevie Cameron’s apparently independently discovered information about RCMP activities, court hearings, and such like would have it, Eddie Greenspan figured out that Stevie Cameron was the informer, working for the RCMP and, incidentally, getting journalistically useable information from them. The footsteps of revelation were slow. Beginning, in fact, in early 2000, the request to unseal information was only, finally, terminated in 2004.

Third, the fact of Stevie Cameron’s role astounded Kaplan, for it revealed violation of fundamental principles of journalistic integrity as well as opening very serious questions about motivations to investigate on the part of the RCMP. Among many of the principals in the Airbus Affair, a firm conviction existed (and exists) that Stevie Cameron was determined, one way or another, to “get” Brian Mulroney.

There is an appearance that she had been both a motivator of investigation by and a receiver of information from the RCMP for six years prior to and after the publication of the best-selling book about the Mulroney regime entitled On The Take.

It would seem, also, that she was one of the instigators of action in the Airbus Affair and, certainly, she has been one of the people most effective - as author of the book On The Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (1994), Last Amigo (with Harvey Cashore), and in her many public addresses - in casting doubt upon the integrity of the Mulroney years.

On every side, it would seem, William Kaplan was confronted with unacceptable behaviour which required a book to work through and explain. His book, A SECRET TRIAL, is scrupulous in its determination to be fair and even. It is informative and concerned.

Kaplan is, obviously, not on the political left. Even so, the book might leave some liberal-minded people puzzled. Its quite unnecessary foreword is by J. L Granatstein, a certified right-wing ideologue. The equally unnecessary afterword is by Norman Spector, a Mulroney appointee of quite long service. In a distasteful way, a man who did not scruple to take various appointments from Mulroney, Norman Sector tells tales on him now.

One of Spector’s tasks, as well, seems to be to “balance” Kaplan’s book by a “Liberals are corrupt, too” addition. It doesn’t advance the book’s purpose in any way. For instance, Spector reports that “Kaplan was surprised and disappointed that the National Post proved to be a lapdog for the powerful, not a watchdog.” (p. 215) Spector defends the National Post by equivocation. (That he now works for CanWest, owner of the National Post, is slightly embarrassing.)

Then he attacks the CBC as “Left” (which is as stupid a canard as can be hauled up by a right-winger. All one can say is: “Would that the CBC was Left!”) He urges that the CBC needs much reform, but he doesn’t say the same of CanWest which needs reform much, much more, and is deliberately and ideologically prejudiced and manipulative.

But most important, Spector draws a picture of himself as someone who witnessed or was aware of misuse of office, favour-giving, and pork-barrelling in both Conservative and Liberal governments – activities which required bold public resignation from position and exposure of the wrong-doings in order to help maintain integrity in public life. He did not take those steps. His long-after-the-facts recounting of bad deeds implicates him in the obloquy he directs at others. It is not a pretty picture.

Spector continues today in an ambiguous position, apparently confusing himself - certainly confusing this reader. The dust jacket of A SECRET TRIAL reports that he is a columnist for the Globe and Mail and Le Devoir. Now he is more. On March 12, 2005, I read a column by Spector in The Vancouver Sun and the Victoria Times Colonist – both columns exactly the same, and both in CanWest papers.

Worse. In the twice-printed column, Spector is (surprise) lambasting the Left, and he enters what he calls a “disclaimer.” “I don’t work for this newspaper; while I write a weekly column, I’m also a regular in two other newspapers….” But wait! He writes a column every week that appears in the Vancouver Sun and the Victoria Times Colonist , both owned by CanWest Global. He writes the column for them, and he obviously receives payment for the column. And so in the normal person’s mind he “works” for the two papers, for two CanWest papers.

By what contortion of the real situation can he say “I don’t work for this newspaper,” in a column that appears weekly in the paper and for which he is contracted and paid? One thinks immediately of Brian Mulroney’s answers under court questioning – carefully examined by William Kaplan – and suspects that Norman Spector spent a little too long as an appointee during the Mulroney regime to be able to face his position squarely and describe it as it truly is. He seems embarrassed enough to be writing for CanWest that he fudges the fact that he “works” for CanWest. He doesn’t, you see. He writes for CanWest. He gets paid for writing for CanWest. He agrees to do a weekly column for CanWest. But don’t be misled – he doesn’t “work” for CanWest!

The foreword and the afterword of A SECRET TRIAL are very hard to understand. Neither does anything but get in the way of Kaplan’s story. If Kaplan’s text had to be “wrapped around,” why not by a principled NDP person for the foreword and a principled Liberal for the afterword? To write that is not foolish because Kaplan’s own work is principled, searching, and unsparing.

An unfortunate conservative trait marks Kaplan’s text, however. He tends to make unnecessary comments about people to whom he refers. Apparently he does so for descriptive reasons, to place them for readers. But by doing so in the way he does he risks his credibility for many. Brian Mulroney, for instance, “did many good and important things as prime minister.” (p. 162) David Cameron, Stevie Cameron’s husband, is “a well-regarded University of Toronto professor who had won the 2002 Governor-General’s award for Canadian Studies for his outstanding contribution to scholarship….”(p.150) Robert Fulford [is] the unofficial dean of Canadian journalists. One of the most respected public intellectuals in the country, Fulford has a well-deserved reputation as a responsible iconoclast….(p. 141) And so on.

For people who think those statements and others of the same kind are partisan nonsense and embarrassing puffery from the right on behalf of the right, the book takes on an unfortunate – and wholly unnecessary - colouring.

The book, nevertheless, is important. Kaplan opens up uneasiness, again, about Brian Mulroney’s judgment, and, in so doing, about the definition of his innocence. Kaplan opens the question, again, about the Canadian recipients – still undiscovered – of millions in pay-off in the Airbus Affair and the role of Karlheinz Schreiber and his German backers in devious manipulations of Canadian political history – manipulations that figured heavily in providing us with Brian Mulroney as prime minister of the country. He focuses on the bad state of politics, police, and the press in the country. And he focuses on Stevie Cameron, specifically, awakening questions in readers’ minds about her motivations and her “evidence” of claims about wrong-doing. Apparently seeking justice for wrongs she couldn’t prove against Brian Mulroney, Cameron used highly questionable methods and she dwelled so constantly in denial of her role as a police informer that serious suspicion falls on her.

Was she, in her own way, driven by greed and ambition to the detriment of Canadian fate? Was she a truly strange other side of the Mulroney coin? One is hard pressed to give clear answers.

What conclusions might a reviewer come to at the end of reading A SECRET TRIAL? I have suggested a number already. The overwhelming conclusion I have come to is that every Canadian should read William Kaplan’s book. But every Canadian who does so should pass over and ignore the unfortunate contributions by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Spector.

[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 19, 2005]