An Inside View

While former prime minister Brian Mulroney has engaged the services of a seasoned, certainly politically unpartisan (business is business, after all) lobbyist to have his interests advanced through access to ears in the current government, another individual who once had access at the very highest and closest level to the wrongly-dishonourable Mr. Mulroney has been busy airing his experienced observations.

Formerly chief of staff in the prime minister's office in the early 1990s, Norman Spector spoke before the parliamentary ethics committee set up to probe Mr. Mulroney's acceptance of generous cash payments from German-Canadian arms dealer and lobbyist, Karlheinz Schreiber. Even before his appearance before the committee Mr. Spector had released troubling comments about the former prime minister's mode of self-enablements.

In his column appearing a week earlier in Le Devoir, Mr. Spector stated unequivocally that his former boss received money not quite licit, while still in office. "Documents in hand, I expect to be able to help them [the committee members] identify the source of large quantities of cash brought to 24 Sussex Drive [residence of the prime minister] when Mr. Mulroney was prime minister of Canada", he had written.

Not unexpectedly, Mr. Mulroney's lawyers cried foul, complaining that the revelations go beyond the scope of the committee's mandate. Characterizing the revelations as merely another in a long list of disrespectful instances of unfairness demonstrated by a public, the press, and parliamentarians who harbour a grudge against the Right Honourable.

There are those not connected with any of the principals who consider Mr. Spector's testimony to be tantamount to an unethical violation of the understood code of discretion invested in political staff members. "It is essential that a relationship of absolute trust exists between a prime minister and his closest advisors, without which the exercise of power would be quasi-impossible", thundered one Quebec government insider.

On the other hand, the public does have a right to feel its trust in those whom they elect to the highest station in the land has not been misplaced. And when instances arise that cannot be overlooked and that require acceptably-edifying explanations and those explanations are not forthcoming, then it is only reasonable that parliament explain itself through a proper investigation.

Caesar must be above suspicion, and his wife as well. For they have been entrusted with the hopes and aspirations of all those whom they represent as legislators and regulators. Their ethics should be impeccable, in recognition of the high station they represent. Their duties both to their country and the nation's voting public must be first and foremost in their minds; their behaviour circumspect and above-board.

The former Liberal minister of justice in the Chretien government, Allan Rock, who called off the original RCMP investigation into charges of corruption against Mr. Mulroney in the Airbus affair, and who agreed to pay out $2.1-million of tax dollars to settle Mr. Mulroney's law suit against the government out of court, states quite clearly that had it been known at the time that Mr. Mulroney accepted cash payments from Mr. Schreiber the money would never have left the treasury.

For Mr. Mulroney had, after all, stated under oath, that he had never had any dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber. Portraying himself as an injured innocent, determined to clear his name and put all the unfair smears on his reputation to rest, once and for all. Until the latest revelations about his mendacious money grubbing became public, that is.

Mr. Mulroney's rather unorthodox reimbursement of personal expenses while prime minister, from the Conservative party wasn't entirely unknown. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau before him had accepted a fund raised by corporate interests to pay for a swimming pool built for 24 Sussex Drive; and Mr. Trudeau was an avid swimmer, a very fit and energetic man. Mr. Mulroney was avid about swimming with the social elite, a very cash-focused man.

As leader of the Progressive-Conservative Party of Canada, Mr. Mulroney received $5-thousand a month from their fund for "expenses incurred as party leader". Mr. Spector informed the committe that this money would be handed to Mrs. Mulroney in cash. Those "personal expenses" totalled $100,000 in the space of one and a half years.

As for unethical behaviour on other fronts, it would appear that Mr. Mulroney's chief of staff, Fred Doucet, enjoyed extraordinary access to the prime minister even after departing the office and becoming a lobbyist himself. Inserting himself whenever he pleased, on behalf of one of his clients, Karlheinz Schreiber, for dialogues with the prime minister which represented in the final analysis, yet another income source.

Claims and denials aside, all the public wants, actually, is to hear a coherent and reasonable explanation for what appears, on the outside, to a vexed and cynical audience, to be behaviour unbecoming a prime minister.

Straight to perdition, otherwise, Mr. Mulroney. Am I biased; you bet.