Black's Back!

Which is to say, he will shortly return to Canada.  He has been granted a one-year temporary resident permit, valid from May 2012 to the following May.  He will finally be released from an American federal penitentiary, jailed for fraud and obstruction of justice.  A typical white-collar crime with political overtones.  The issuance of that temporary permit will form step one in the granting eventually of Landed Immigrant status that will itself lead to a restoration of his Canadian citizenship.

Conrad Black has many virtues, not the least of which are his discerning and intelligent writing capabilities.  He is an outstanding author of excellent biographies.  But he was also behind a prestigious global publishing empire.  And for Canada, he did a very special favour, launching a national newspaper that would challenge the primacy of the country's number one national paper, the Globe & Mail.  In the process outdistancing it in quality of reportage and writing.

The National Post, in fact, under the ownership and guidance of Conrad Black, became a formidable and excellent newspaper, assembling a coterie of opinion writers and reporters that formed the backbone of an exceptional national daily.  Although Mr. Black wrote the very occasional opinion/editorial piece, he did not impose his views and his politics on the paper; it formed its own, reflecting its mandate as a national digest of events and opinions.

The man's passion was newspapers.  Evident enough in the quality of those which he eventually owned, among which were the British Daily Telegraph, the U.S. Chicago Sun-Times, Israel's Jerusalem Post and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald.  Along with a string of other lesser papers, to make him the third most successful newspaper publisher in the world.  And earning him a British peerage.

It was that peerage which he wanted to achieve, capping off his social and business ambitions, that inspired him, in an unseemly spat with then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien, to renounce his Canadian citizenship.  Never dreaming that there would come a time when he would regret that decision.  Jean Chretien's mean-spirited insistence that Conrad Black could not become Lord Black of Coal Harbour while maintaining Canadian citizenship had no basis in Canadian law.

What it did represent was nasty pay-back for Mr. Black's National Post writing a series of articles highlighting the pork-barreling politics of a French-Canadian politician accustomed to having things his way, as "the little man from Shawinigan".  The tug of war the two tussled with as each attempted to undo the other reflected poorly on Jean Chretien, to the detriment of Conrad Black.

In the end, Jean Chretien was able to escape legal action and responsibility for his covert, unethical and very lucrative shenanigans, but Conrad Black's illicit backroom dealings came back to haunt him by prosecution in an American court of law.  He was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in a Chicago court, and sentenced to 78 months in prison, before the U.S. Supreme Court made hash of the "Honest-Services" law that had convicted Lord Black.

He did serve 29 months in prison, before being released, and then sent back again.  While in prison he went above and beyond his anguish at the humiliation he suffered with the loss of his dignity, his privacy and his pride, insisting that his trial, conviction and sentencing were unjust.  He become the very model of a model prisoner, working studiously in a writing class to educate other prisoners and give value to their lives.

He has more than earned his release.  In point of fact, nothing can expunge the fact of his service to Canada, his essence as a Canadian, with or without the formality of citizenship and a passport.  What he surrendered will eventually be restored to him.  And those small minds like NDP leader Thomas Mulcair who insist the government is doing favours to someone of Conservative mind, simply reflects his own nasty ignorance.

The issuance of a Minister's Certificate to permit his return is a common enough occurrence.  Canada will surely be favoured with this return of a native son.  By and large Conrad Black's life in Canada has benefited this country greatly.  We should welcome him back, fulsomely.