Amazingly, Mulroney became a close Harper adviser and confidant. They spoke on the phone all the time. Marjory LeBreton, a Mulroney-appointed senator who acted as his unfailing advocate on Parliament Hill, went on the campaign bus for Harper’s victorious 2006 campaign.
And they all would have lived happily ever after—except Conservatives almost never get to do that, do they? Every once in a while, old tensions would resurface. During the party’s first formal convention, in Montreal in 2005, a debate over delegate rules for future conventions pitted former Alliance members against former Progressive Conservatives. The former outnumbered the latter 10 to 1. Peter MacKay threw a strategic tantrum, telling reporters, “This party is in real jeopardy, in my view.” Harper kicked a chair over and, days later, took MacKay and Belinda Stronach into his office to berate them for airing the party’s dirty laundry in public. The incident led directly to Stronach’s departure from the party.
But none of that mattered much as long as it involved temporary tensions and minor characters. The saga of Mulroney’s dealings with Schreiber obeyed neither of those rules.
Mulroney had denied for years that he had any business dealings with Schreiber, a cheerfully crooked operator who faced extradition on charges of bribing German officials. But on Nov. 8, 2007, Schreiber filed an affidavit claiming he visited Mulroney on June 23, 1993—two days before Mulroney ended his term as prime minister. At that meeting, Schreiber claimed, he negotiated a $300,000 lobbying deal with Mulroney.
Suddenly Mulroney’s dealings with Schreiber weren’t necessarily those of a private citizen in retirement, but those of a serving politician. And his close relationship with his one-time apostate successor, Harper, meant allegations against Mulroney could hurt Harper.
Harper announced an independent review of Schreiber’s allegations. Mulroney said that wasn’t enough and called for a full public inquiry: “It’s time we put this issue to bed, once and for all.” Harper took Mulroney at his word and announced what would eventually become, in the fullness of bureaucratic time, the Oliphant commission. At a news conference announcing the commission, quite unprompted by reporters, Harper went a step further and cut the ties that connected the two prime ministers.
“I think it will be incumbent on me and also upon members of the government not to have dealings with Mr. Mulroney until this issue is resolved,’’ Harper said.
This was something new. “It put a suggestion of persona non grata on Mulroney,” L. Ian MacDonald, a Montreal political journalist who served for years as Mulroney’s chief speechwriter, wrote in his Gazette column. Harper’s hands-off-Mulroney edict, MacDonald wrote, “has created serious rumblings in the old Tory tent this week, especially in Quebec, where Mulroney is held in high regard.”
A year later Harper won re-election, no thanks to Quebec, where his government’s cuts to arts funding sparked a truly formidable voter backlash. Facing his own re-election campaign, Premier Jean Charest joined the criticism rather than defend Harper. In MacDonald’s Gazette column and others in Quebec newspapers, the theory spread that if Harper had kept lines of communication open to Mulroney, he wouldn’t have been so tone-deaf in Quebec.
Three days before Christmas 2008, Harper named 18 new Conservative senators. One was Irving Gerstein, the party’s chief fundraiser. Shortly after the New Year, Gerstein took a phone call from Mulroney.
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