“They had a nice long chat,” Robin Sears recalls. Mostly Mulroney wanted to congratulate Gerstein on landing a Senate perch. “Irv, being a good fundraiser, asked Mr. Mulroney whether he wanted to make his Leader’s Circle donation.” The Leader’s Circle is the list of top Conservative party donors.
“Mr. Mulroney said, ‘That’s a great idea, Irv, but as you know, they won’t talk to me, so I don’t think I’m in the Leader’s Circle any more.’ ” He added, according to Sears, that he would be happy to keep donating to Conservative party candidates he knew. Elections Canada records show that Brian and Mila Mulroney have donated almost $15,000 to the party and individual candidates since the 2004 election.
Now the thing to remember about Mulroney’s call to Gerstein is that it took place in January. And nobody heard any more about it until March 30 and 31, when reporters from at least three Ottawa news bureaus heard about it from officials in the Conservative party and the Harper government.
What happened in the meantime?
Clues might lie in the story that ran in Canwest newspapers on Sunday, March 29: “Mulroney reputation, legacy at stake as inquiry set to begin.” It’s an “understatement to say the stakes are high for Mr. Mulroney,” the story said, noting Schreiber’s claim to have evidence of “the biggest political scandal in the history of Canada.”
Each Monday morning at the Langevin Block meeting of the Prime Minister’s senior staff, Jenni Byrne, the director of issues management, reports to a group including the chief of staff, Guy Giorno, and the communication director, Kory Teneycke. Byrne’s role is to identify recent or coming events that might present political hazard or opportunity during the week ahead. The meeting starts at 7:30 a.m.; Harper enters around 8, if he is in town, or calls in if he is away. On this day he was in New York City, but it is impossible to know whether he called in to the March 30 meeting: in recent days, his office has stopped taking questions about Harper’s squabble with Mulroney.
Funny, they were a lot more chatty when this began. By March 31, a day after the senior staff meeting, three Ottawa news bureaus had been approached by PMO political staffers with the stale but suddenly handy “news” that Mulroney had asked to be stricken from Conservative party lists. And also that he had let his membership in the party lapse in 2006.
Tom Clark was the first with the news on CTV Newsnet. Robin Sears’ phone rang minutes later. “I got a call from the CBC saying CTV had a story saying, quote, ‘Mr. Mulroney has ripped up his membership card in frustration at the conduct of the Oliphant inquiry.’ Did I have any comment? I said I don’t know anything about that, let me check.”
Sears called Clark, who confirmed that was what he’d been told “by the PMO.” Then he called Mulroney, who took a little finding. A Monday evening dinner with Mila in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., had turned into a two-day hospital stint with food poisoning. Sears asked Mulroney whether he had torn up his party card and set the party loose.
“I guess my job is to delete a few expletives here,” Sears says, recounting the conversation. Mulroney “said, ‘Just tell him that I am a member of the Conservative party and I will be one til the day I die.’ ”
By Tuesday night the story was leading the cable newscasts. The PMO sent “talking points” to MPs and staff, urging them to direct reporters’ questions to the PMO. Those who did call were informed, cheerfully but off the record, that Mulroney had taken it upon himself to sever ties with the party.
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