Hollywood just can't catch a break

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

Poor Hollywood. The major film studios are enjoying one of their best years in memory with box office up 15 per cent—a trend that many relate to the public trying to escape the pressures of the slumping economy. But now it seems that DVD sales—a big part of their profits in recent years—have dropped off by at least that much. What really has film executives panicked however, is they no longer can predict which films will do well on DVD, with some box office blockbusters turning into dogs down at the video store.

Los Angeles Times

Cancellation Blues And Other TV Thoughts

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:25 AM - 3 Comments

- Several long-running canceled shows will go off without much in the way of a finale. My Name Is Earl was just canceled, but its last episode seemed to operate on the assumption that there would be another season. In fact, it ended with a “To Be Continued” caption, the absolute worst way to end a series. The Unit, which CBS just canceled as well, at least went out with a wedding. The importance of series finales can be overstated (like season finales, they are a relatively recent invention), but it does seem like a show that’s on the bubble should at least try not to end the season with a cliffhanger, just because it’s going to piss a lot of people off when the show gets rerun; people have been angry about the ending of Soap — which ended with a character about to be executed by a firing squad — for over 25 years now. Of course, you could turn that around and argue that it’s in the producers’ interest to end with a cliffhanger because they can then offer a reason why the network should pick them up: they’re not out of stories to tell. (In Earl’s case, they were hoping that Fox would pick them up if NBC didn’t.)

Update: My Name Is Earl‘s creator, Greg Garcia, claims that ending with a cliffhanger was a strategic decision to help the show’s chances of getting picked up by another network: “There’s a lot of reasons the show would work well on another network, and I think we’d do very well with some promotion. We certainly feel like we have more stories to tell. That’s why we left the show on season 4 on a cliffhanger.”

- When I said that Mitch Hurwitz was the unluckiest man in TV, I was unaware that he was one of the executive producers of a show that did get picked up: Fox’s football-player comedy “Brothers.” So while that’s a Friday-night show that’s not likely to last more than a season, he at least has a show on the air. The creator of Brothers is Don Reo, who must have one of the longest careers in television at this point. He wrote for Sonny & Cher, became a writer-producer on Rhoda and M*A*S*H, ran the cult flop Action and Everybody Hates Chris, and has been creating his own shows for over 25 years, including the fantasy spoof Wizards & Warriors, Blossom, The John Larroquette Show, and star vehicles for everyone from Damon Wayans to Rhea Pearlman. Except for a fascination with recovering alcoholics, I don’t know that there’s a lot of consistent themes or styles in his work, but apart from having done some good stuff (particularly season 1 of John Larroquette), it’s impressive that he’s managed to be a viable, in-demand TV writer-producer in Hollywood for 35 years. How many other people have managed that?

Dead Guy Walking?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:14 AM - 1 Comment

With the Prime Minister’s party lagging in recent public opinion polls, the time has come to try something different in the PMO, say some political observers. Since a Canadian Press report described Harper¹s chief of staff Guy Giorno as “one of the most controversial figures inside the nation’s top office” last week, speculation has been rampant about whether the once star staffer may soon be replaced. But as politics expert Dennis Pilon of the University of Victoria points out, while other leaders may have shaken up the PMO when their chips were down, Harper is a “different kind of political animal,” whose reaction is to go on the offensive. The recent attack ads on Ignatieff are proof of this.

The Hill Times

Cola kills muscle power

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:12 AM - 1 Comment

Drinking too much cola can cause everything from mild weakness to muscle paralysis, as it can cause blood potassium to plummet, doctors are reporting in the International Journal of Clinical Practice. In it, they report on an Australian farmer who needed emergency care for lung paralysis after drinking up to 10 litres of cola a day (he fully recovered). In another case, a pregnant woman who drank up to three litres a day for six years was found to have an irregular heartbeat, likely caused by low blood potassium levels. She recovered fully after cutting her cola intake. Experts say soda’s three most common ingredients (glucose, fructose and especially caffeine) are likely to blame, the BBC reports, while manufacturers say soft drinks are safe when consumed in moderation.

BBC News

Chalk River shut down, again

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:04 AM - 1 Comment

The troubled nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ont., has been shut down, prompting new concerns of a medical isotope shortage. The reactor was first struck with a power outage last week. The next day a heavy water leak was detected. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. estimates the facility will be out of use for at least a month. This is but the latest trouble for a facility that was at the centre of a furious political dispute in November 2007.

The Canadian Press

Psychics are recession-proof

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 11:02 AM - 0 Comments

The global financial meltdown may scare the bejesus out of economists, but it’s producing a bull market for those who read other sort of signs—astrologers, palmists numerologists and something called “intuitive seers.” “There’s uncertainty right now and people are looking for certainty,” says Julie Cusmariu, an intuitive consultant and life coach in Montreal. Why you would go to a psychic for certainty is anyone’s guess. But Cusmariu and others interviewed for this story report that business is up 20 to 30 per cent. “When things are bad, people panic and I have more clients,” shrugs numerologist Pauline Edward, sounding not a little like a vulture fund manager.

Montreal Gazette

Insulting! Tasteless! Sad! A gutter campaign!

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 38 Comments

The critics continue to rave. Continue…

Some Tory humour for you this morning

By Stephen Taylor - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 10:13 AM - 22 Comments

Q: Why is Michael Ignatieff still in Canada?

A: Because Ruby Dhalla’s holding his passport.

Liveblog: Brian Mulroney at the Oliphant inquiry (Day Five)

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 89 Comments

So, are we all rested and refreshed from the long weekend, and ready for another day of rock’em-sock’em cross-examination? ITQ hopes so, since this will likely be the grand finale for commission counsel Richard Wolson, who is expected to wrap up his grilling of the former prime minister today. What’s not clear, however, is whether Mulroney will be heading back to Montreal after today’s appearance. After all, at least one other lawyer — Richard Auger, counsel to the convalescing Karlheinz Schreiber – has indicated that he will have a few followup questions for the right honourable witness.

Meanwhile, Norman Spector – who testified a few weeks back – is once again contradicting his former boss’s claim to have “killed” the Bear Head project, this time in an interview with Canadian Press.

9:12:27 AM
Well, my goodness – and good morning, of course, Oliphantologists – if not for my carefully reserved seat, I might have been relegated to the bleachers, alongside Team Navigator’s crack twitter truth squad, because there is a remarkably heavy media turnout at Old City Hall today. That’s likely at least partly due to the gaping hole in the political news-generating machine brought on by the parliamentary break — yes, the kids are back in the ridings for the week; govern yourselves accordingly — but it’s also looking like Richard Auger – Schreiber’s lawyer, in case you’ve forgotten – may get to begin *his* cross-examination of the former prime minister this afternoon. Right now, we’re actually experiencing a brief delay — 25 minutes or so, we’ve been told — due to some sort of flight cancellation mishap that befell the judge. No word on his knee, but I’ll keep you posted.

9:31:34 AM
And more breaking news — apparently, Schreiber may not be well enough to take the stand on Thursday, which means — well, we don’t know what it means, really, other than that there is a distinct possibility that this may not be the last week of public hearings. Also, I can report that Auger has assembled a veritable fortress of folders, binders and loose-leaf documents, which suggests that his cross-examination may go considerably longer than we expected.

9:50:53 AM
Alright, places, everybody!

Hey, where’s the witness? Shouldn’t he standing behind his chair, gazing at the crowd and basking in the adoration of his cheering section?

Continue…

Fresh from the press

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 2:20 AM - 3 Comments

Last January, Tropicana, the orange juice behemoth owned by PepsiCo Inc., made a major marketing blunder: it redesigned the carton for Pure Premium, North America’s pasteurized orange juice brand. Gone was the familiar logo of an orange skewered by a straw; in its place, a close-up of a glass of orange juice. Sales plummeted immediately. Loyal customers griped that the design made the product look like a generic store brand. Within weeks, the new look was scuppered and the image of a fresh orange was reinstated.

The packaging debacle could have been avoided had company executives only got their hands on an advance copy of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, Alissa Hamilton’s insightful history of the Florida juice industry, which hits stores next week. They would have been reminded that consumers have long been conditioned to expect processed juice to telegraph the illusion of straight-from-the-orange freshness. The verbiage on the Pure Premium carton is typical: its contents are described as “pure and natural,” containing only “100 per cent pure squeezed orange juice.” Its production methodology is conveyed with Zen-like simplicity: “Our juice is made from fresh hand-picked oranges. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. Only oranges.”

Continue…

Our national blood sport

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 2:00 AM - 4 Comments

At this time of year, as we are often told, it’s all about sending a message. And from the opening moments of the NHL playoffs, things have been crystal clear. Down 4-1 in the waning seconds of their first game against the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Philadelphia Flyers trotted out winger Dan Carcillo—the league leader in penalty minutes—to take the final faceoff. He never touched the puck, but he did live up to expectations, smacking the Penguins’ Maxime Talbot across the head with the butt end of his stick.

ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: (Video) Top 10 cheap shots during the 2009 NHL Playoffs

There was no penalty, but the next day, the league handed Carcillo a one-game suspension, and fined Philly coach John Stevens US$10,000. “Organizations—players and coaches—will be held accountable for such actions,” said Colin Campbell, the NHL’s vice-president of hockey operations. He referred to a conference call, just prior to the playoffs, where general managers and coaches were warned that late game shenanigans would not be tolerated. It’s tempting to say the league’s chief disciplinarian “set the tone.” Except for the inconvenient fact that only hours later, Calgary’s Mike Cammalleri delivered an even more flagrant shot to the head of the Blackhawks’ Martin Havlat. The Flames winger got two minutes for high-sticking, but no further punishment. Viewers may not have seen the difference between the two incidents, but the league did. Cammalleri’s a goal scorer, not a “repeat offender,” went the official reasoning, but the Carcillo hit came in the final period. “At the end of the game, that’s bullying,” Campbell told the CBC. “I like tough hockey, but it crosses the line.”

Continue…

They Listen To the Rap Music, Which Gives Them The Brain Damage…

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 11:51 PM - 3 Comments

A little late to blog about this, but I was reminded of it by Wyatt Cenac’s hilarious Cosby Show tribute on The Daily Show a few minutes ago (check it out on one of the umpteen million reruns on CTV and The Comedy Network): On the Today Show on Tuesday morning, May 19, there will be some kind of Cosby Show reunion. Not that there haven’t been others, but this is the 25th anniversary reunion and we all know that 25th anniversaries are completely different from 20th anniversaries.

The reputation of The Cosby Show has gone through some interesting twists and turns. Apart from arguments over the show’s representation of racial issues, there were a lot of arguments over whether it presented too idealized a version of family life. (Married With Children was originally supposed to be called “Not the Cosbys.”) It started as an attempt to reverse a particular TV stereotype of family life – the bumbling, well-meaning dad who doesn’t really know how to deal with his kids, a type of character represented by Michael Gross on Family Ties or Bryan Cranston on Malcolm in the Middle. By turning that around and starting from the assumption that parents usually know better than their children, Cosby challenged one TV stereotype but, as often happens, fell right into another one, making the parents so smart and know-it-all-ish that they could seem kind of unlikable — constantly insulting their kids, shooting them down, and refusing to explain their reasons for acting the way they did. It wasn’t new; Robert Young’s character on Father Knows Best was a complete know-it-all jackass most of the time. Still, there are so many doofus dads and sweet moms on TV these days that you have to figure that someone, somewhere, will return to the Cosby model of having parents who get the best of their kids. It can work in small doses; as I’ve mentioned before, the moment in the pilot where Cliff shoots down Theo’s sentimental speech (“Theo, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard”!) was the moment that turned Cosby into a hit, a cathartic response to decades of feel-good TV speeches.

That’s one reason that Cosby‘s reputation is higher now than it was when it went off the air; people are once again longing for a Cliff Huxtable and, maybe, even a Clair (though she still Continue…

What it takes

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 11:08 PM - 5 Comments

I took advantage of the long weekend to read Paul Tough‘s Whatever it Takes, his account of the evolution of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone into one of the most ambitious community development programmes in America. 

Canada’s central idea is that when it comes to fighting inner-city poverty, you have to start with the outcomes you want to achieve, and work backwards from there. Once you know what you want, then you have to do whatever it takes to get there. His goal is to see poor children, no matter how disadvantaged, grow into full participants in middle class life. To do that, he needs to get them through adolescence, into high school, and preferably graduating from college. And how do we do that?

The solution, in the end, is what he calls a “conveyor belt” of support programmes, parenting clases,  schools, and so on, all designed to provide the appropriate and necessary intervention at the point in the child’s life when it is most needed and most likely to succeed. And so he conceived the HCZ, an interlocking and overlapping series of programmes that will carry every child from birth to graduation, giving them every advantage that middle-class parents provide their own children as a matter of course.

Tough’s book is the distillation of four years of reporting he did on the HCZ, while working for the New York Times magazine. It traces the evolution of Canada’s efforts, narrating both the wonderful successes (such as the Baby College that teaches even the most inept and unprepared parents how to properly foster their child’s cognitive development) as well as the failures — the most heartbreaking of which is the summary expulsion of an underperforming class of eighth graders from his charter school, the Promise Academy. 

It’s a short book, but it deftly and unobtrusively braids together a number of touchy themes, including race,culture, poverty, class, educational theory, and philanthropy. If there is a single takeaway from  Geoffrey Canada’s experiment, it is that it is further confirmation that for interventions to work, the sooner they are implemented the better. If you want to help a child out of the poverty trap, you have to intervene preferably in infancy; by the time the kids get to kindergarten it is too late. 

Harlem is one of the most complicated, fascinating, and exasperating neighborhoods in North America. Geoffrey Canada is a remarkable man, and Paul Tough has written a small masterpiece about him and his community.

Reagan's paradise: Canada

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 7:13 PM - 90 Comments

Over at the Cato website, Chris Edwards is making sublime mischief with just about everybody’s head by arguing, persuasively, that if you really are a small-government conservative then Canada is starting to look a lot better than the United States. Today’s post:

Thomas Jefferson famously opined that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” but Canada has bucked that gloomy forecast in recent years. As my co-authored op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday showed, Canada has:

• Cut government spending
• Cut government debt
• Balanced its budget consistently
• Pre-funded its version of Social Security to make it solvent
• Decentralized power within its federation of provinces
• Cut taxes, particularly corporate taxes

Meanwhile, the United States has headed in the opposite direction in each of these policy areas.

The piece from yesterday that he mentions has charts that will make your brain melt.

Before everybody engages their comment-board autopilot, I should point out that almost every Canadian trend Edwards applauds was well underway before the current Canadian federal government was in place. So if you’re a Liberal who thinks this is awful news, you’re going to have to have some words with Jean Chrétien. And vice versa, sort of.

Toward a general theory of fascism

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 6:42 PM - 6 Comments

A new book claims the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, may have had more in common with Adolf Hitler than previously known – having one testicle.

link

Conrad Black has a date with the U.S. Supreme Court

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 5:28 PM - 6 Comments

Conrad Black, who has served 14 months of a six-and-a-half year sentence will have his appeal heard before the U.S. Supreme Court, it was announced Monday. The one-time newspaper baron is fighting to clear his name of the fraud and obstruction of justice conviction on the grounds that he and others did no harm to the company. Black already lost one appeal to a U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago in July of 2007—and many legal experts were skeptical that the highest court would be willing to review the case. Black’s lawyers believe they will be in front of the Supreme Court in November or December of this year and Black will have a final ruling by June of 2010. Black is currently in the Coleman minimum-security prison in Florida.

CBC

Wide world of sporting chicanery

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 4:39 PM - 5 Comments

From AP (via TPM):

The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.

Imagine his surprise

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 2:02 PM - 41 Comments

Mulroney’s apparent total naiveté about corrupt international business practices prior to “1996 or 1997″ is hard to understand.

Bribery and corruption in international business had been a matter of public knowledge since at least the 1970s. The Lockheed scandal — which exposed widespread use of bribery of public officials to win contracts in several European and Asian countries — led to passage of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977, prohibiting American companies from offering bribes overseas. Two decades of subsequent discussion culminated in adoption of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in 1997. (Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act was proclaimed in December 1998.) It is hard to believe that Mulroney would have heard nothing of this, whether as a lawyer, a successful businessman or in nine years as prime minister.

It is all the more remarkable in light of his own involvement, as prime minister, in the crusade against corruption’s kissin’ cousin, money laundering.

For example, Mulroney would have been an attendee at the 1989 G-7 summit in Paris, which created the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on Money Laundering. According to its website,

The Task Force was given the responsibility of examining money laundering techniques and trends, reviewing the action which had already been taken at a national or international level, and setting out the measures that still needed to be taken to combat money laundering. In April 1990, less than one year after its creation, the FATF issued a report containing a set of Forty Recommendations, which provide a comprehensive plan of action needed to fight against money laundering.

And it was the Mulroney government that first made money-laundering a crime in Canada in 1989, after similar legislation in the United States (1986) and Australia (1987). It was followed by passage of the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) Act (1991), which “required financial institutions to introduce a system to keep records and to identify clients in order to preserve financial trails for large financial transactions (over $10,000.)” The regulations went into effect in 1993 — a year that was also significant for another reason:

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the RCMP and the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) signed. This MOU called for voluntary reporting of all suspicous transactions that might indicate money laundering activities.

So if his government was taking all these vigorous steps to control the use of, inter alia, cash transactions to conceal evidence of crimes, how could he been so innocent of Schreiber’s possible motives for dealing in $1000 bills? And why was he personally so allergic to depositing the money in a bank account?

Fun With Time Slots

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Fox has announced its fall schedule (also its mid-season schedule, but they do that every year and every year, the announcement bears little resemblance to what the schedule winds up being). Apart from the over-exploitation of So You Think You Can Dance, which will start in the fall and have three hours devoted to it — two on Tuesday, one on Wednesday — and the decision to move Fringe to the more challenging Thursday time slot, the big news is that the renewed Dollhouse will continue on Fridays but its lead-in, Sarah Connor Chronicles, has been canceled. (Its ratings, Fox said, were trending in the wrong direction, and it was so expensive to produce that it couldn’t be saved with a Dollhouse-style budget cut.) Instead it will follow Fox’s only two half-hour comedies for the fall of 2009: the new show Brothers, starring Michael Strahan, the latest in a long line of NFL players trying their hand at TV, and the ironically unkillable ‘Til Death.

It’s a bizarre schedule, but since Dollhouse depends so heavily on DVR and online viewers — that is, people who don’t watch whatever comes before it on the network – the lead-in doesn’t matter as much as it otherwise would. Still, all in all, it’s an example of the downside of broadcasting only two hours a night, the way Fox does and the way NBC soon will, sort of (by turning over the 10 p.m. slot to Jay Leno). The upside is that there are fewer slots to fill and therefore fewer flops. The downside is that there is hardly anywhere to put a struggling drama; with no 10 o’clock slot, and with the 9 o’clock slots on any other night too valuable to be wasted on a low-rated show, a show like Dollhouse cannot really go anywhere except 9 p.m. on Fridays.

'This book had better be banned in the PMO'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 18, 2009 at 11:34 AM - 55 Comments

Robin Sears reviews Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis.

Following the revelation last Christmas of how many Canadians — starting with the Prime Minister — have a twisted understanding of how we choose our governments, some of the best minds in academe decided urgent therapy was in order. In less than three months — the speed of light in the academy — under the leadership of the venerable Peter Russell, they have assembled a powerful and lucid book of essays about how Canada’s Constitution really works.

The race for second-best

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 11:46 PM - 12 Comments

Cell-phone manufacturers line up for their shot at releasing an iPhone killer. Guess that’s because they have no chance of beating the real market leader. U.S. smartphone sales in May:

1. RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
2. Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
3. RIM BlackBerry Storm
4. RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
5. T-Mobile G1

In other news, I believe it’s been at least three weeks since the last Globe feature about trouble at RIM.

Snubwatch: Where did the end of the Cold War begin?

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 11:31 PM - 12 Comments

A fuss in Poland about a European Union video clip commemorating the end of the Cold War. Poland is mentioned at the beginning — Jaruzelski announcing martial law in 1981 — and that’s pretty much the end of that. No clips of Solidarnosc, no Pope. When things really start to hop in 1989, it’s portrayed as basically a Berlin thing.

I’m not well placed to judge the merits of all this. My hunch is that in other Central and East European countries, people wonder why Poles think the miracle didn’t happen in their countries too. I only note the depth of the hurt feelings here over something that, to many of us, must seem trivial — it’s a Youtube, after all — and point out the obvious reason: because what happened 20 years ago was a miracle. And it amazed everyone who lived through it. And they’d hate to see anyone forget it or overlook it.

These occasional “Snubwatch” features are funny, of course, as we look around the world (or closer to home) for groups or people who fret and worry that somebody’s disrespecting them. But try to imagine you’ve been working for something fundamental all your life. And one day, almost without warning, it happens. And everything changes. And years later you’re not sure anyone even noticed. It would be a strange feeling.

Lars Von Trier is The Antichrist

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 7:16 PM - 9 Comments

It has become a mantra. When I try to tell people what’s exciting about Cannes, and that it’s not all about the red carpet, the beach and rivers of champagne, I say something to the effect of: “We come here looking for something we’ve never seen before, something that will change cinema as we know it.” Well, be careful what you wish for. Danish bad boy Lars von Trier has made a habit of shocking audiences in Cannes, gleefully violating the film grammar and the women he casts to serve as his martyred objects of desire. Some of the results have been brilliant—notably Zentropa, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark.

But tonight we saw von Trier’s Antichrist, and this one goes beyond the pale. I think he’s just messing with our heads. It opens with a dreamy black-and-white, very slow-motion sequence of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg having sex in the bathroom while camera idly drifts over images of a baby monitor, mobiles circling above a crib, an adorable toddler climbing to freedom, reaching a widow ledge. . . The camera follows the child through fairyland snow all the way to his death, which coincides with Charlotte’s orgasm. I’d been warned the film was brutally violent. But this was a relatively tasteful, if perverse prelude, scored to a lovely soprano with harpsichord.

An hour went by without much happening, with Dafoe and Gainsbourg holed up in a summer cottage working through the grief. He plays therapist and she’s the patient. It was like a bad episode of In Treatment. And I was having trouble staying awake. I dreamt of being home, snuggled up on the couch watching In Treatment. Then bad things started to happen. Continue…

That's Strauss, as in the waltz

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 7:10 PM - 13 Comments

One of the thorniest issues raised by Brian Mulroney’s testimony is the question of what connection, if any, he had with Franz Josef Strauss, the late chairman of Airbus and noted benefactor of conservative politicians around the world — including Mulroney, as it happens. It was Strauss’s money that Karlheinz Schreiber contributed to the dump-Clark movement at the 1983 leadership review, paving the way for Mulroney to become Conservative leader and, a year later, Prime Minister.

Now, if Mulroney did know Strauss, it wouldn’t mean that he knew that Strauss had helped in his rise to the top. And even if he knew anything about that, it wouldn’t mean that he had anything to do with the Airbus deal. All the same, Mulroney was categorical in his 1996 examination: “I did not know Mr. Strauss myself, nor did I know any of his family.” No cup-of-cofffee equivocation here — this time it’s a flat denial:

Q: Is it not a fact that Franz Josef Strauss was the chairman of Airbus?
A: I have no idea.
Q: You have no idea of who Franz Josef Strauss is?
A: Oh, yes, I do.
Gérald Tremblay (one of Mulroney’s lawyers): The question is: “Is it not a fact that he was chairman of Airbus?”
A: I… I knew of Franz Josef Strauss; I didn’t know him personally, I never met him, but I knew of him as the Premier of Bavaria and as a Minister of Finance in the Federal Republic. I had no idea what his other occupations may be.

Yet his former appointments secretary, the self-described “gatekeeper” to his office, Pat MacAdam, tells a very different story. MacAdam has said or written on different occasions over a space of more than a decade — to William Kaplan in 1994, to the fifth estate in 1999, in his newspaper column in 2007– that Mulroney and Strauss were “old friends,” that Strauss was “a good friend of Mulroney’s [in] years gone by,” and that “Brian Mulroney was pretty thick with Franz Josef Strauss.”

Then there’s the question of Max Strauss, Franz Josef’s son, one of the family members Mulroney professes not to know. MacAdam is on record repeatedly saying that, before Mulroney became Prime Minister, Schreiber “used to show up with Strauss’s son,” that “the son used to call on him [Mulroney] as a courtesy call,” that Schreiber would “come in with Max Strauss … oh, maybe five, six, seven times a year.”

(CORRECTION: Beware of ellipses. A closer examination of the transcript of that 1999 interview suggests that “five, six, seven times a years” is a reference to the number of times MacAdam saw Schreiber, not the number of times Schreiber and Strauss visited Mulroney’s office together. On the other hand, MacAdam also says that Schreiber was “a close friend of Mr. Mulroney’s. They knew each other long before Mr. Mulroney became an MP and leader of the opposition. I don’t know where they met, maybe through the Strausses.”)

Now, MacAdam has said different things on other occasions. In 2001, he told the fifth estate that the younger Strauss visited only once, for 30 seconds. He also said he didn’t think Mulroney had ever met the senior Strauss.

At the Oliphant inquiry, under oath, he stuck to the “one visit” version with regard to Max. But he insisted, repeatedly, that Mulroney knew Franz Josef.

MS BROOKS: “Mulroney was pretty thick with Franz Josef Strauss.”
MR. MacADAM: I don’t know that. I know that they knew each other.

One of these gentlemen is clearly mistaken.