He destroyed himself. Nobody did it to him. He was simply asked, respectfully, to explain himself. And he could not. If the former prime minister of Canada is now widely suspected of corruption, it’s all his own work.
Brian Mulroney was not on trial before the Oliphant inquiry, nor was the commission counsel, Richard Wolson, his prosecutor. Wolson’s job was simply to test the witness’s story, to see how well it stood up: whether there was any evidence to support it; whether it conflicted with others’; whether there were any internal inconsistencies. But mostly it was to let the witness tell his story. And the more Mulroney talked, the less believable he became.
Indeed, his story started to fall apart under questioning from his own lawyer, in his first two days on the stand. He started by expressing his regret. Was it for taking three payments totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber, a notorious international arms dealer and self-admitted briber of politicians? For failing to keep any record of these dealings—no invoices, no receipts, no expenses, no bank accounts, and no tax returns, or none until six years afterwards? For telling a court, in examination for his celebrated 1996 libel suit against the government of Canada, that his relationship with Schreiber amounted to “a cup of coffee . . . once or twice”?
Not as such: it was for the “circumstances” surrounding these “inadequately documented arrangements,” which gave rise to “suspicions as to their propriety.” For the rest, he offered no apology, and no explanation. Or none that made any sense. The reason he had tried to keep the whole business a secret, he maintained, was because of the “enormity” of having been accused of taking kickbacks from Schreiber in a 1995 letter from the Justice Department seeking access to Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts. The experience had so “scarred” him, he said, that “it explains my conduct in trying to keep private the private commercial contract I entered into after I left office.” He was convinced that, had his dealings with Schreiber come to light, they would have further inflamed the speculation and “innuendo” surrounding him.
That may explain why he did not tell anyone about it in 1995, or at any time from then until 2003, when the story of his dealings with Schreiber first broke. It doesn’t explain why he was acting so furtively in 1993—dealing in cash, keeping no records, not declaring the income, not even telling his own accountant. At that time, no one knew about Schreiber, or the $20 million in secret commissions he’d been paid by Airbus to deliver a $1.8-billion sale of 34 aircraft to Air Canada. By Mulroney’s own account, he knew Schreiber then only as a respectable businessman. So why the cloak-and-dagger act at that time?
Nor does it explain why, to this day, he has failed to give a convincing explanation of what he did for the money, or why he was paid in cash, or why he kept it in cash, or what he was doing having dealings with a man like Schreiber. Mulroney has had six years to come up with a good explanation. He was given six days on the witness stand at the Oliphant inquiry—two with his own lawyer, four under Wolson’s cross-examination. And yet he failed to deliver. It isn’t that he did not perform well: in its own way, it had a certain magnificence. It’s just that he hasn’t got a good story to tell. And so, under oath, he told the inquiry, and the Canadian people, the only story he had. The one that doesn’t stand up.
It isn’t just weak on this point or that. It rings false in just about every respect. His story is improbable, implausible, inconsistent, unsupported by a single document, almost entirely uncorroborated—and contradicted on point after point by people in a position to know the facts. And the more he attempts to rationalize these multiple inconsistencies, the more improbable his story becomes. Where it’s his word against another’s, he denies the exchange took place. Where there are documents to support the other’s account, he has no recollection of them. Where he appears to have given false testimony, it was said in a particular context. Where he contradicts himself, his previous statement was a mistake. Where his own spokesman contradicts him, he was mistaken. And when he can’t do anything else, when he can’t deny, or forget, or fudge, or otherwise explain away incriminating bits of evidence, when we get right down to the rock bottom fact that he took the cash—well, you see, it was an “error of judgment.”
The rest is bitter denunciations of his critics, irrelevant anecdotes about his childhood, long defences of his record, flagrant appeals for pity, attempts to be charming, endless repetition of the same points, the odd tear, the occasional smear. For long stretches during his testimony, you got the feeling that he was trying to talk out the clock. For the rest, he gave every sign of making it up as he went along.
