Let us try and put the best face on Mulroney’s behaviour. Let us suppose there was nothing untoward in his relationship with Schreiber, that it was merely, as Mulroney claimed, a matter of bad optics: that he feared the harm to his reputation if it were known he had had any dealings, even legitimate ones, with Schreiber, after the publication of the Justice Department’s letter to the Swiss authorities, accusing him (without evidence) of having taken kickbacks from Schreiber on Airbus and other deals. Perhaps that explains, if not excuses, the lengths to which he was prepared to go to conceal his activities at the time.
But after the terrible secret had come to light? Mulroney had four years to prepare his story, from the time the existence of the cash payments first came to public knowledge until he finally broke his silence in 2007. He had two cracks at it, once before the Commons ethics committee and again before the judicial inquiry. It cannot be argued that he was caught unprepared, or quoted out of context. If he had an innocent explanation, this was it. And now a judge has officially torn it to shreds.
(To be fair, the judge did believe Mulroney on some other points: that he did not formally agree to do business with Schreiber while still prime minister, that their agreement was international rather than domestic in scope, that he spent the cash as he claimed. There’s your headline: “Former prime minister of Canada’s testimony found credible, in parts.”)
Judge Oliphant was particularly scathing on the subject of Mulroney’s testimony in deposition for his celebrated 1996 libel case against the government of Canada, in which he claimed, inter alia and under oath, that he “had never had any dealings” with Schreiber. Judge Oliphant not only found that Mulroney knowingly misled the court on that occasion, but dismissed his defence of the same testimony before the inquiry as no less tendentious. “For Mr. Mulroney to attempt to justify his failure to make disclosure in these circumstances by asserting that [the government lawyers] did not ask the correct question is, in my view, patently absurd . . . What the question called for was a clear, complete, forthright answer. And that answer was not forthcoming from Mr. Mulroney.”
Now, all of this was apparent enough before the report. But now we have, not a journalist, but a judge ruling that Mulroney’s story is not credible: that is, that a former prime minister of Canada lied to a judicial inquiry about his cash dealings shortly after leaving office with an acknowledged dispenser of bribes, who made millions of dollars from contracts obtained from his government, some of which was used to make the payments (though, again, there is no evidence Mulroney knew this).
But do not leave it at that. Because what is significant about this is not, surely, the fact that he lied, but the reason he did. Why would Mulroney go so far as to give false and misleading testimony before a judicial proceeding, not only to conceal his dealings with Schreiber, as in his libel trial, but even after they were exposed? We do not know the answer to that. But what we do know is this. The innocent explanation has now been discredited, thoroughly and officially. Which can only leave us with a not-so-innocent explanation.
When people carry on the way Mulroney and Schreiber did, it is not merely “inappropriate”: it is suspicious. And when, called to account, they still lie about it, well, even suspicious isn’t quite the word.
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