The judge isn’t buying it. Nor should we.

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

The word “inappropriate” appears literally dozens of times in the course of Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s report on Brian Mulroney’s dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber. It was inappropriate, the judge found, for Mulroney to have met so many times with Schreiber while he was prime minister and Schreiber was an unregistered lobbyist, inappropriate for him to have entered into business with him scant weeks after leaving office—and on the same file, the Bear Head project, for which Schreiber had been lobbying his government all those years—inappropriate to have taken payments from Schreiber in cash, inappropriate to have kept them in cash, inappropriate not to have deposited the money in a bank account, or leave any other record of the transaction, whether contracts, invoices, receipts, expenses, tax returns or even a decent thank-you note.

Well, no. “Inappropriate” would be the word if Mulroney and Schreiber had entered into a legitimate business arrangement—if Mulroney had never had any dealings with Schreiber before leaving office, or if the business had nothing to do with government, or if it were anything, really, that anyone could attest to or understand or even describe—but had kept no record of it and dealt only in cash and done everything else they could do to conceal it. Or “inappropriate” would perhaps serve if Schreiber, having had privileged access to Mulroney in office and having enjoyed such notable success at winning lucrative contracts from his government, had retained him immediately afterward for some sort of murky “professional services” agreement but at least had kept all the appropriate records and perhaps used the odd bank now and then.

But “inappropriate” does not begin to describe what went on here. Nor is it the judge’s most significant finding. Because Schreiber is not just a lobbyist, but a man with a long and distinguished career as an international arms dealer, whose cheerfully confessed modus operandi, when it came to winning government contracts in other countries, was to bribe the nearest politician. And the European manufacturers who hired him, in secret, to lobby the government of Canada did not just pay him a salary, as they did their in-house lobbyists, but agreed to pay him millions of dollars in commissions, prohibited under Canadian procurement rules, specifying that the agreements would become void in the event of a change of government. And while it has long been known that some of the millions Schreiber was paid, notably for winning the Air Canada contract for Airbus Industrie, went to Mulroney confidants, including his onetime fundraiser, Frank Moores, Judge Oliphant’s report is the first official finding that the money Schreiber paid Mulroney came from the same source (though there is no evidence that Mulroney knew this).

But even that’s not his most significant finding. It is not that Mulroney had done business with Schreiber, or that he made such strenuous efforts to conceal it. It is that he lied about it: lied to keep it a secret, certainly, but more tellingly lied after it was no longer a secret—notably in his testimony before the Oliphant inquiry. To be sure, the judge does not use such precise words. But on point after point, his meaning is unmistakable. He does not believe what Mulroney told him.

On his relationship, while still in office, with Schreiber: “Mr. Mulroney’s description of [it] as ‘peripheral’ is simply not in accord with the evidence I heard.” On how much Schreiber paid him, a point of some dispute between the two: “I have decided not to accept the evidence of either of them.” On what Mulroney did for the money: “I must view with skepticism Mr. Mulroney’s claim to have spoken to the leaders referred to . . . I am unable to conclude that Mr. Mulroney spoke to the Chinese leaders, as asserted by him . . . [I] question seriously the credibility of Mr. Mulroney’s testimony . . . I am not able to find that any services were ever provided by Mr. Mulroney for the monies paid to him by Mr. Schreiber pursuant to the retainer.” On Mulroney’s defence of his cash dealings as a mere error of judgment: “I confess to having a serious problem with that explanation . . . I found Mr. Mulroney’s evidence on this issue to be troubling at best and, at worst, not worthy of any credence.” On Mulroney’s decision to keep the money in cash, rather than deposit it in a bank: “I do not accept the reasons proffered by Mr. Mulroney.” And on and on.

I’ll just pause here and note: this is a former prime minister of Canada we are talking about. It would be extraordinary for any former prime minister of Canada to go before a legal proceeding of any kind and tell anything other than “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” But in the present case it is simply astonishing.