A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, and the Public Trust

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

In 1994, investigative journalist Stevie Cameron’s book On the Take
described Brian Mulroney’s government as one of the most corrupt and
self-serving in Canadian history, alleging that Canadians in high places
had helped themselves to public money. Later, Mulroney, accused of
taking kickbacks on the sale of Airbus jets, sued the Canadian
government and settled out of court. None of the people around him has
faced criminal charges, but neither has Stevie Cameron had to deal with
a lawsuit for libel. Was Mulroney as clean as he claimed? Was
Cameron’s journalism unbalanced?

Historian Jack Granatstein introduces author William Kaplan as a lawyer
and historian who had already written one book about the
scandal—Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the
Government of Canada (1998). In that book Kaplan exonerated Mulroney.
Despite Kaplan’s evidence, says Granatstein, most Canadians detested
the former prime minister with such passion that they found Presumed
Guilty less than credible.

Norman Spector, who served Mulroney both as chief of staff and as
ambassador to Israel, wrote an afterword for A Secret Trial in which he,
like Granatstein and Kaplan, criticized Cameron, who turned out to be an
RCMP informer. Yet Spector’s fascinating contribution is not
unmitigated praise for Mulroney. Spector notes that Mulroney did not
believe Canadians to be “generous and tolerant.” Spector found
Mila’s tastes extravagant, and he thought that Mulroney pandered to
the rich. He found it strange that Mulroney would appoint Conrad Black
and Charles Bronfman to the Privy Council, otherwise limited to cabinet
ministers and former cabinet ministers.

A Secret Trial is a partial correction to Presumed Guilty. Kaplan
subsequently discovered that Mulroney did receive $300,000 in cash from
Karl-Heinz Schreiber (the fixer of the Airbus scandal) shortly after he
left office and when he needed money to pay for his new Westmount home.
This was new information for Kaplan. “I had been duped,” says Kaplan
of his interviews with Mulroney when preparing Presumed Guilty. Conrad
Black’s National Post refused to publish the story of the money
uncovered by veteran reporter Philip Mathias. It may all have been
legal, but it was not very nice. The tale is here.