On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s.

This best-selling book, much praised and much denounced, is a superbly
researched tale of “crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney
years.” Journalist Stevie Cameron and her researchers have dug into
the dung heap erected by the Mulroney government between 1984 and 1993,
and they have uncovered enough that smells to more than justify the
book’s title.

Swept into power twice with massive victories, Brian Mulroney was never
much liked by the people who mistrusted his too-obvious interest in
feathering his own family nest. The stories are all here—Guccis,
lavish trips and parties, and an avaricious wife—and the mind reels to
see the detail presented in concentrated form. Then there are the real
scandals, the contracts to friends who peddled influence and Oerlikons,
computer systems and military bases to the highest bidders. Their
rewards? Patronage appointments to parole boards, citizenship courts,
the Senate, and the Bench. A dung heap indeed.

Yet there is no smoking gun, nothing that catches Mulroney himself with
his hand in the till. Cameron suggests strongly that he connived at and
tolerated what his friends did; that he himself profited, other than in
the perks he took and the trappings of office in which he wallowed, is
unproven. Does that weaken the case? Not at all. The virtue of
Cameron’s book is that it presents such a mass of detail and
demonstrates such a pattern of greed, that no one can doubt
Mulroney—even if he had turned a blind eye to what was going on—is
culpable. In effect, the best one can say is that Mulroney was a
Canadian Warren Harding; the suspicion persists, however, even if
Cameron could not catch him in the act, that the better analogy is to
Spiro Agnew.