Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife, and Her Money

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University, is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century and Prime Ministers: Ranking

Some authors have an uncanny knack for selling books, and Stevie Cameron
obviously falls into that category. Her vicious attack on Brian Mulroney
and his government, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the
Mulroney Years (1994), sold like hotcakes as every Canadian who detested
the Tories, the Free Trade Agreement, the GST, and Brian Mulroney’s
many pairs of Guccis bought a copy and seemingly believed every word.
Cameron’s arguments and bonafides have been more than slightly
deflated by author William Kaplan’s study of the Airbus affair, but
clearly that doesn’t faze either the author or her public. How else
can one explain the success of Blue Trust, a study of an obscure lawyer,
Bruce Verchere, and his marital and extramarital misadventures? Oh,
there is one point—Verchere was Brian Mulroney’s lawyer, and while
there is not a shred of evidence that anything untoward happened, there
is here a good deal of nudge, nudge, wink, wink to imply that something
must have been going on.

What we have here is a sad story about a lawyer who made a good
marriage and then fell in love with novelist Arthur Hailey’s daughter.
This is a personal tragedy of a type not unknown to many. Why it
deserves to be exposed in this way is unclear. This reader can only
conclude that Cameron had a contract to write yet another Mulroney
exposé, found nothing, but delivered her manuscript nonetheless.
Amazingly, it sold, proving that brand-name authors sell even when they
cannot deliver.