A tale of two books and one former prime minister

19 September 2005

The Globe and Mail

A17

No one was more nonplussed than I was to find Brian Mulroney splashed across the front page of The Globe and Mail last Monday. After lunching with Peter Newman a year ago, I had been left with the impression that his book on my former boss had fallen victim to a dispute over the terms of their agreement.

Perhaps, having managed on all but one occasion to avoid Mr. Newman's perilous tape recorder, I was not sufficiently engaged in the conversation. In retrospect, I should have been more inquisitive when he confided — in rather salty language, I might add —that with a number of ex-wives to support, he needed to write to live.

That said, I'd be the last to criticize him for putting the tapes — which capture the less attractive side of the Brian Mulroney I got to know over six years and, in many ways, came to respect — on the historical record. Mr. Mulroney is not the first politician who has tried to seduce a journalist; more troubling than Mr. Newman — who played along long enough to get the story — are those journalists who stay seduced.

Based on personal experience, I can also understand why Mr. Newman and his publishers scrupulously kept their plans secret. Two years ago, when I agreed to write an afterword to William Kaplan's sequel on the Airbus affair (a book in which I have no financial interest), little did I imagine the pre-emptive pressures that top-flight and well-connected lawyers could put on publishers.

Under threat of legal action, McGill-Queen's University Press agreed to change the title after the publicity material had already been distributed. Liar, Liar became A Secret Trial. And when the former prime minister's lawyer made known his unhappiness about the book — partly about $300,000 in cash payments Mr. Mulroney received after leaving office from German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber — the publisher also had to go to considerable expense in having the book re-lawyered. As a result, a further round of changes was made at the last minute.

Then, by agreement, a copy of the book was delivered to Mr. Mulroney three days before it was shipped to bookstores. Fortunately, no application for an injunction under Quebec's laws ensued. However, for some reason, McGill-Queen's University Press subsequently made no effort to market the book.

Round about that time, a number of other strange things happened. The Toronto Star's book editor told one prospective reviewer the paper would not touch A Secret Trial with a barge pole. Over at the CBC, Mr. Kaplan was not interviewed on a single one of the public broadcaster's radio or television programs. One prominent host, who's never struck me as a simpleton, later told me that the issue was just too complicated for listeners. Tellingly, with Mr. Mulroney's lawyers nipping at its heels, the CBC decided to delay broadcasting its own documentary on Airbus last March. A senior Ottawa columnist eventually confided to me that most of his colleagues were searching for excuses not to write about the book. And so it came to pass that, as Andrew Coyne wrote in the National Post, “The book of the year is also, curiously, the least noticed.”

With this background, you'll understand why I believe Mr. Newman and his publishers were wise to pre-empt any interference with their book. In his case, the stakes were financial and historical. With William Kaplan's A Secret Trial, the public interest was also involved.

We know that Mr. Schreiber received $20-million in commissions for Air Canada's purchase of Airbus planes. We know he was wise enough to engage lobbyists and form friendships on both sides of the political street. And we know that the Airbus affair is one factor in Canada's declining ranking in Transparency International's corruption index.

Mr. Schreiber has twice offered to tell all — where all the money ended up, that is — in return for not being extradited to Germany to face tax and corruption charges. On both occasions he has been rebuffed.

The offer, I understand, remains on the table. It's difficult to understand why the current government in Ottawa would not take it up.

nspector@globeandmail.ca