Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As you know, I am not delighted to be in Ottawa today. That has to do with the snow and the weather, it is true, but it also has to do with the climate here. I left this city in 1996 after I resigned from the public service of Canada.
I resigned from the public service in circumstances eerily parallel to my brief but still-shining moment with Karlheinz Schreiber, with one significant difference. When presented with the facts, Mr. Mulroney did not hesitate to do the right thing and declare Bear Head dead.
In 1996, had my deputy ministerial colleague at Public Works stood up to the very same minister who was piling pressure on us at ACOA, he could have nipped in the bud what became the sponsorship scandal.
Regrettably, efforts by your public accounts committee to minimize these situations in future are being frustrated by the government, as Mr. Gomery reminded us on the second anniversary of his report and of our not-so-new government.
Canadians who have been following the Mulroney-Schreiber affair have been seeing how Canada really works. The story is one of lobbyists and lobbying and of the power of the Prime Minister and his office. It's also a story about the media.
I can't help wondering whether you'd have launched these hearings back in 2001, with Frank Moores still alive to testify, had the National Post not killed the story of Mr. Schreiber's cash payments—a story that flew in the face of everything we thought we knew when the government paid Mr. Mulroney $2.1 million to settle his defamation suit—or maybe three years and not three months ago, had William Kaplan been interviewed on Politics or on The House or on any of the other programs that routinely feature far less significant books than A Secret Trial.
Can you imagine a newspaper in Canada killing a sensational scoop about a former Prime Minister that is today on everyone's lips? Frankly, it still boggles the mind.
I warn you, don't get me started on journalism in your questions. I spend most of my time these days reviewing the daily press on my website, and it's not always a favourable review.
Today I'm here to assist you in two specific areas, first on the Bear Head project, the reason you summoned me to Ottawa to appear today.
In 1995, I gave the RCMP, at its request, a sworn statement about what I knew regarding Mr. Schreiber's Bear Head project.
As you know, Ottawa was brimming with lobbyists in the 1980s. Some of them made a lot of money. One of them, Fred Doucet, had extraordinary access to the Prime Minister's Office. After he left PMO, he would still bring visitors to the PM's office on the Hill, upstairs. These appointments were not on our schedule and were unknown to me, unless I happened to chance upon them. This extraordinary access may explain in part why Bear Head refused to die even after Mr. Mulroney killed it.
As I wrote recently in Le Devoir, I can also help you identify the sources of the large amounts of cash that were brought back to 24 Sussex Drive.
Frankly, some of my neighbours were scratching their heads when they heard that you had invited Mr. Mulroney's ex-chef to testify, but I guess it's understandable in light of the possibilities conjured up over the years by François Martin's vivid Upstairs, Downstairs gossip.
The documents I've brought today, including two I've not written about before, identify a more prosaic source of this cash. As you will see from these documents, Mr. Mulroney and his family had an expensive lifestyle, and one can understand why he would have been somewhat preoccupied by what life after politics would bring, and perhaps this explains why he seemed eager to cater to the rich and powerful, as I described in the Kaplan afterword with anecdotes, one of which has never been reported.
I urge you, however, to keep your eye on the ball and not to get distracted by the kind of stuff that fills Frank magazine.
Around the end of Mr. Mulroney's second term, Canada was rated the fifth least corrupt country by Transparency International. When Mr. Chrétien left office we were twelfth. At the end of the Paul Martin interregnum we were fourteenth, which means that this town has a bipartisan problem.
A better way to look at it is that it also has a bipartisan solution, in that two parties are not centrally implicated in this problem, not having formed government. Since 2006 Canada has climbed back to ninth place, but as news out of Public Works last week suggested, we have a long way to go to ensure that the best country in the world is also the least corrupt country in the world.
In contrast to the leadership shown by Paul Martin when sponsorships hit the fan, I have grave doubts that Mr. Harper wants Airbus answers, and I also doubt that the proposed public inquiry will uncover where $10 million in “Schreibergeld” ended up.
The darker possibilities were captured by a Mulroney cabinet minister visiting the splendid new home of the head of Earnscliffe, then a Tory lobby firm, it may surprise some of you to know. Why is it so much more lucrative, he asked, to know Harvey André than to be Harvey André?
You are here today, and I'm not out walking my dog gazing at trees in first blossom, because the RCMP botched its Airbus investigation. And I hope that in drafting your final report you'll examine the special prosecutor system designed by your former colleague, and your former colleague, the Honourable Stephen Owen, in British Columbia. Meanwhile, this wretched process is Canadians' best hope for getting to the bottom of the story that was ignored by members of Parliament and suppressed to a remarkable extent by remarkably large sections of the media for a remarkably long time.
As a semi-retired public servant, it would have been easy enough to say no and go on enjoying life in Victoria when Mr. Kaplan asked me to contribute an afterword to his book, A Secret Trial, Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron And The Public Trust . You've come to the table late, but late is better than never, unless, that is, it is simply to dine out on partisan politics.
You have all the powers you need, and Mr. Ménard and Mr. Comartin have already set the example.
If you're truly serious about getting to the truth, you'll not hesitate to subpoena tax and bank records or to invite Mr. Mulroney back to testify, and you'll start pressing the government to offer Mr. Schreiber a deal to spill the beans--if he has any to spill, that is.
Thank you for your attention.
