The Al-Mashat affair was about the fact that.... Raymond Chrétien's title was associate undersecretary of state for the Department of External Affairs—in other words, the second-in-command in external affairs. At that time, the deputy minister was called the undersecretary of state, and he was the associate undersecretary of state. My boss, and Joe Clark before her, were called the secretary of state.
As the second-in-command, Raymond Chrétien's job was to decide who went on what postings in the annual shuffling of the deck of foreign affairs diplomats. He was in charge of that, a very powerful guy. Mohammed Al-Mashat had been the Iraqi ambassador in Washington when Allan Gotlieb was the Canadian ambassador to Washington.
What did Al-Mashat do as the serving Iraqi ambassador when we were fighting Iraq in the Gulf War?
I can tell you what he did. He didn't apply through the normal channel that people use in our immigration system, which I believe now has a backlog of 2.4 million. He didn't apply through the normal channel. Mohammed Al-Mashat phoned his buddy Allan Gotlieb, and Allan Gotlieb gave him a little advice and said, “Hang on; let me talk to Raymond Chrétien.” This all came out in the parliamentary inquiry when ministers came and testified.
Allan Gotlieb phoned the second-in-command at the bureaucratic level, Raymond Chrétien, and said, “I've got this friend. He doesn't want to go back. He wants to stay here. He's a good guy. Can we get him into Canada as a landed immigrant?” Raymond Chrétien decides on a Friday afternoon at about five o'clock at night—because that's when these things happen in Ottawa, on Fridays at five o'clock—to send a memo up to the minister's office, to the departmental assistant to the minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, and also to the minister of immigration, Barbara McDougall, who at that time was my boss, because believe it or not, back then all of the people in the posts abroad who processed immigration applications were actually employees of external affairs, not employees of the department of immigration.
When this memo came up, my boss said, “Absolutely not”, and wrote in handwriting across the thing that as minister of immigration she would not approve this person to come into Canada.
I remember when the memo came up. When the memo came up in the office of the secretary of state of external affairs, Joe Clark, the minister was out of the country, as the minister often is in that role, and the minister's departmental assistant put it forward to the chief of staff, who sort of looked at it and just didn't think much of it and agreed with whatever the department said.
That's always a danger for political staff. As a warning to the folks behind us on both sides, don't always take everything that the department says as gospel and think that the motivations are always pure.
All of this was secret and wasn't known, and one month later there was a cabinet shuffle, in 1991, and Joe Clark was shuffled to intergovernmental affairs to deal with constitutional issues. You might remember Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accord from your history books.
My boss was shuffled to foreign affairs, and back then, the exempt staff went with the ministers. They didn't go home and wait for PMO to tell them if they had a job or not; they actually went with the ministers, so we were in external affairs. The department was doing its initial briefing and up comes this memo, approved on the Autopen, not by the minister. The staff probably know what the Autopen is; it's an automatic pen used to sign the minister's signature, but the minister doesn't actually sign. The memo approved Al-Mashat as a landed immigrant in Canada because he had gone, as Raymond Chrétien had arranged, to Belgium to apply to come to Canada from the United States.
He went to Belgium because Raymond Chrétien sent a memo to the head of immigration in Belgium and said, “I've got this friend I want to fast-track. I want to fast-track him into Canada. I would appreciate it if you would do it.” He did, because of course what else—