Schreiber time

If the Commons ethics committee’s interrogation of Karlheinz Schreiber yielded some startling revelations -- and it did -- it was not any doing of the committee’s: Schreiber toyed with them. Conversely, if the committee members were made to look like fools -- and they were -- it was not any of Schreiber’s doing. They saw to that quite well enough on their own....The committee, especially its chairman, Liberal Paul Szabo, appeared to be making it up as they went along: unsure how to proceed, unclear what powers they possessed to compel evidence, unwilling to use the powers they had. In consequence, Schreiber was left to decide for himself which questions he would or would not answer, at some times claiming he could not answer even the simplest questions without having access to his personal papers, at other times answering expansively from memory, more or less as the mood took him. The most rebuke that Schreiber received from the chairman was an adomition not to say that he “refused” to answer, but rather that he was not “prepared” to.

Nevertheless, he did deign to provide some answers, offering the committee tantalizing hints of what he promised was to come. There were several fresh allegations, of which the most explosive involved, not Schreiber’s dealings with Brian Mulroney, but Mulroney’s with Stephen Harper. Towards the end of his testimony, Schreiber claimed that Mulroney told him that Harper, at their now-famous Harrington Lake meeting in the summer of 2006, had given him some assurance the government would hold off on Schreiber’s extradition, Mulroney having first provided him with a letter from Schreiber purporting to show that they were on good terms.

Here’s the relevent section of his testimony, as best I could transcribe it. What did Mulroney promise he would do with the letter, he was asked. To take it to Harper, Schreiber answered. And what was the outcome of their meeting? “The outcome was the message was very well received.” There were no guarantees, he was told, and the courts would have to deal with the matter first, but after that the Justice minister, then Vic Toews, would look into it and “do the right thing.”

Anyway, nothing came of it; Mulroney, he concluded, had lied to him. It was “a shock,” he said, to hear Harper deny on television that he and Mulroney had had any discussions about Schreiber. Even Elmer MacKay, the former solicitor general and a friend to both Mulroney and Schreiber who apparently helped draft the letter, was “set up.”

There are many possibilities here. Maybe Schreiber’s telling the truth, and Mulroney did indeed lie to him. Maybe Mulroney never showed Harper the letter; maybe he did and Harper rebuffed him. Or maybe Mulroney thought they had a deal, when they didn’t. Maybe Harper lied to him. Maybe Harper’s lying now. Or maybe Schreiber’s making the whole thing up.

But if there were such a deal we would have a serious problem on our hands. That Mulroney was anxious to obtain such a letter is suggested by MacKay’s involvement. That Harper might wish to be reassured that Schreiber had patched things up with Mulroney is also plausible: we already knew by then about the $300,000 in cash, and it wouldn’t do to have Schreiber launching fresh accusations at the former Prime Minister. But that he would offer that the minister of justice would stay his extradition? It can’t be true.

Indeed, it's hard to square any of this with the government’s evident eagerness to pack Schreiber off to Germany at the first opportunity. But that has raised questions of its own, notably the current Justice minister’s repeated insistence in Parliament that he had no power to delay Schreiber’s extradition, just a day before offering to do just that.

Other allegations:

- that the agreement with Mulroney, which Schreiber affirmed again under oath was sealed at Harrington Lake on June 23, 1993, two days before Mulroney stpped down as PM, contemplated payments of $500,000, not $300,000. But that could perhaps have been deduced already, since it was known that Schreiber transferred $500,000 that summer into the famous “Britan” account in his favourite Swiss bank.

- that his friendship with Mulroney fell apart when he learned that Mulroney had personally killed his treasured Bear Head project, a scheme to build light armoured vehicles in Cape Breton for which Schreiber had long lobbied -- and for which he received $4 million in secret commissions from Thyssen Industries. “When I learned this was true I got so mad,” he testified. He said he and everyone involved in the project “felt like crooks to Thyssen,” having been paid on the understanding, which he said Mulroney had encouraged, that the project was a go.

All of this, as I say, was offered up at Schreiber’s whim. The questioning was haphazard and scattershot, with little in the way of followup -- there was nothing you would call a “line” of questioning. Deference was the order of the day: Schreiber was repeatedly promised the committee’s full cooperation in obtaining his precious papers. Here’s an idea: how about the committee just subpoenas them? How about requiring Schreiber’s cooperation, rather than the other way around?

I rather doubt that a witness before a Congressional committee would be allowed to play such games. At one point Schreiber was accused of “taking the fifth,” as witnesses in the US are known to do. If only that’s all it was. It’s one thing to invoke a constitutionally guaranteed protection against self-incrimination to avoid testifying. It’s quite another just to shrug that it’s inconvenient.