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Canada
We demand better scandals!
A former Prime Minister trying to keep his credit cards working? It’s so low
By Jose Rodriguez
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Among the stranger allegations flowing out of the very strange revelations involving Brian Mulroney and Karl Heinz Schreiber is the one that has the Prime Minister, in his waning days in office, feeling as though he is so broke, he is desperate for the $100,000, or $300,000, or $500,000 (depending on who we believe) he can finesse out of Schreiber.
Newspaper reports tried to corroborate the allegation by dredging up the memory of the Mulroney’s, Mila and Brian, trying to sell furniture out the back door of 24 Sussex, furniture belonging to the government. That reminded us of the security camera shots of Conrad Black huffing boxes out the back door of his office just ahead of the arrival of investigators.
Unless he had habits we don’t know about, Mulroney wasn’t broke in any sense of the word an ordinary Canadian would recognize. Paycheques for a Prime Minister are not ungenerous. And he had well-paying board appointments beckoning, including most lavishly at Quebecor. The allegations therefore came with the speculation that Mila’s shopping habits and Brian’s dining habits were of an order on which a pretty big income would still be regarded as being broke.
Nonetheless, the image of a Prime Minister scamming to cover off bills, something usually associated with lower-rung used car dealers and Howe Street gold-mine hucksters, strikes hard at the national identity and psyche. The effect is potentially as altering to Canadian self-image as the ongoing destruction of the RCMP icon. Canadians have always taken for granted that, in general, ours is an uncorrupted political elite in which leaders may be misguided in their policy choices but are nonetheless surely concerned for the public good most of the time.
To learn that in fact not only are the biggest stars in the firmament thoroughly corrupted, but are corrupted on such a base and unromantic level, is terribly deflating. To find a Prime Minister worried about his personal finances and pulling off badly conceived frauds for relatively small amounts of money lowers the image of that high office too much. If we must have corruption in high places, could it not at least be complicated and high-end corruption? Could it not be ideologically motivated out of a sense of history, or at least corruption involving more staggering amounts of money, like hundreds of millions instead of just mere hundreds of thousands?
No it isn’t. It’s small time crime completely off the map where the likes of Sukarno, Marcos, the Shah and Noriega appear. Our high-level corruption is small time and simple, like so much else in Canada. The former Prime Minister comes off like a goof staring at his maxed out credit cards like the rest of us and coming up with our kind of stupid hare-brained schemes to make his minimum payments.
What this country needs is a better class of criminals. If we must suffer the indignity of learning that our elites are corrupted like those in every other country in the world, could we not at least discover that they are corrupted in interesting and audacious ways? The British have their guys dressed up in school-girl outfits whipped by dominatrixes, the Americans have their neo-cons selling guns and cocaine to enemies to fight imagined religious wars. What do we have? Idiots taking small-time bribes they don’t even deliver on trying to keep their credit cards from declining at the restaurant.
It’s like finding out your own father had been leading a mysterious double life—only to learn his other life was being an accountant.
Boring! The people demand way better entertainment in our political scandals. Harper, are you listening?
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