"Thank you,” Brian Mulroney said in his usual polite way when Karlheinz Schreiber passed over the large envelope containing $100,000 in cash. “Thank you very much.”
That first paragraph in A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust, William Kaplan’s second book about the former prime minister, is clear, succinct and significant. Would that the hundreds that follow met the same standard.
The information in it—that shortly after he left political office in 1993, Mulroney accepted a number of cash payments totalling $300,000 from a German Canadian wheeler-dealer—is not new. It was first unearthed four years ago by National Post reporter Philip Mathias, who tried vainly to persuade the Conrad Black–Izzy Asper–owned newspaper to publish it. Finally, it saw the light of day in November 2003 in one of a series of articles in The Globe and Mail written by Kaplan and various Globe staffers. These formed...
Peter Desbarats spent 30 years as a print and TV journalist before being appointed dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario. Now retired, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.
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