Saturday, December 08, 2007

How the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair Really Matters to Canada

There are many Canadians whose interest in the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair does not extend beyond the delicious anticipation of watching the 18th prime minister of Canada explain to a Parliamentary Committee why he accepted bags of cash which he took some time to declare as income.

The affair does have a much deeper importance, though, which is rooted in the way key decisions were made in Canada during the crucial decade of the 1980s. It was the decade when Canada signed on to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The FTA, and is successor NAFTA, drove a stake into the heart of Canadian democracy. Under the terms of these treaties, Canada was required to accord “national treatment” to U.S. firms, meaning that Canada could no longer discriminate in favour of domestic firms in its taxation and subsidy policies. Nor could Canada create new publicly owned firms to compete with U.S. corporations without paying out crippling financial compensation to them.

Moreover, the FTA took much of the control of the Canadian petroleum industry out of Canadian jurisdiction. It stipulated that Canada could not have a two-price system for its petroleum in which Americans would pay the world price for Canadian oil imports while Canadians would pay a lower price. And it committed Canada, at any given time, to sell at least as much petroleum to the U.S. as it had sold on average over the preceding three years, even if this were to mean petroleum shortages for eastern Canadians who were reliant on imported oil.

The Mulroney government made all these concessions to the Americans without gaining unfettered access to the U.S. market in return. American trade law remained in place alongside the FTA, allowing the U.S. to mount countervailing duties against Canadian exporters to protect U.S. producers---as the United States has repeatedly done in the case of softwood lumber.

What has all this to do with Karlheinz Schreiber?

We know that, acting on the instructions of his Bavarian masters, whose leader was Franz Joseph Strauss, Minister President of Bavaria and the dominant voice in the Christian Social Union, the fervently right-wing partner in German politics of the more moderate Christian Democratic Union, Schreiber helped finance the overthrow of Joe Clark as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

In 1983, the PCs held a federal convention in Winnipeg and a review of Clark’s leadership was on the agenda. Strauss and his CSU henchmen saw it as their role to support the rise to leadership of conservatives of their ilk in the right-wing parties of the West. In their eyes, Joe Clark was an old-fashioned conservative, a red-tory who was too firmly Canadian for the new era of globalization. As was revealed in 2001, on the CBC program, the Fifth Estate, Mr. Schreiber helped fund the effort to fly delegates to Winnipeg who would vote against the leadership of Joe Clark.

Schreiber explained that he gave money to Walter Wolf, a member of the group that was determined to dump Clark. Schreiber put it pithily: “It’s expensive to travel, right? For this is what Walter Wolf collected the money, and then get the people in which worked for you, and you paid their fare, and perhaps he said to you, they need some money for their wives, they want to go shopping, or whatever, for the hotels.”

When Clark received the support of 66.9 per cent of the delegates, short of the 70 per cent he felt he needed, he called on the party to convene a leadership convention, the convention at which Mulroney succeeded him as leader.

Schreiber and the Bavarians had played a role, quite likely decisive, in nudging the support to dump Clark above the thirty per cent level at Winnipeg. With Mulroney as PC leader and later as prime minister, Schreiber and his associates felt they had a man with whom they could come to understandings.

Franz Joseph Strauss, in addition to being the leader of the most right-wing brand of mainstream German politics in the post-war decades, was involved in the 1970s in the founding of Airbus, the European civilian aircraft manufacturer that challenged American Boeing for the multibillion dollar business involved in selling aircraft to the airlines of the whole world. Strauss became chairman of Airbus in the late 1980s and held that position until his death in 1988.

For the past several decades, the Europeans and the Americans have been fighting a no-holds-barred struggle to sell their respective aircraft to the world. The Europeans have subsidized and bribed their way to success, while the Americans have used Department of Defense contracts to buttress their national champion.

Both sides wanted to sell their planes to Air Canada. In 1988, government owned Air Canada signed a contract to purchase 34 Airbus A330s and A340s. Not only Boeing, but the U.S. government, was heartily annoyed by this victory for the European competitor. And the details of how this came about remain highly controversial.

What matters more than how the deal was or was not lubricated, is that during the 1980s, Canada was being put out of the business of fostering national industrial champions so that it could play in the big leagues. And this benefited both the Europeans and the Americans.

If the Europeans got the Airbus contract, the Americans got the FTA, with all its arrangements that made it impossible for Canada to support its own industries. While neo-con Canadian politicians from Mulroney to Harper sold the line to Canadians that governments should stay out of the marketplace, the Europeans and the Americans spent billions ensuring the success of their industrial champions, with all the employment, technological, strategic and sleazy benefits that went with that.

What mattered when Karlheinz, everyone’s favourite Christmas uncle, helped replace Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney, is that the door was opened to the globalization deals in Canada in the 1980s that helped shove this country down the global ladder to the position we occupy today as suppliers of oil sands oil to the Americans and greenhouse gas emissions to the planet.

What I can’t fathom are the media pundits whose line of analysis is that what went on in the 1980s was the bad old days of influence peddling and that all this has happily been put behind us. Are they kidding?

When Brian Mulroney came to power and made his deals, Canadian democracy was fundamentally weakened. We live today in the nether world of plutocracy, in which those with big money ensure that they get the arrangements that favour them. They twist arms, fight wars, educate economists to peddle their line, and yes, they bribe whenever and wherever it is necessary.

7 comments:

ken said...

On NAFTA the Liberals were no better than the Conservatives. Of course traditionally the Liberals were the continentalists and supporters of free trade.
In the 1993 election sensing the political backlash against NAFTA they campaigned on a policy of renegotiating but all they did was extend it!
http://www.vancol.com/history-of-nafta.cfm
Despite this many Canadian politicians have made peace with the agreement, including most of the governing Liberal Party of Canada, which campaigned in the 1993 election to renegotiate the teaty but then took no steps to do so and even signed an extension of the Free Trade Agreement (the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA) in 1994

Bill Bell said...

If these agreements "drove a stake into the heart of Canadian democracy" then it was already a pretty weak democracy in the first place. Thirty million passive spectators paying most of their attention to events occurring south of their country's border.

David Tough said...

The information about shreiber's role in dethroning Clark is pretty chilling. That whole period invites some interesting counter-factual reflections - like what would have happened had Clark run against Turner (or Trudeau) in 84. The shift to neo-liberalism/globalization wasn't just Mulroney's doing, of course. The Macdonald Commission report on free trade was obviously key, as was the pressure from Reagan, Thatcher, and the indigenous right (Fraser Institute, et al). But how Turner, Clark or Trudeau (or Broadbent!) would have reacted to it all that is interesting to think about.

Anonymous said...

This website sums it all up:

www.George-W-Harper.com

:)

Anonymous said...

I wish we could read more columns like this in the Toronto Star. Of course, I'd like to see them in any of the major dailies, but reality intrudes.

The media is a mess, no doubt. Otherwise, This would be bigger and logner-lasting news, rather than something to be found in blogs by progressives and on shows like TVO which are not standard fare for most.

I'm leery of the whole statesman Clark myth that leftists seem to be enamored of. Perhaps Clark would have slowed down Canada's march into the eagle's maw. Perhaps. I seem to recall that, along with Clark's impressive displays of erudition, there were the usual rightwing nostrums such as claiming we need tax cuts.

We just needed, and need, real choice in the electoral marketplace. But choice for us is not on, for which reason we see entrenched in Canada other anti-people tendencies such as governments that will not easily let us see into it's inner workings.

The people are the enemy - to minorities who possess power and privilege and who fear the unknown that resides within the possibility of people-power with it's potential for determining that what's necessary is a search for a an entirely new plan for society that works for everyone. It's sad how terrified of sharing and how hardened to the hardships of others, neighbors, our elites are.

Rick Battams

unknown fool said...

I wonder what Schreiber was really paying Mulroney for. He seems a little bit embarrassed... does not really come up with anything very convincing. What kind of service do people pay for in cash at clandestine meetings in hotel rooms?
As for Mulroney, perhaps he is also too embarrassed to mention it(and to declare the income).
What could it be?

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