No one in their right mind would have volunteered for the job of the “special rapporteur” to chart a path through the tangled web of accusations, leaked intelligence reports, public controversy and political partisanship that surrounds allegations that agents of the Chinese state interfered in the two most recent federal elections.
Only a rare individual, someone with a commitment to public service so deep that they would set aside misgivings about accepting a job that has no job description, no terms of reference and no designated authority – “a fake position doing fake work,” as the leader of the opposition described it.
From what I know of him (and I’ve known him for many years), David Johnston, the former governor-general, is one of those special individuals who, whatever his misgivings – and he must have had some – would not refuse if ever his prime minister asked for help.
You will never meet a nicer person in public life than Johnston. At least, I haven’t. There is no pretense about him, no evidence of ego. He seems immune to the cynicism that infects people who stray too close to the political action.
But what, precisely, is Johnston meant to do? He is not an expert in matters of national security or intelligence services. His mission, baldly defined, is to extricate Prime Minister Trudeau from a crisis that is largely of his own making, and to advise him how he can prevent it from returning to bite him again.
Conservative MPs and other critics who would disqualify Johnston on the ground that he is too close to the Trudeaus to be impartial have a point, but the point misses the mark. Impartiality is not a requirement for this job. I think I understand Johnston’s code of public service. It goes like this: In a democracy, when the elected leader of the country asks a citizen for assistance that he or she is capable of rendering, the citizen had better have a darn good reason for not picking up the phone and an even better reason for declining to help.
Whether the leader and the citizen are family friends, wear the same political colours or have similar interests, is not relevant. I cannot imagine Stephen Harper and David Johnston enjoying a convivial pint after work. They are too different in too many ways. Yet when Harper called, Johnston answered.
Harper’s minority Conservative government was under siege from the opposition demanding that it establish an independent inquiry to reopen the Mulroney-era Airbus Scandal, replete with allegations of patronage and bribery, that had been festering just below the surface for nearly two decades.
By late 2007, the ubiquitous lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, who had been fighting deportation to Germany for 10 years, was singing his heart out to the Commons ethics committee about $20 million of schmiergelder, or grease money, that he said the European consortium Airbus Industrie had given him for distribution to “Canadian friends” to seal a deal in which Air Canada would buy its next fleet of passenger jets from Airbus (as it did) rather than from Boeing, its American rival. He confirmed he had given “my friend Brian,” as he called Mulroney, three envelopes, each containing $100,000 in $1,000 bills. But where had the rest of the $20 million gone? Schreiber tantalized the committee by dropping the names of cabinet ministers and Conservative party officials.
The RCMP was reportedly ready to lay criminal charges. Harper carried no brief for Mulroney, but he had no intention of being forced into an election in which Conservative corruption would inevitably be a central theme. He called David Johnston.
Johnston wrote terms of reference in 2008 that established a narrow-scope inquiry. The Oliphant Commission would look into recent disclosures about Schreiber, Mulroney and envelopes of cash, but it would not be authorized to look back, to investigate the murky cloud surrounding the Airbus purchase, or to probe where the grease money had gone. That, Johnston assured Harper, was “well-tilled ground.”
Trudeau’s situation is quite different. For one thing, he is the author of most of his misfortune. For all his talk of transparency and open government, he keeps his operations as opaque as he can. He would be in a better place today if he had been straightforward when he was first questioned about the leak of CSIS reports on the activities of Chinese agents, and if he had not stonewalled opposition demands for an independent inquiry.
He now says he will order an inquiry if the rapporteur recommends one, which Johnston would surely do. I suspect he has a plan – not to narrow the scope of this inquiry, but to shift attention beyond Chinese activities by writing broad terms of reference that would invite the chosen commissioner(s) to look into the political involvement of any and all foreign interests, to trace the source of dubious donations to candidates and other political players at all three levels of government, and to report on the obviously troubled relationship between Canada’s leaky intelligence services and their masters in the government.
There won’t be any “well-tilled ground” this time. Johnston was wrong about that in 2008.
The ground had barely been scratched. Three other Arbus customers, the United States, Britain and France, working together, kept tilling the ground; in 2020, they reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Airbus. The company agreed to pay penalties totalling $3.9 billion.
Canada didn’t get a dime of it, but it did get another seven years of Harper government.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com