Interesting Canadians?
Edmund Wilson wrote in the 60s that to many Americans, Canadians are exotic, without being interesting.
In that spirit, I will suggest that Conrad Black is the one and only interesting Canadian these days--and even he is not all that interesting. (I suppose there should be a special category for celebrities like Avril Lavigne, Shania Twain and Celine Dion.) (Update: arguably both Mike Myers and Jim Carrey are more interesting than the divas; back to our story).
Slate has taken up the new saga. Black apparently (perhaps I should say allegedly) has used a fairly widely owned company to funnel money to himself and a few close associates--profiting the few rather than the many who have invested and trusted him.
The best line is actually from a couple of years ago: "'For 30 years, Conrad Black has been Canada's most extraordinary businessman,' said David Plotz in this 2001 Assessment. 'For U.S. readers who've never heard of him, this is the same as saying: Conrad Black is the world's tallest midget.'"
Black has always liked to portray himself as an extremely successful businessman who is also a man of letters, and probably some kind of all-round gentleman or lord. He has literally fought, and even given up his Canadian citizenship, in order to get into the House of Lords. Yes, that one. God knows why. He said at the time it was a privilege to join the greatest debating body in the world, or something. Huh?
He grew up with some money, and had some success for a while in making more. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto--what Americans might call a prep school associated with old money--but he was kicked out, as he admitted in his memoirs, for cheating. (The details are recounted in a biography here.)
There are now suggestions that he has never been all that successful at business. His standard procedure may have been to gain control of a business that generated cash, keep a lot of the cash, and then move on. This is different from actually growing a company, which might profit investors and shareholders in general. His major assets have lagged behind the main stock market indicators for some time.
For more on the high and low points of Black's career, see here.
As for the man of letters, I for one intend to read his book on Duplessis (premier of Quebec in the 50s, when the "Quiet Revolution" was just getting started)--some day. The new book on FDR may also be interesting--and obviously, not only to Canadian history buffs.
Update: I probably should have mentioned before that Black, while he owned Southam newspapers in Canada, founded the National Post in Toronto. This paper has been a huge money-loser, but I suppose all readers must be grateful for its existence. (I was a charter subscriber, and I have the acrylic paperweight to prove it). At the beginning the paper emphasized a kind of literary tone, small print, lots of facts and argument, and fairly often, it was actually witty. It praised the U.S. and decried problems in Canada. The joke soon circulated that the typical headline and/or editorial was: "Canada Sucks."
What makes this less funny now is that Black has somehow become the most crawling kind of Anglophile--maybe worse than Max Beaverbrook, another Canadian newspaper proprietor who became a Lord. Meanwhile, David Frum, one of the main "intellectuals" at the Post, has become more or less an American.
By the same sort of standard: is Brian Mulroney interesting?
Alas, no. But the Globe and Mail gave major coverage in recent weeks to yet another "Airbus" story. Briefly: one enterprising reporter named Stevie Cameron has been convinced for years that Mulroney as Prime Minister was "on the take"--she actually used that phrase as the title of a book on Mulroney. She thought the deal Air Canada made to purchase Airbus planes from Europe, instead of Boeing planes, would provide the proof she was looking for. But: there really never was any proof.
Partly or largely because of her efforts, some members of the RCMP became convinced there must be some fire at the source of all the smoke, so they have investigated for years. In one case they wrote to Switzerland, saying they wanted to see some bank records partly because Mulroney had been part of a criminal conspiracy. That's right, they didn't just say "alleged." This led to a big law suit, which Mulroney won.
Bizarrely, there has been another court case grinding on more recently--this one involving helicopters. One character who is in both stories is Karlheinz Schreiber. There seems little doubt that this guy is a dubious character. Cameron and others have probably proved that he was willing to put government deals together corruptly, with bribes being paid, that Mulroney's old friend Frank Moores loved to portray himself as a big-time lobbyist who could deliver a deal with the PM, and that Mulroney, like Richard Nixon, liked being in private conversations where there was cynical laughter about such deals.
In the recent stories, there is lots of testimony from other politicians that they knew Schreiber was bad news, and they wouldn't even have lunch with him, or let their staffs meet him.
And yet, it now turns out that as soon as Mulroney left office, he took a contract with Schreiber worth $300,000. This was supposedly to help a pasta business do its strategic planning, or whatever the jargon is now. Nothing to do with helicopters or jets. And yet, no one thinks Schreiber would hand over this money for nothing.
My brother e-mailed me and asked: have Canadians done an injustice to Mulroney, in thinking he's crooked, or to Cameron in thinking she has given up her career for a crazed vendetta, and become a kind of ersatz cop?
I don't know.
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