Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  I was interested in ending the double stalemate with the two major Persian Gulf powers, Iran and Iraq, whose combined animosity to the West (just about all they could agree on) made it almost impossible to exercise any influence in the area. I also thought it would be useful to give the masses of an important Arab country a taste of power-sharing, if not perfect democracy. Saddam Hussein was an enthusiastic terrorist supporter in Israel and Palestine, and I was not especially concerned with weapons of mass destruction, as they could be eliminated without the drastic step of occupying the entire country.

  At the time of the invasion of Iraq, I never imagined that the United States would disband the Iraqi armed forces and police, hurling four hundred thousand people into unemployment while leaving them their weapons and munitions, hoping they would all become quail hunters or target-shooting enthusiasts; this was arguably, along with failing to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War, the greatest military blunder in U.S. history. Nor did I imagine that the United States would for a long time prove so inept at the manipulation of local factions. Nor that there would be such inadequate attention paid to protecting, among other sites, Iraq’s electric generators, oil pipelines, and museums. (Of course, I also didn’t imagine, and could not have conceived, that the United States would persecute me half to death either.)

  By expanding its annual current account deficit to $800 billion and by stranding almost its entire conventional ground forces capability in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has reduced its influence in the world. If weakening the country was the aim of the French and Russians, instead of obstructing the United States in Iraq, they should have urged it forward vigorously.

  For urging Canada to compete with the United States and take an imaginative role in reorienting the Western alliance, I was widely portrayed as an unpatriotic Canadian. For urging upon Britain a course that would preserve British identity and maximize Britain’s advantages as vital to both Europe and America, I was reviled – by ultra-skeptic Enoch Powell and Euro-joiner Edward Heath, with both of whom I was reasonably cordial – as an American Trojan horse and by European commentators as a CIA parrot screeching at Europe from an ill-gotten gilded cage on Fleet Street. And in Israel, where we eventually moved the Post back from the Jabotinskyan inflexibility of David Bar-Illan to the pragmatic realism of Bret Stephens (now one of the Wall Street Journal’s writers), I was, like so many sober voices indigenous to the country, caught in the crossfire between the hardened factions pursuing peace or security, the one virtually to the exclusion of the other, when they are in fact ultimately inseparable.

  My only serious political objective in the United Kingdom was to resist Euro-integration until Britain would not be trading the institutions that have served it well for centuries for inferior ones, would not be going back to pre-Thatcher tax levels and industrial relations, and would not be subsuming its relations with the United States into the relations of France and Germany with that country. Chancellor Kohl professed to find those criteria reasonable during our conversations. My brief period of modest influence in British public policy did not end as I would have wished, but my only serious public policy objective was embraced by a majority of Britons. I no longer have any standing, but I did what I could.

  I have referred to my contacts with a number of leaders of several countries. The only request I have ever made of any government, apart from supplementing our requests for zoning changes in Chicago when we were building a new printing facility and redeveloping our office site there, was when I asked the incoming Harris government in Ontario not to impose compulsory helmets on adult bicyclers in the parks system. The new premier made an exemption in his order-in-council that has enabled me to continue my leisurely rides through the parks near my house in Toronto without putting on the airs of a Tour de France contestant. This is not much to show for millions of dollars of contributions and a great deal of editorial support and advocacy, but it is all I ever actually asked or specifically wanted.

  * A clarifying word about corporate governance: I personally took the telephone calls and replied to the letters and questions of doughty individuals, no matter how small their shareholdings and no matter how obscure or eccentric their concerns. I considered that anyone who had invested in our company was entitled to access to me. I was happy to do this and usually enjoyed the contact, especially in Britain and Australia, where such activist shareholders tended to be rather colourful. My objections were to corporate guerrilla war waged by well-oiled institutional bully-boys, holding hands with their fellow raptors in violation of the spirit of the securities rules, though their antics were generally and deliberately overlooked by the SEC, and using other peoples’ money to masquerade as champions of the odd-lot shareholders. Almost equally nauseating were those piously hypocritical executives who appeased them and substituted richly compensated self-abasement for industrialism and serious management.

  [CHAPTER THREE]

  IN 2000, NATIONAL POST EDITOR Ken Whyte was having a grand time badgering Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Chrétien was formerly a 25 per cent owner of a golf club with an adjoining hotel that had received federal government assistance. As scandals go, this never seemed to me like a particularly promising one; however, Chrétien and his entourage added to their woes by allowing suspicious aspects of the problem to fester while trying to deter any official or journalistic research into the controversy. This was catnip to Whyte, an honest and straightforward man of the Prairies, apparently unaware of the traditional dangers of affronting a Quebec prime minister. (Premier Duplessis had tried to shut off newsprint supply to opposition newspapers, among other unsportsmanlike actions.)

  Chrétien telephoned me about this matter several times and wrote an extensive letter, which we published prominently and without comment, although it contained a number of obvious inaccuracies. Whyte’s badgering was excessive, but then Chrétien’s shabby one-party rule was depressing. In the last hundred years, Canada’s Liberals had won twenty-five elections plus one draw, out of thirty-four. The Opposition Progressive Conservatives were crumbling into oblivion, their party already riven into ideological and geographical factions.

  I was one of many people before whom Chrétien dangled the possibility of being Governor General when Roméo Leblanc was retiring from that position in 2000. I did not think Chrétien was serious – and I had no interest in the position, for which I had little aptitude – but that was the high water mark of our long but desultory relationship. Of late, all I had heard were Chrétien’s rather bitter complaints about the National Post and what he regarded as unflattering photographs of him in other Southam newspapers. There was a tinge of a threat in his comments. He reminded me, and not very obliquely, that federally Canada was effectively a one-party state.

  By then, I had been based in the U.K. for fourteen years. As a peerage would normally go at some point to whoever was proprietor of the Telegraph ex officio, it was fairly clear that the British House of Lords was my opportunity to take part in public life. I had no illusions that I could achieve elected office. Principle and pride prohibited me from seeking a peerage, but when William Hague, John Major’s successor as opposition leader, called me to ask if I would accept one in 1998, I was delighted. The House of Lords is a junior legislative chamber, but the quality of its membership is high and that of its debates often very high. It was not so much the title that interested me, but the window, however modest, on a fascinating time in British history. Whether Britain entered Europe entirely or remained close to both Europe and the United States was one of the great strategic questions in the world, and I wanted to have a say in that debate.

  I asked the Toronto law firm Tory & Tory if a Canadian citizen could accept the peerage. They felt there was no need to consult Canada, since what was being proposed was an honour of the United Kingdom, for which a Canadian citizen is eligible, for services rendered in the United Kingdom. I gave their opinion to Tony Blair when he called me about Hague’s proposal. Blair, being aw
are that after the retirement of Brian Mulroney as Canadian Conservative leader, the number of federal Tories in the Canadian parliament declined to two, thought the Tory & Tory letterhead was a send-up.

  As I was a Canadian citizen at that point, existing protocol between the United Kingdom and Canada required that the matter be referred to the Canadian government, which was done through the British High Commissioner in Ottawa and the Canadian chief of protocol. The response eventually came back that Canada had no objections to a peerage provided I did not use my title in Canada and became a dual citizen. Tony Blair called to tell me this and said that he would send me a citizenship application. If I filled it out and sent it back to him, he would take care of it. I did so, and a day later I was accepted. The prime minister and the home secretary, Jack Straw, were my sponsors.

  All seemed in order until the Toronto Globe and Mail, hearing rumours of my elevation at its London bureau, publicized the story in a tendentious manner that I was attempting to sneak into a peerage, an antiquated and contemptibly inegalitarian honour, through the back door, and indicating I was not receiving an adequate number of invitations to foxhunts and so forth. It was assumedly intended to rouse the hostility of Chrétien, whose disenchantment with the National Post was well known. Chrétien swiftly descended on the issue. His chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, called the Queen’s assistant. The Chrétien position, as Tony Blair told it to me, which Pelletier had now conveyed to the Palace, was that the Nickle Resolution of 1919 required him to oppose my elevation to the peerage.

  The Nickle Resolution was a non-binding request to King George V not to give British honours to Canadian residents. As I was not a Canadian resident and was now a dual citizen, it had no application to me. I telephoned Chrétien and presented the facts in a very conciliatory way. He did not dispute the facts but said I should aspire to the Canadian Senate. I said I would be happy to do both and might even be a Liberal senator while a Conservative peer. My attempt at levity was not successful. He received the call coolly and promised to call back. He did not. In his place was Pelletier, whose tone to me was one of heavy condescension. I was treated like an unsuccessful mendicant, which I must admit was a new experience for me, though likely not unfamiliar to many others with whom Pelletier dealt.

  The British were horrified. They knew Chrétien’s position was nonsense, but they couldn’t put the Queen in the invidious position of resolving conflicting opinions on a constitutional point between two prime ministers of countries of which she was the monarch – and over so trivial a matter. Blair was asked to defer the recommendation of me, and I couldn’t blame him for doing so.

  But it was infuriating. Chrétien was in effect taking the entirely false position that he had the legal obligation to stop me from becoming a member of the House of Lords. He was making me the first and only member in a new class of citizens in a foreign country. I was to be the one solvent, unincarcerated, and sane adult in the United Kingdom ineligible for a U.K. honour given by the United Kingdom in recognition of services deemed to have been rendered in and to the United Kingdom. In view of our exchanges over the National Post’s coverage of him, I didn’t think it much of a stretch to deduce that the reason for this unsought singling out was that Chrétien objected to the editorial position of some newspapers I influenced. I sued Chrétien in the Canadian courts for my rights as a dual citizen. It was not justiciable in Britain, and in any case I could hardly attack the British authorities who were trying to confer an honour on me.

  The predictable articles appeared in the Canadian press describing the House of Lords as a geriatric assembly of masters of fox hounds and chinless descendants of once great men. In fact, the hereditary component was down to ninety-two people, who emerged from a fiercely contested election to retain their places. Almost 85 per cent of the peers are life peers, who were named because of some distinction they had achieved. Not much of an aristocracy, but compared with any other legislative chamber in the world, they are a formidable meritocracy.

  I trusted the courts to be sensible, even though the respondent was the federal government – and despite the fact that, as Chrétien laboured to a number of mutual acquaintances who visited him, he himself appointed the judges.

  My balloon quickly deflated. The Ontario Superior Court and then the Ontario Court of Appeal denied that they had jurisdiction. The non-deciding judge first seized of the case, who took many months to decide that he had no jurisdiction, soon retired to the private sector, where his new law firm cited his abdication on my case as evidence of his distinguished judicial career. Hostile Canadian media referred to this as my being “thrown out of court.” In fact, tiers of judges abdicated.

  All my concerns about Canada were cresting. I love Canada. I believed fervently in its potential and was therefore constantly irritated by what I saw as public policy holding Canada back from exploiting its God-given resources – human and natural. I had uprooted myself from Quebec, a province to which I felt closely attached and one that was the base of my newspaper business, as a protest against separatist and anti-English sentiment. There was room for legitimate argument about whether the course I championed – less regulation, greater competition, more pro-American policies such as NAFTA – was the right or wrong way to exploit Canada’s greatness, but I don’t know how anyone could question the depths of my patriotism, though many did.

  Canada had obviously been good to me in many ways, but I was fatigued with fighting the good fight pretty much alone and being pummelled and caricatured for both my views and just about every aspect of my personal being, as well as many views and traits I did not, in fact, hold or possess. Now I discovered that there was no worthwhile recourse to the courts in cases where the federal government was a party. And almost two-thirds of the population, 63 per cent of English-speaking Canadians, thought Jean Chrétien, a cunning and determined philistine and placeman, was a good leader of the country, according to a poll we published in the National Post in 2000. I had failed to make any visible inroads in Canada in policy terms.

  Chrétien was inviting me to choose between Britain and Canada. When the deliberations of the Court of Appeal had gone on for an absurdly protracted time, I commenced action to renounce my citizenship. I published a statement in the National Post that I was taking this step “with regret but without rancor” and made it clear I hoped to be allowed to take back my citizenship when conditions changed. Had I known that the Liberal Party would eject Chrétien in a couple of years, or that my action would be resented as much as it apparently was, I would have been more patient. I said I would leave and thereafter would have no further comment on Canadian public affairs. I have adhered to that. I have never uttered one disparaging word about Canada since and publicly did not mention the country at all until I resumed my residency. Naturally, I have often wondered if this whole episode has been a terrible mistake. It arose suddenly. If I had had informed advice from Torys, I would have applied for British citizenship before the issue started simmering. If I had known how much ill will would be aroused in Canada (I didn’t think many Canadians cared what my citizenship was), I would probably not have proceeded. If the House of Lords is completely emasculated in the next couple of years, or I don’t go back to Britain, or my legal travails are too durably compromising to enable me to return to Their Lordships’ House, then it will certainly have been a mistake. If not, then perhaps it may yet work out.

  One frequently imputed indication of error is the uninformed claim that if I were only still a Canadian, I would be evacuated out to Canada and escape the worst aspects of the U.S. legal system, which at time of writing still bedevils me. In fact, I have an equally advantageous arrangement with the United Kingdom, whose government is traditionally more influential in Washington, and nothing can be done with any foreign government without a degree of cooperation from American prosecutors that I was never going to abase myself adequately to obtain. I may have made a mistake in renouncing my Canadian citizenship, which I have never ceased to
promise to try to regain, but we don’t know yet.

  The fact is, I found the whole episode heartbreaking. When I threw in the towel after decades of involvement in the Canadian public debate, having achieved almost nothing that I could detect, the Toronto Star ran a cartoon of me that I found deeply affecting. They portrayed me not as a flabby plutocrat, as was the custom of most Canadian caricaturists at the time, but as a rather intrepid canoeist in a Royal Navy uniform, setting out from Canadian shores, with a cheerful beaver holding a Canadian flag in one hand and a life preserver in the other waving kindly after me. It reminded me poignantly of our family’s many years at our summer cottage at Lake of the Woods, where I learned the essence of geographical Canada. (“The cry of the loon and the dip of the paddle.”) Perhaps there was a less benign interpretation of the cartoon, but this is how I chose to see it.

  Leaving the country I had loved all my conscient life – and love still – but where I felt like a punching bag for a permanent complacent majority, was a painful step. Being sandbagged by the judiciary of my own country in what should have been a routine exercise of indisputable rights was jarring. If only I had become a dual citizen earlier, which I could easily have done, there would have been no consultation with Canada. My peerage would have been uncontroversial. As it was, I had become an exemplar of the phenomenon I was trying to stop: the departure of people who could make a visible contribution to Canada’s future. Millions had left silently; my lot was to leave with unpleasant fanfare, having for decades advocated measures that would incentivize resistance to the temptation to emigrate.