The French Connection: Who’s Who of Canuck Politics

The calendar moves ahead, albeit ever so slowly, toward February 2004, when Prime Minister Jean Chretien is destined to ride off into the Canadian sunset.

A date with destiny, to which so many look forward. Chretien detractors in this country and abroad are asking, "Who could be worse?"

Although much has been made of their rivalry, both Chretien and Martin are controlled by the same powerbrokers, and that’s just the beginning of this story.

If there is one latter day saga proving the age-old adage that truth is often stranger than fiction, the story of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin is it.

In a country whose largest television network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is state-owned, and whose largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star is decidedly Liberal-leaning, little reference has been made to this Canadian story of stories.

With the exception of Financial Post columnist Diane Francis, this online publication, and only a smattering of others, the mainline media has paid scarce attention to a documented made-in-Canada story that many average Canadians know nothing about.

Many Canadians know that the Province of Quebec has long monopolized the attention of Chretien, Martin, and too many members of the Liberal clique in Ottawa. They know that anti-Americanism is alive and well in Ottawa, which was staunchly against the war in Iraq.

Jean Chretien’s daughter, France, is married to Andre Desmarais. Andre’s father, Paul Desmarais, is the largest shareholder and director of TotalFinaElf — the largest corporation in France, which held tens of billions of dollars in contracts with the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein.

No wonder Chretien and Martin — who hid the war out — were against Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Well, that’s Chretien, but what of the-up-and-coming Paul Martin you might ask?

"…Optimistic Canadians and Americans say Mr. Chretien is gone in a few months and his successor, Paul Martin, will scrap the anti-American, anti-business behaviour and mend the rift between the two countries," wrote Francis in a recent Post column. …"Mr. Martin has ducked every issue except the dreadful Kyoto Accord, which he supported. This puts him squarely in the anti-business and anti-West Liberal camp. This should not surprise. Mr. Martin was hired in the 1960s to work for Paul Desmarais Sr. (the French connection) by Maurice Strong. Mr. Strong is a Liberal backroom operator, tycoon, and part-time United Nations official who authored the Kyoto Accord.

"In 1974, Mr. Desmarais made Mr. Martin president of Canada Steamship Lines and then, in 1981, he made him spectacularly rich by selling the company to him and a partner for $180 million. Mr. Martin’s shipping company is estimated to be worth about $424 million — making him the 63rd richest person in Canada, wrote Francis.

"I find it astonishing that a guy, in politics off and on all his life, could be such a genius at business and make so much money so quickly.

"It all begs a number of troublesome questions. Did Mr. Desmarais give away the company to Mr. Martin? Did Mr. Desmarais lend him the money or guarantee the loan? And what does this mean in terms of his allegiance or loyalty to Mr. Desmarais and his empire in Canada and France?

As I see it a major obstacle to political reform is Canada's news media.

A few conservative newspapers aside, the media in Canada appear to me to be knee-jerk liberal, especially TV journalism.

And it is a fact that TV is much more influential in forming public opinion than the print media.

Here is what David Frum recently wrore on the subject:

A Death in the Family
I returned from the United Kingdom to the news that the owners of Canada’s National Post newspaper have fired editor Ken Whyte and managing editor Martin Newland. It’s hard to explain to non-Canadians what this firing means — or why they should care. But I have to try.
For most of my working life, Canadian journalism was a dreary bog of left-liberal conformity. By the time I began my journalistic career in the late 1980s, it was obvious to most people under 40 that the old nostrums and dogmas were collapsing — but brute fear deterred most journalists from saying what they knew: In a country in which media jobs were scarce and media ownership was both tightly concentrated and carefully regulated by the government, dissenters faced swift and merciless marginalization.
The launch of the National Post in 1998 upended the old conformist cartel. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in Canada — or just about anywhere else. Yes it was conservative and unashamedly so. But it was also far and away the best-looking paper in Canada, the best-written, and the most amusing. It gleefully defied the old dogmas — and broke stories nobody else dared touch, from Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s financial scandals to the Jenin massacre hoax.
At its outset, the Post was the only Canadian media venture I’d ever seen where the staff did not fear their management and where people came to work for reasons bigger than their paycheck. It was a happy place — eccentric, yes, but happy. Editorial conferences took place around a ping-pong tables. Journalists who had been working one beat for years found themselves suddenly reassigned to something radically different — and doing the best work of their careers.
The paper was the brainchild of Conrad Black, the ex-Canadian media mogul who also owns the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times. Ken was Black’s protege; Ken in turn hired Newland, a devout Roman Catholic with the build of a Royal Marine. Newland was English, as were many of the paper’s first editors, and they gave the paper a very un-Canadian verve and sass.
Brilliant as the paper was editorially, it never quite worked as a business. The immediate problem was the collapse in advertising that hit all North American newspapers early in 2000. The deeper problem was the impossible economics of home delivering a national newspaper in a country where only 24 million English-speakers live spread across five time zones. In two transactions, Black sold the National Post to the Winnipeg-based Asper family.
Unlike Black, a highly intellectual conservative, the Aspers never seem to have felt much zeal for the National Post’s mission. They were television entrepreneurs, and in Canada television is an industry closely regulated by the federal government.
Its regulation of television gives the Canadian government a very disturbing leverage over media companies involved in both television and print — like the Aspers’ CanWest group. Earlier, the publisher of another CanWest paper, the Ottawa Citizen, was fired for permitting his reporters and editorial writers to continue working on the Chretien finance story. Soon after the Aspers assumed full control of the National Post, that paper’s investigation of Prime Minister Chretien’s finances also ceased.
Much could have been forgiven had CanWest at least made a success of the Post as a business. There, however, they fared no better than Black, arguably worse. Random mass layoffs, the closing and reopening of entire sections of the paper confused and frightened both staff and readers.
And yet, though the paper’s elan ebbed, so long as Whyte and Newland remained in charge, it was possible to believe that the Post remained the Post.
On Thursday, representatives of the owners appeared in the newsroom to announce that the paper’s senior management had been fired. Whyte and Newland had earlier been summoned to the Asper family’s corporate headquarters in Toronto. There they were formally dismissed and ordered not to return to the offices. If they had left any personal effects behind, they were welcome to pick them up on Sunday — under guard.
The following morning, a perfunctory news item appeared in the Post about the dismissal. Matthew Fraser, the Post’s newly appointed editor published an editorial promising that under his leadership the Post would remain the finest in Canada — while neglecting to mention, let alone thank, either of the men who had created the paper he inherited. Everybody who has ever loved the Post has to wish the new management team well. It’s not the joyous, fearless paper it was — but it still beats the competition and for the time being at least it remains the closest thing to a dissenting voice that Canada has.
But it’s one thing to wish the paper well; another to continue to work for it. On Saturday, with a breaking heart, I resigned my weekly column in the paper.
(David Frum ['David Frum's Diary'] in National Review, May 5, 2003)
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Interestingly, I have noticed that there has been no Mark Steyn article in the National Post since April 28th.

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