From Macdonald and King’s dubious infrastructure deals to the Airbus and SNC-Lavalin affairs, Globe journalists have gotten the goods on what happened behind closed doors
It was the first and, to date, the only time the front page of The Globe has brought down a federal government. Readers who spent three cents for a copy on Friday, July 18, 1873, were greeted with 17 small headlines running down the right-hand column of the front page, topped with the phrase: “THE PACIFIC SCANDAL!”
The Globe’s 1873 revelations weren’t exactly what we’d today call investigative journalism. Those telegrams had been stolen from the lawyer for But these four are united in several ways: Each prime minister initially denied any wrongdoing, and only after a front-page Globe story appeared did the public become fully aware of the scandal’s scope. And these controversies temporarily bruised the reputation and electoral standing of the governing party, although none has permanently ousted a party or its leader.
Instead, King’s government became interested in a private firm run by Montreal businessman R.O. Sweezey: the Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Corporation. As historians S.J. Donovan and R.B. Winmill put it in the 1976 book, Sweezey “set out to appropriate all the political influence he could summon,” making an astonishing $700,000 in donations to King’s Liberals.
Despite the huge donation from Beauharnois, King’s Liberals lost the 1930 election, during the Depression, to R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives. Bennett didn’t hesitate to launch an inquiry into the Beauharnois affair. Despite being a famously detail-oriented micromanager, King claimed he was unaware of the source of most of the party’s campaign funds.
To the end, King claimed he had known nothing. “The Liberal Party has not been disgraced but it is in the valley of humiliation,” he told Parliament during a three-hour speech in 1931. “But we are going to come out of that valley.” In 1988, Airbus won a $1.8-billion contract from Air Canada for 34 A320 jets. Schreiber provided a similar service for the German corporation Thyssen AG, also involving millions in fees, to persuade Ottawa to build an armoured-vehicle factory in Nova Scotia.
Greenspon later wrote that Mulroney had phoned him and urged him not to publish the story, adding that Mulroney “said he could give us a better story if we suppressed the one about the $300,000 dealing.” Greenspon did not play ball.In 2007, articles by Globe reporter Greg McArthur blew a hole in many of Mulroney’s claims.
Once again, a prime minister managed to dodge responsibility for a scandal until it appeared on The Globe’s front page – this time long after the fact.The Globe's investigation of SNC-Lavalin, whose Montreal headquarters is shown in 2019, revealed that the firm had paid sizeable bribes to win contracts from the Gadhafi regime in Libya.
Yesapplenews Mulroney Schreiber Globe Minister Snc-Lavalin Beauharnois King Trudeau St. Lawrence Seaway RCMP Liberal
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