How Many Generations of Schreiber/Mulroney?

If Ben Mulroney weren't the spitting image of his father, now would be a good time to start a rumour. It' wouldn't be that outrageous if you think about it. Karlheinz Schreiber arrived in Canada in 1975, and Ben was born the following year. Maybe that "spitting image" is a bit too eery, in a Madame Tussaud kind of way. Could it be that Ben really is the lovechild of Schreiber and Mila? And in order to hide this great shame, the Mulroneys have been progressively surgically altering Ben's face to ensure that he looks more and more like daddy? Okay, perhaps that is a bit outrageous. So outrageous, as to be utterly unbelievable. (But thank you for entertaining my whimsy.)

However, as outrageous as the whole Mulroney/Schreiber story is to the Canadian political context -- and growing more sordid by the day -- sadly, it is believable.

We have a soon-to-be ex-prime minister desperately seeking a way to continue to afford his wife's fetish for fancy footwear, who hosts his friend Schreiber at the PM's official summer residence, days before stepping down as one of the least liked prime ministers in Canadian history. There's a lot of back-shaving, er, scratching going on here. Big, greenback-scratching.

There is little doubt they were friends, at least in Mulroney's eyes. I say "friends" because the two have a history that goes back to at least 1982/83, when Schreiber raised money for Mulroney's run at politics and then paid to have delegates vote against Joe Clark at the leadership convention that Mulroney would win. They were associates who established a friendship rooted in greed.

And with Mulroney it is always personal -- from the personalized thank-you notes and birthday cards to everyone on his very long Christmas card list, to the bitterness he still harbours towards Lucien Bouchard, Pierre Trudeau and Peter C. Newman (to name a few).

As obsessed as Mulroney has shown he is with his legacy, I can't help but wonder if being burned by another friend is losing him more sleep.

But where I lose sleep is over the long-term impact of the sketchy nature of this whole story, especially, overlapping in time as it does with the sponsorship fiasco. The sponsorship inquiry ensured daily media coverage that was unflattering to politicians. A lengthy Airbus inquiry will only further damage public perception of politics as a noble profession. What kind of impact will this have on recruiting the next generation(s) of political leadership? For young people or other professionals who have considered a career in politics, this is devastating. The stories making the news out of Ottawa are just as convoluted, the images just as nasty, as the stories coming out of Washington. It's not supposed to be like this in Canada.

Either that next generation of political leadership possessing a modicum of integrity will be so discouraged by the "outrageousness" of it all that they will turn their backs on the process and we will all lose as a result. Or, they will become so "outraged" as to do something and affect real change. I'm not hopeful.