National
1'he Prince George Citizen — Friday, January 30, 1987 — 5
I
THE PM'S PALS
Same names crop up in Tory activities
by LES WHITTINGTON Southam News
   OTTAWA — At the height of the bidding for a huge federal government job last fall, a Conservative party backer suggested to a defence contractor that his firm would have a better chance if it hired a public relations man who is a good friend of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
   “The gist” of the suggestion from a "PC supporter” was “that if you want to perhaps make an impression on the political activities, we should consider using” Roger Nantel, said an official with one of the two losing bidders for the $l-billion CF-18 jet fighter maintenance contract.
   “Our basic response was ‘no thanks’,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “We don’t get involved in that type of activity.”
   What is interesting about this sketchy tale is the notion that Nantel, because of his relationship with the prime minister, could have make-or-break influence over a major contract bid.
   For Nantel is one of the Mulroney mafia, the gang of old pals and allies who have been at the prime minister’s side, on and off, throughout much of his political career.
   From the conspiracy to dump former prime minister Joe Clark as Tory boss in the early 1980s to the Bissonnette affair now rocking the Tory government, the names of Mulroney’s same friends keep cropping up.
   The soft-spoken, handsome Nantel was in the news recently as one of the two men who in mid-January drove two hours to Ottawa from Montreal to deliver a warning to the prime minister’s office.
   The information about the irregular land dealings in St-Jean, Que., would lead Mulroney to fire his junior transport minister, Andre Bissonnette, five days later.
   Nantel said he delivered the message because his firm does public relations for Oerlikon Aerospace, the company that purchased the $3-million St-Jean property shortly after the price shot up as a result of a series of questionable land flips.
   Along with Nantel on the mission was Jean Bazin, another close friend of the prime minister’s. Bazin, who was named to the Senate by Mulroney in December, had business ties to Oerlikon. He was retained as legal counsel and lobbyist for Oerlikon shortly before the firm won the $600-million federal defence contract for which it needs the St-Jean land.
   Although Nantel and Bazin have said little about it publicly, it must have been a painful mission for two men who worked so hard to put Mulroney in office to bring word of impending scandal to Bernard Roy. the prime minister’s principal secretary and himself a crony of Mulroney’s since their student days.
   Bazin, a disaffected former Clark ally, was one of a number of Mulroney associates who took part in a cabal beginning in 1982 to wrest control of the party from Clark and pass it to Mulroney.
 . Also in this group were former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores, Ken Waschuk, then an advisor to Saskatchewan Premier Grant Devine, and other longtime Mulroney friends from university — Fred Doucet, Sam Wakim and Michel Cogger.
   The campaign that led to Clark’s decision in January, 1983, to call a leadership convention and which culminated in Mulroney’s rise to party leader the following June is still a source of dispute among Conservatives.
   Many believe the anti-Clark team was secretly funded by foreign sources, including Austrian-born multi-millionaire Walter Wolf. And the hard-fought battle for convention delegates in Quebec, in which Nantel worked for Mulroney, caused lasting rancor among Tories.
   In the years since, with Mulroney moving into the prime minister’s office on his 1984 landslide election' win, the dump-Clark conspirators and other Mulroney loyalists have gone on to build a network of power and influence that only now, in the wake of the Oerlikon affair, is attracting widespread national attention.
   In two years, the roster of Mulroney friends and political allies appointed to boards, commissions or the Senate, or now active in lobbying or in receipt of government contracts, has become extensive.
   Here are some of them:
 ■	Bazin, until his appointment to the Senate, was a director of Petro-Canada, Ottawa's oil company, and his former wife, Michele, was named to the Canada Council;
 ■	Moores has become such an influential figure in the capital that many believe he bears more responsibility than any other lobbyist for the Tories’ reluctant move to set up a registry for those who try to sway government decisions.
   Moores’s company is believed to have worked for multinational drug companies that want Ottawa to increase patent protection for prescription drugs and foh Gulf and Western Industries, which was involved in the controversial acquisition of Prentice-Hall publishing in 1986. And Moores’s firm is rumored to have helped Canadair and CAE Electronics, for which Nantel also does work occasionally, win the CF-18 maintenance contract last October.
   Moores previously was named by Mulroney to the board of Air Canada but was forced to step down after it emerged he also worked as a lobbyist for a competing domestic airline;
 ■	Doucet is now senior adviser to the prime minister;
 ■	Cogger has been named to the Senate;
 ■	Waschuk was named a director of Air Canada;
 ■	Wakim received a $200,000 legal contract from the government. His name has come up recently in connection with the Oerlikon affair because his Toronto law firm has represented Litton industries, one of Oerlikon’s main subcontractors. Wakim has denied any lobbying in connection with Oerlikon’s defence contract;
 ■	Wolf received a $365,000 government contract for an offshore project in Atlantic Canada.
 ■	Nantel, along with another Tory organizer. Peter Simpson, was the focus of a brief uproar in 1985 when a company they formed was given a contract valued at $125,000 a month to place all federal government advertising. The government dropped the ide^ after the media got word of the exclusive deal.
   Although no one is suggesting any of Mulroney’s friends have done anything illegal, the breadth and depth of this network is giving rise to persistent questions. Critics of the government are increasingly concerned about the power, much of it behind the scenes, that the prime minister’s allies and buddies are now in a position to exercise.
   In the Commons this week, Liberal MP Bob Kaplan suggested Canadians are "entitled to conclude from the spectacles we have seen and the revelations we have had that to do business with this government you have to operate through close personal friends of the prime minister.”
   Deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski, standing in for Mulroney who was abroad, dismissed the comment scornfully.
   But there is a mounting suspicion that a public inquiry into the Oerlikon affair — something the Tories have so far rejected — would only deepen the curiosity about what Mulroney and the plotters of 1982 have wrought in the past five years.
Bank rate lowest since 1973
   OTTAWA (CP) — The bellwether Bank of Canada rate slid for the fourth consecutive week Thursday, hitting 7.49 per cent, its lowest in more than 13 years.
   The bank rate fell one quarter of a percentage point from 7.74 per cent and later the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce announced a reduction in its consumer lending rate by one half of a percentage point to a minimum of 10.5 per cent.
   There were no announcements of prime rate reductions.
   That left the prime rate, offered to blue-chip corporate borrowers and the benchmark rate for more costly short-term loans to other businesses and consumers, at 9.25 per cent.
   For the first time in recent weeks the dollar’s climb against its U.S. counterpart stalled. The dollar closed at 74.58 cents US, down from Wednesday’s close of 74.63 cents US.
  Bryan Griffiths, foreign exchange specialist with the Royal Bank of Canada, said much of the weakness Thursday in the dollar was caused by the Japanese, who began some selling of the currency overnight Wednesday.
   The Japanese, attracted by relatively high interest rates offered in Canada and apparently reluctant to invest heavily in the U.S. dollar, have been behind some of the recent strength of the Canadian currency.
   What happens next to the dollar depends in large part on whether the Japanese start buying it again, Griffiths said.
   The bank rate is now at its lowest since September 1973, when it was 7.25 per cent. The dollar is still about a cent stronger against the U.S. dollar than it was at the start of the week.
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Peckford blasts fish deal
  GRAND FALLS, Nfld. (CP) -Newfoundland. Premier Brian Peckford angrily rejected federal apologies Thursday as he contin-. ued to rail against Ottawa for making a fisheries deal secretly with France.
  The Conservative premier accused federal Transport Minister John Crosbie, a fellow Tory who is Newfoundland’s representative in cabinet, of betraying the province by not strongly opposing the agreement.
   Crosbie has said he objects to the way negotiations were handled but feels the deal giving France fishing rights off the Newfoundland coast is reasonable.
   “It’s a cunning ploy on his part,” Peckford told a local Chamber of Commerce gathering. “He’s saying the federal government should apologize — ‘the big federal government apologizes to small Newfoundland for using the wrong process, but I (Crosbie) still support the agreement.’
   “Well, to hell with the process,” Peckford said harshly, his voice steadily rising in volume. “It doesn’t make any difference if
Erola now drug firm spok
esman
   OTTAWA (CP) — Former Liberal cabinet minister Judy Erola, who once resisted lobbying by the multinational drug companies which make up the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada, has accepted a job as their chief spokesman.
   Erola becomes president of the association on March 1. One published report said she will earn more than $100,000 a year.
   The association is made up of 65 companies, most Canadian subsidiaries of firms based in Europe or the United States. It is best known recently for lobbying for changes in the Patent Act .to bolster protection to new prescription drugs.
   Amendments to the Patent Act. which have the blessing of the association, now are before Parliament.
   Erola was named minister of consumer and corporate*affairs in the government of Pierre Trudeau on Aug. 12, 1983. The Liberals had virtually committed themselves at the time to changes in the Patent Act along the lines sought by the multinationals.
   Erola put the brakes on those changes.
 we’re there while they sell the shop on us or whether we’re home. They sold the shop.
   “So don’t give me this business of apolgizing to me for not inviting me.”
   Deputy Prime Minister Don Mazankowski apologized Wednesday to Peckford for not consulting with him during secret negotiations to arbitrate a boundary dispute around the French islands of St-Pierre-Miquelon, southwest of Newfoundland.
   Sources told The Canadian Press that Mazankowski told Peckford he would be told about the deal -by External Affairs Minister Joe Clark or Fisheries Minister Tom Siddon. But the phone call was never made and the Newfoundland premier was kept in the dark for days after the deal was quietly signed in Paris.
   Under the interim agreement, Canada will allow ships from continental France to continue fishing in the disputed zone around St-Pie-rre-Miquelon, despite indications from France that it will not respect Canadian cod quota.
   Newfoundlanders view it as a li-
GERRY MERRITHEW
 cence to continue blatant over-fiai-ing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, costing them millions of dollars? a year in lost catches.
   In Haliax, Nova Scotia Premier John Buchanan said Canada should have stoodt its ground against tjie French instead of handing ov£r fishing right in a secret defll reached last weekend.
   “You don’t back away fromia threat and that’s apparently what’s happening here,” Buchanan tq)d reporters Thursday.
   He said he heard reports thjpt France was threatening to send three naval corvettes to accompany its trawlers in the disputed ar£a surounding the French islands of St-Pierre-Miquelon, but he doubted the reports were true.	|
   Buchanan said he has been urfe* ble to determine why the secret deal was reached in such a hurny, breaking off months of negotiations that involved representatives frorn Canada’s fishing provinces and tpe fishing industry.	J
   In Yarmouth, trade and fisheries officials*said the French deal could seriously hurt Canada’s fishing Relations with other countries, particularly the United States.
'Open trade7 touted
  DENVER (CP) — Canada and the United States must work together for a more open trade relationship and fight the temptation to return to the “dark days” of protectionism, Gerald Merrithew. Canada’s minister of state for forestry and mines, said Thursday night.
   Speaking to an international mining conference in this Rocky Mountain city, Merrithew urged an audience of about 100 U.S. and Canadian mining economists and businessmen and government representatives to support Canada-U.S. freer trade talks.
   “The minerals industries and the consumers of minerals in both countries will be far better off if we’re successful. And both may face serious consequences if we fail.”
   The minister said the.recent settlement of the softwood lumber dispute, which saw Canada appease U.S. lumber interests by imposing a 15-per-cent export tax on Canadian lumber, produced only one certain result — it increased the price of U.S. housing.
   It has also prompted some Canadian industries to consider similar actions against American competition, he said.
   “If this tide (of protectionism)
 comes in, it will be difficult to stop in either country.
   “We must resist all temptations to mbve backward into the dark days of protectionism and econoiii-ic stagnation.
   “The staggering tariffs imposed the world over -during the Great Depression proved that the gains are illusory (and) short-term and the damage is lasting.”
   Merrithew, whose department along with the U.S. Department of the Interior sponsored the three-day conference on competition and public policy in the metals industry, warned that U.S. protectionists are eyeing the mining industry as well.
   Canada exported about $10.6^ bullion in non-fuel minerals to the United States last year, about 65 per cent of Canadian metals production. About 70 per cent of Canada’s non-fuel mineral imports — about $5.8 billion — came from the U.S. in 1986.
   “There are those here in.. the United States who claim that Canada subsidizes its mineral industry and that competitive advantages result from such government intervention.”	..
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