Schadenfreude gets a bad rap. The feeling of "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others," especially from the fall of the high and mighty, was mentioned often during the trial (and trials) of Conrad Black, but was oddly absent during those of Brian Mulroney. I don't think schadenfreude is just about nastiness or pettiness; it's about recognizing a shared, flawed humanity. It's built on a desire to know that the powerful are more like the rest of us than a race apart. That's what's satisfying in it, not mere spite.

If it had just been that former prime minister Brian Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash payments in hotel rooms and failed to report the income for six years, it would be quite a story.

But what makes this saga truly stunning and of vital importance is the fact that the payments were made by the notorious lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, wanted in Germany on charges of corruption, who was paid $20 million by European consortium Airbus to lobby the Mulroney government to buy its jets.

These facts inevitably raise the question of whether the cash payments in hotel rooms are in any way linked to the $1.8 billion airplane deal Schreiber was able to win from Air Canada, then a crown corporation, in 1988.