Brian Mulroney

Alert the media! Hold Page 1! A study by University of Rochester psychology professor Richard Ryan shows most working people are happier on the weekend.

According to Dr. Ryan, both men and women feel better on the weekend. Doesn’t matter how much money they make, whether or not they like their jobs, what kind of work they do, whether they’re married or single, old or young. Yup, everybody loves weekends. That’s enough of that — you can read about it yourself on the upstate New York university’s Website.

We mention this only because of Brian Mulroney, of course.

The point being that it should have been fairly obvious that you don’t really need to spend a lot of money, or tie up high-priced psychological or legal help for that matter, to figure out certain things.

One of those things might be that most people are happier on the weekend. Another for sure would be that “something was amiss” when Mulroney, our former prime minister, began pocketing envelopes of cash handed to him by a sleazy German businessman.

But so said Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, Associate Chief Justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, who issued the report of his two-year inquiry into Mulroney’s shenanigans yesterday. Well, no kidding!

For this insight, we Canadian taxpayers have spent $14 million! Let’s rephrase that as a question: We paid $14 million to be told that Myron Baloney is a sleazeball?

Probably we could have put that money to better use, say, job creation for people other than a few of the nation’s coruscating legalists. (Here’s a bet that Ryan’s research didn’t cost that much, even in Canadian dollars.)

Now, our current Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is very big these days on aggressive prosecutions of criminals and tough penalties for those who are found guilty of crimes. So, how about one of those?

What the heck? According the Toronto Star, the judge said “he could not accept Mulroney’s testimony that his acceptance of at least $225,000 in cash was an error in judgment. Rather, it was an attempt to hide the transactions. …” (Emphasis added.)

That would mean the judge thought Mulroney was lying under oath, right? And lying under oath would be perjury, correct?

As the Canadian Criminal Code explains, “every one commits perjury who, with intent to mislead, makes before a person who is authorized by law to permit it to be made before him a false statement under oath or solemn affirmation, by affidavit, solemn declaration or deposition or orally, knowing that the statement is false.”

At the very least, our current Conservative government could ask Mulroney nicely if he would mind giving back the $2.1 million we taxpayers paid him in 1997 after he sued the federal government for defaming him by accusing him of taking kickbacks to get Air Canada to buy Airbus passenger jets.

After all, Justice Oliphant said he thought the former prime minister’s sworn testimony in that case failed to “disclose the true state of affairs.”

Uh, Mr. Harper? Hello?

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...