Angry in the Great White North

As far as I'm concerned, the CBC has done the right thing.  Krista Erickson has been publicly identified as the reporter who wrote questions for Liberal MPs to read out for Brian Mulroney answer.

As I've pointed out, the problem here is the secrecy.  If Brian Mulroney was approached by a CBC reporter, he would be within his rights to answer "No comment" to any question posed.  Indeed, he would be within his rights to answer with a straight-out lie if he so chose.

But when an MP is posing questions in a committee hearing, not answering is not an option, nor is lying, as perjury laws apply.  So when a Liberal MP agrees to be a front for a CBC reporter working on a story that had nothing to do with the Schreiber issue, and then poses those off-topic questions as his own, Brian Mulroney is in a tight spot.

Mulroney has to answer, and the CBC reporter gets her story.  The business of the committee, on the other hand, is not advanced at all, since the question had nothing to do with Karlheinz Schreiber.

The CBC has come clean in the Krista Erickson case, but in doing so, more questions are left to answer:

When, as in the present instance, it is revealed that a reporter has been collaborating, even if only obliquely, with one party or another, an appearance of partisanship emerges that cannot be dispelled by claims that this is how political reporters interact with their sources.

In this case, our reporter provided questions to two Liberal MPs using her BlackBerry in the hope that these would be put to the former prime minister during the committee hearings.

I accept the reporter's explanation that she did not do this to advantage the Liberals or hurt the Conservatives — that she just wanted answers for her story.

She believed it was permissible to create a temporary alliance of convenience with the Liberals if it would help determine whether Brian Mulroney had lobbied a Tory minister on a recent matter.

Was it a temporary alliance?  How can we know?  We don't know who the two Liberal MPs were.  Was one of them Pablo Rodriguez?  Though he was the MP who read out the question that allegedly came from Krista Erickson, he continues to insist that his question was his own.  If we knew the names of the MPs who were in contact with Erickson, we'd be further along in understanding just how "temporary" the alliance was.

Here's the problem.  Krista Erickson has been exposed, and because of that, she is no longer able to play a role in this.  But we don't know which Liberals on the committee were involved.  Heck, we don't even know if these two Liberals are even on the committee, or if they are feeding questions given to them by reporters to their colleagues on the committee (that might explain why Pablo Rodriguez thinks his questions are his own, assuming he counts questions he gets from other Liberals as his own).  While these two Liberal MPs continue to lurk in the shadows, the integrity of the committee is compromised.  Any information that goes to the committee might end up with another CBC reporter or with a journalist with a different media organization.

Indeed, we don't know if these two Liberal MPs were involved in other "temporary alliances", and there is no way to know until their names are revealed.

This matter now because the Commons ethics committee is trying very hard to get access to Brian Mulroney's personal tax returns:

A lawyer for Brian Mulroney sent a blistering letter yesterday to the chair of the House of Commons ethics committee, arguing vehemently that Airbus, personal tax records and the cash expenses of the former prime minister and his wife should be off limits to MPs.

Members of the ethics committee met behind closed doors yesterday for the first time in weeks and approved a list of about a dozen witnesses they want to question in February about Mr. Mulroney's business dealings with German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.

Committee chair Paul Szabo, a Liberal MP, told reporters committee members discussed whether to use their summons powers to obtain Mr. Mulroney's tax records, but did not make a decision.

Thanks to Pablo Rodriguez, the Commons ethics committee cannot be trusted.  If the collusion between Krista Erickson and these two unnamed Liberal MPs had not come to light, the committee might have proceeded to get Mulroney's tax returns in the next week or so, and then delivered that information to Krista Erickson.

We don't know that it would have happened, but it is bad enough that it could have happened.

We know that any potential Erickson leak has been plugged, but until the names of the committee members who were party to the collusion are revealed, the committee cannot be trusted with particularly sensitive information.

That doesn't mean the committee can't continue to ask questions.  Any answers given in the committee room in front of the cameras are in the public domain.  But the committee simply cannot be allowed to consider sensitive evidence in secret, because there can be no confidence that the committee can keep a confidence, not as long as this shadow remains over the committee.

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