The Secret Mulroney Tapes - Mulroney's Reaction

Mulroney's Reaction

Via a spokesman, Mulroney said he was "devastated" and "betrayed" by Newman. He went further, saying "I was reckless in talking with Peter C. Newman... This was my mistake and I'm going to have to live with it." Mulroney also said that most of the time he was not aware that his conversations were being recorded.

This view is disputed by Newman, who claims that an agreement was struck between the two men in 1976, shortly before Mulroney's first run at the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. Newman claims that Mulroney agreed to grant him privileged access on a regular basis should Mulroney become Prime Minister. According to Newman, Mulroney wanted someone to write a definitive history of his time as Prime Minister, warts and all. "I don't want a puff job," Mulroney allegedly told Newman. Newman writes that he didn't get one, and that the only pre-condition was that any book (based on the interviews) be published after Mulroney left office, which happened in early 1993. The original agreement allegedly also included a provision granting Newman access to documents from the Mulroney period -- some of them cabinet confidences -- in order to round out the book and provide historical evidence and perspective to Mulroney's taped words. In 1995, Newman writes that Mulroney changed the terms of the agreement and denied access to the documents.

Newman now says this wasn't the book he wanted to write, but that he was prevented from writing an unbiased historical look at Mulroney's term in office because he wasn't given everything that he was originally promised. Unwilling to let the tapes sit unused, Newman instead wrote this book, which was released September 12, 2005. There has been speculation that the reason behind Mulroney's alleged decision not to grant access to the documents originally promised was that he was planning to release his own memoirs, which were published on September 10, 2007 under the title Memoirs: 1939-1993. It has been suggested by some media outlets that Newman released his book before Mulroney could get his own edited and sanitized version of events out.

After the publication of the book, Jean Charest, a former Cabinet minister under Mulroney and former premier of Quebec, came to his defence in a press conference, saying that he agreed with the statement that "Nobody has achievements like this ... you cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none." Charest pointed out that Mulroney was the father of Free Trade and that the GST was a good thing for the Canadian economy.

Newman has pledged to make the tapes available publicly at a later date. The original tapes are now located in a special collections archive at the University of Toronto where Newman says they will remain safe for future historians.