Love him or hate him, we cannot escape Conrad Black.
by Geoffrey Stevens
If Conrad Black did not exist, we would have to invent to him. After all, he's the protagonist in a uniquely Canadian melodrama.
For some, he has been a source of perverse pride — a Canadian whose name is recognized everywhere, a fallen media tycoon who once assembled what was said to be the world's third largest newspaper empire. For others, he has been an outrage — a rich scoundrel with political connections who renounced his own land for the fool's gold of a foreign title and who now, needing sanctuary, seeks to crawl, unrepentant, from American prison back to the embrace of the country he so rudely spurned.
Love him or hate him, we cannot escape him. They used to say that Pierre Trudeau sucked the air out of any room he entered. Conrad Black is like that. He sucks other news from the front pages and the airwaves. On Friday, who cared about the presidential runoff in France, the Euro crisis in Greece, or the student strike in Quebec? Conrad Black was back! His release from jail in Miami made headlines from London to Philadelphia to Toronto to Chicago to Atlanta to (for some reason) Casper, Wyoming.
It was big news, even if there was not much news to report. Everyone knew Black was out, but did he leave the prison in that unmarked van with tinted windows? The crowd of reporters and photographers couldn't see and didn't know. Was Black, as an alien and a felon, taken to a processing centre in Miami for formal deportation? Or was he given preferred treatment and whisked straight to the airport? Did he fly to Toronto on a private charter? The hapless paparazzi weren't sure.
All that was clear was that he showed up at home — or what used to be home — in Toronto a few hours later.
Staked out by television crews, reporters and photographers, with a media helicopter circling over the Black mansion, the scene was a vaguely reminiscent of the famous pursuit of OJ Simpson and his white Bronco on the freeways of Los Angeles in 1994. Not a man to pass up media moment, Black made a show of kissing his wife, Barbara Amiel, for the cameras.
What happens next? He is in Canada on a one-year permit. He could return to Britain where he remains a citizen. He is still listed as a member in good standing of the House of Lords, although he could no longer sit with other Conservative party peers because of his criminal conviction. But to remain in the Lords, he would be required under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act of 2010 to be domiciled for tax purposes in the United Kingdom, which might not be too attractive given that he no longer has a home or newspapers there, and a seat in the Lords carries no remuneration.
Most likely, when his temporary permit expires, he will apply for permanent resident status, then seek to retrieve his citizenship.
It is far more likely that when his temporary permit expires, he will apply for permanent resident status, then seek to retrieve the citizenship that he surrendered to spite Jean Chrétien back in 2001. Chances the Harper government, despite its claims to be hands off in the matter, will make the process as painless as possible for Black, if only because any enemy of Chrétien Liberals is, perforce, a friend of Harper Tories.
Meanwhile, he will not be idle. He has to contend with the Internal Revenue Service, which would like him to pay $70 million in US taxes. He has his newspaper columns to write and more books to author. But his criminal record will make it awkward, if not impossible, for him to run public companies in the future.
If his interest in justice and penal reforms persists now that he is free, he may have an useful contribution to make to the public dialogue. One day, he could be recognized as a public intellectual, like Michael Ignatieff , although I don't suppose either of them would thank me for the comparison.
About Geoffrey Stevens
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the address below. This article appeared in the Waterloo Region Record and the Guelph Mercury.
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