All chauffeurs should be treated as potential spies and gossips, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney secretly warned cabinet members, according to newly declassified records from 1987.
“Talking in the presence of chauffeurs was a deplorable but common mistake as these persons were notoriously unreliable gossips,” Mr. Mulroney said, according to minutes from a March 19, 1987 meeting.
The minutes quoted Mr. Mulroney as saying that “everything discussed in the cabinet room was secret” and that “cabinet’s business” was not to be shared with ordinary MPs. “There must be no disclosure to outsiders of views taken in cabinet,” Mr. Mulroney was quoted.
Even photocopying was to be monitored, the former prime minister said, adding that “indiscreet copying of ministerial correspondence could lead to embarrassment at the hands of hostile premiers and lobby groups.”
Mr. Mulroney said that some cabinet members were “far too trusting,” and that political aides were unreliable.
“Indictments often arose when staffers’ telephone calls were intercepted. In other words, staffers could trigger indictments through bragging,” Mulroney was quoted. “Such showing off can lead to direct taps on ministerial phones.”
Certain sections of the cabinet minutes were censored and an Access To Information records request by Blacklock’s Reporter did not expound on the “indictment” reference.
The former Conservative leader also offered advice on how to handle the 1988 election, saying deputy ministers should be left in charge of the various departments while the ministers prepared for the “electoral challenge.”
Mr. Mulroney described the deputy ministers as “loyal” with the ability to “keep the deepest secrets which could not be said of chiefs of staff and political advisors” who, he added, should be sent “out of the departments and into the ridings.”
“Not many current chiefs of staff could command $75,000-a year jobs,” Mulroney was quoted in the minutes. “The quality of proposed appointments–nice people of Conservative persuasion, period–was not of the calibre of the professional deputy minister.”
Mr. Mulroney, now 84, was prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993.
He led his party to the largest electoral triumph in the country’s history in September of 1984 and was re-elected with a majority government in 1988, the first Tory prime minister to win back-to-back majority governments since Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald in the late 1800s. Mr. Mulroney resigned in June 1993, after serving nearly nine years as prime minister.
