Canada needs Conrad Black

In honour of Victoria Day, one presumes, Conrad Black, the former industrialist and onetime newspaper baron, he of the British peerage – his lordship, if you will – took part in what reportedly will be his one and only sit-down media interview, chatting with the CBC’s chief news anchor Peter Mansbridge at his palatial Bridle Path home in Toronto after his release from a Florida jail earlier this month.

Sitting in what appeared to be a study, with multitudinous volumes of books in the background, the 67-year-old Black was at his feisty best as he excoriated NDP leader Thomas Mulcair for using his parliamentary immunity to call Black a “British criminal” in the House of Commons. Black also took Mulcair to task for none-too-subtly insinuating that he had used his Tory contacts to gain a one-year temporary residency permit in Canada.

And like he always has, Black maintained his innocence in the most vociferous and florid of terms, as is his wont and tradition.

But aside from minor bouts of irritation with Mansbridge’s chummy, softball questions, it was a rather subdued performance from a man who was clearly looking to rehabilitate his tattered public image and burnish his quest to regain his Canadian citizenship.

Clearly his lordship needs a good rest to get himself back in fighting form, unless he truly is the changed man that he and his supporters say he is, which would be somewhat disappointing to those of us who have enjoyed a good chuckle in the past from his puffed up persona.

I feel like I should be getting worked up about Black being allowed back into Canada, as well as his lack of remorse over his fraud and obstruction of justice convictions, and his desire to become a Canadian again after obnoxiously renouncing his citizenship in 2001 in order to accept a British peerage.

I should be getting more agitated, but my heart’s just not in it, because I think Canada needs Lord Tubby as much as he apparently needs Canada.

The Americans have plenty of rich buffoons to make fun of – Donald Trump and Mark Cuban spring immediately to mind – but here in Canada, the pickings are slim, especially since the downfall and death of Peter Pocklington and the demise of Pierre Péladeau.

Galen Weston, David Thomson and the Irvings are just too dull for words.

We need Conrad Black and his polysyllabic silliness, if only for the sheer comic fodder he provides.

Sure he probably cut a lot of journalism jobs as he built his newspaper empire using Roy Thomson’s cut-expenses-to-the-bone prescription for profitability.

But he also set off a job boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the launch of the National Post, his perpetually money-losing vanity project. It was a time that saw every journalist and his or her mother, or so it seemed, find work at one of four fully staffed Toronto-area dailies.

There were bidding wars for top talent, and salaries were sky high.

It turned out to be the mega-party before the massive hangover that the battered newspaper business is now experiencing, but the industry-wide hiring spree initiated by the Post helped jump-start many a journalism career, mine included.

Anything that interrupts the viagra sildenafil 100mg blood flow can directly cause erection problems. This hormone also provides a sense of relaxation and decrease the feeling of general anxiety. tadalafil from canada http://www.wouroud.com/environment.php?ln=ar It can have a devastating effect on your life and cialis viagra australia on your self-esteem. The prolonged use of these products get viagra online doesn’t have any side effect. Nevertheless, Black is a convicted criminal in the United States, and granting his only interview to the public broadcaster was a nakedly cynical ploy in his effort to regain his citizenship.

Indeed, he told Mansbridge that he intends to apply “within a year or two when it is clear that I don’t have cloven feet and wear horns” and once all the hubbub over his return dies down.

That has angered many critics, who say he should be treated like any other non-citizen with a criminal record who tries to come to Canada.

The Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn is clearly not amused by Black’s post-release charm offensive. In his latest column, Hepburn reminded readers of how Black dissed Canada when he renounced his citizenship in 2001, calling this country “a plain vanilla place” – a rather mild statement compared to some of the descriptions Black has used to describe Canada in the past.

Yet Black apparently has the support of at least one prominent left-wing cultural type: literary heavyweight Margaret Atwood, who is a personal friend of the erstwhile media baron.

Atwood told the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente that Black “has a lot to say and contribute” and “is now a very informed and outspoken commentator on prison reform, and does not think the government’s expensive mega-jails plan will work.”

Atwood apparently buys Black’s line that he was railroaded by the U.S. courts, as well as his contention that he would never have been convicted of similar crimes based on similar evidence in other jurisdictions, including Canada and Britain. (He repeated these claims to Mansbridge this week.)

“The grounds for his conviction – say the legal experts I have spoken with – are dubious,” Atwood told Wente.

Overall, aside from criticizing Canada’s harsh new prison reforms and mandatory sentencing law – he self-servingly told Mansbridge that it makes no sense to lock up non-violent offenders – Black seems, Wente wrote, to have “rekindled a genuine appreciation for Canada, a nation he harshly criticized for years. The rapacious capitalism he once celebrated is less attractive to him now. He seems to have developed… a social conscience.”

No doubt this is all part of a carefully crafted plan to rehabilitate his image, and it’s questionable as to whether he’s changed all that much. (It is heartening, however, to see that he’s learned some common sense when it comes to prison reform.)

In the end, though, the PR campaign hardly matters, as he apparently faces an uphill battle in his effort to regain his citizenship, because of his criminal conviction in the United States.

And yet, oddly, I find myself quietly rooting for Black, because this country has been rather boring since he was sent away in 2007.

Say what you will about him, but he’s always willing to stick his neck out in public and utter opinions that other rich guys like him might be thinking, but are too afraid to say. And he usually does so in such a pompous way as to make an utter fool of himself.

He’s good for a larf, as they say, and if we didn’t have him, we’d need to invent him.

To paraphrase a prominent ex-Canadian, without Conrad Black, this country is indeed “a plain vanilla place.”