Every family has a Brian Mulroney

I'd have paid good money not to see Brian Mulroney testify to the Ethics Committee. It was like watching your father get drunk at a party or seeing your mother naked.* I kept having to straighten myself out of the fetal position.

It was excruciating because it was so revealing but only in the worst way, like a group therapy session for the nation.

Over all of us glowered the shadow of the family patriarch, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a man who inherited money and never developed a taste for it. It wasn't good for the deficit but at least we know Trudeau's deft, aristocratic hands never soiled themselves with thousand-dollar bills from any Mr. Dodgy.

Every aspect of the Canadian personality was represented at the committee hearing. Paul Szabo, the chair, is a sweet man who means well — "Nobody will fault me for not trying" he says — the kind of guy who runs a small-town Canadian Tire franchise.

He looks eerily like Representative Henry Waxman of California who has all the good questions written down for grilling witnesses (such as ex-attorney general Alberto Gonzales) but delivers them like a wet facecloth.

At one point, Szabo said hopefully to the quarrelling MPs, "If you would accommodate each other, that would be great." Yes, it would be super-dooper, Mr. Szabo.

The supporting cast

A handful of MPs stood out. Pat Martin, the NDP's Ethics and Privacy critic and MP for Winnipeg Centre, is the stalwart son, Matt Damon in Syriana. "I'm not calling you a liar, Mr. Mulroney, but I don't want anybody here to think I believe you," he said wryly, which was as good a summing-up of our relationship with Brian Mulroney as has ever been spoken.

Serge Ménard, Bloc MP for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, was scarily good, a former trial lawyer and clearly the brains of the family. It seems unfair that he is also good-looking. He wants to divorce Canada but we are holding out for major real estate and throwing emotional fits, so he lies low for the moment, skulking in a sexy way.

Tory MP Dean Del Mastro was the boisterous kid brother. David Tilsen, a Conservative MP and life member of the Optimist Club of Orangeville, Ont., was your classic bad-tempered old guy with hair cut with garden shears. Have you ever in your life referred to someone as a "Johnny Come Lately?" He does. And he yells.

Essence all about dirt

Other than these, the men — and they were all men but that's typical and not just because they're typical men — were OK, just like in real life and in your family, which is why I found them reassuring. They appeared youngish, but disproportionately portly. MPs gain weight because they eat awful food at local events, and these men were suffering from a collar size too small.

You can always spot the ones whose marriage is in trouble, because if a wife truly loves a husband, she doesn't let him leave the house with a tie like that. But perhaps they don't see their wives who are back home in the riding, gritting their teeth while the men stride through Ottawa.

The essence of the intervention was all about dirt, in the anthropological sense. Dirt is matter out of place. Envelopes of thousand-dollar bills are matter that should never have touched Mulroney's hands. They did. Ergo, he has dirty hands.

It was a mistake, he tells the family, and besides they weren't really dirty in the first place. "I erred in judgment," he says. No. I erred in judgment when I didn't get my eavestroughs cleaned in November. You took cash from a German bagman. It's different.

He just can't help himself. Unctuous as ever, he goes over the top. He doesn't work at a law firm, but one of "the great law firms of Canadian history." He doesn't just have a family but a wife by his side and four young children and an ailing mother and a dead father … Brian, everyone in the room has a family. Everyone has a boss. It's not special.

"We all have enemies," he says, and waxes philosophical. But that's not how he really feels, so why pretend. He rails at Stevie Cameron, one of Canada's best and most implacable journalists, for talking to the RCMP in her office at home, which must mean she's some kind of informant. He doesn't realize that informants don't invite you to their home; they meet you in hotel rooms.

Talks like an archbishop

He weirdly didn't declare $45,000 in expenses when he finally paid tax on his mysterious cash. Then he destroyed any written evidence of those expenses. He says it's OK to take cash, which is news to me and news, I would imagine, to Revenue Canada, who wants my eavestrougher's income written down.

Asked to provide his tax return, Mulroney doesn't just refuse, he talks like an archbishop. "The only sacred thing is the secrecy of our tax returns." Tax returns aren't sacred, they're embarrassing. Everyone finds out how little money you make compared to someone else and you die a little death. So hand them over, Brian. But he won't.

I dread the return of the committee in January, the most depressing month of the year. That's the thing about family therapy. It never tells you anything you didn't know about your family, but it does drive the pain home.

Canada is my family. I love them, I don't love them. After they looked like fools at the Bali summit, from now on when I go out with them, I'll pretend I don't know who these people are.

But I know Brian. Every family has a Brian.

*My father was a teetotaler. My mother has never been naked.

This Week

I didn't want to write this because it's so disappointing. But Anne Enright's novel The Gathering, which won this year's Booker Prize, is bad. Boring and bad. It's just another Irish family full of resentment, alcoholism and Mam's mysterious friend in the parlour, and it isn't written well enough to make up for the clichés. While I'm at it, her memoir about motherhood, Making Babies, was dull. And I love babies and pretty much everything they do.

For Christmas, you're going to get Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Be warned. It's a great story about the most significant summer in a young woman's life, the summer by which she measures all summers. The last section is a huge disappointment. It sort of peters out. This may be intentional, as in "It's so like life." But maybe not. I used to despise alternative endings on movie DVDs but I want Hay to write a new ending for the paperback.

Letters

Heather Mallick's column on the internal family squabbles that were evident in the Mulroney testimony was funny and refreshing, and reminded me again of what I miss most about Canadian politics. Not the scandal or embarrasment of course, but the way that Canadians and Canadian politicians relate to each other - north of the border, it's OK for politicians to be human, where in the US it's apparently inexcusable (and a bit salacious).

Thanks for the perspective, Heather - and keep an eye on the family for us!

– Tony Higgins | Las Vegas, NV