Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was prepared to pay US$40 billion for Canada's Potash Corp. Forty billion dollars. Regina Leader-Post columnist Murray Mandryk says Ottawa was prepared to approve the deal but then politics and a certain national newspaper columnist got in the way. Mandyrk's full column is here — and ought to be read — but let me call your attention to this this rather remarkable paragraph:
The second key element [in the government's decision to reject the deal] was a leak to former Postmedia columnist Don Martin that the takeover was about to be approved with conditions. The impact of the information leaking out caused panic in a federal government already paranoid about legal breaches of confidentiality over the approval process.
And sources believe the need to disprove the Martin leak was such that it became the other big reason why the Harper government changed its position on the BHP Billiton takeover.
Erik Waddell, who is the senior policy advisor to Industry Minister Tony Clement (who ostensibly made the decision to reject BHP Billiton) tweets his reaction to this paragraph: “Absolute nonsense.” And, a few minutes after Waddell, the minister himself reacts to Mandryk's assertion: “This is a load of utter balderdash.”
I'm not privy to the decision-making in the PMO nor to Minister Clement's department, but if Mr. Mandryk based the “second element” of his piece on Don Martin's musings, he should have read Martin's column a little bit more closely.
For example, this part of Martin's column:
“All I said in the column, based on two in-the-loop sources who have never lied to me before, is that the departmental position is to endorse the takeover with unspecified conditions. Once political calculus is added to the mix by the Clement-Harper decision desk, anything can happen from a rubber stamp approval to an outright rejection.”
Quite a wide berth, wouldn't you say? Martin left himself the opportunity to claim “I told ya” whichever way the deal went. So, what in effect was leaked to Martin? Nothing much, it seems.