Conrad Black is back! Thank goodness! It was difficult to envision how the nation could maintain its sense of identity without him.
Here is a man with so much integrity that he would rather give up his Canadian citizenship than be denied his rightful place as a Peer of the Realm – an authentic realm, the English realm – and honestly, do we not all desire secretly to be Peers of the Realm? To be addressed as Lord Somebody instead of just Mr. Somebody?
True, Lord Black didn’t actually have a rightful place in the House of Lords, a body that historically consists of those who inherit their peerage, but that is where his Canadian spirit came into play.
He bought his rightful place and Canada has a long and proud history of wealthy men buying their rightful place in society. Sometimes that place is in the pages of history, sometimes in the society pages of the country’s leading newspapers and sometimes, as in Lord Black’s case, in the weighty pages of court documents.
That is the second way in which Lord Black assured himself of his rightful place; he not only waged a long, hopeless legal battle with a foreign power, but he never surrendered, fighting instead until every one of his legal arguments was discredited and every last appeal denied.
Not only did he battle courageously in the proud Canadian tradition, but when finally convicted, he did not bow his head and submit timidly to the blind dictates of American justice, but strode proudly into custody, there to serve his time as a model inmate.
Now released, those close to him have confirmed the third way in which Lord – sorry, I forgot he lost his peerage – Mr. Black has defined his rightful place in society.
While imprisoned, he discovered that those around him, his fellow convicts, were in fact a much more complex, interesting and in many ways worthy group of individuals than he had imagined.
Many yearned to better themselves; many were knowledgeable and skilled, and many had been treated harshly by a system that had ignored their humanity. Mr. Black, we are now told, is a changed man.
I say welcome him back. He will need our help. There will be many of his former peers, who will say that he has been duped.
They will scorn him and shun him, not because he was convicted of serious crimes – that is merely evidence of his pushing the limits of legality, an activity they both admire and practice themselves – but because he was seduced into denying that the lower classes, the less advantaged, the poor and indigent, were responsible for their own poverty and misfortune.
That denial is offensive to the rich and powerful, and was to Mr. Black himself before his downfall.
Like so many of the wealthy, he was certain that his own gifts were what determined his success: his brains, his work ethic, his cleverness and that the rest of society was, well, simply not worthy.
There is now hope, however, that since he has been readmitted to Canada for a year, he will recover and regain the disdain he has lost.
A few glimpses of placard waving protesters and a couple of whiffs of poutine, and he will retreat with his lovely wife to his library and wine cellar.
When that happens he will be able to resume his rightful place, if not as a true Peer of the Realm, then at least a member of that even more powerful and influential peerage: the self-proclaimed elite. Afterwards, he can display once again the air of superiority and the demeanour of proud dignity and self-satisfaction that we so long admired.
– Jim Holtz is a columnist for the WEEKENDER and a former reporter for the Grand Forks Gazette
