Foreign cash helped dump Clark: CBC report

CBC Television's the fifth estate aired a report Wednesday night suggesting foreign money went toward financing the successful campaign in 1983 to dump Joe Clark as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

• fifth estate: Choppers, plots and cold, hard cash

Clark, who's now Tory leader once again, would only say he plans to leave those events "in the past."

But he says if money from German industrialists led to him losing the leadership review it may be time to look at how party leadership races are financed.

Clark gave up the leadership in 1983 after failing to get 70 per cent of delegates, a target he had promised to achieve.

He won the confidence of 68 per cent of those at the convention, but concluded that was not strong enough. He decided to submit to a full-fledged leadership contest and lost to Brian Mulroney.

The fifth estate report says German money was used to pay for two planeloads of Quebec delegates to fly to Winnipeg to vote against Clark.

The documentary quotes two wealthy industrialists, Karlheinz Schreiber and Walter Wolf, as saying they helped get the money together.

Schreiber is a German-Canadian businessman with connections to politicians and business people in Canada and Germany.

Austrian-born Wolf is a former oilman who now lives and works in Slovenia.