Quebec courts reject businessman’s privacy claim

All this whining from
All this whining from Mulroney and company is such bullshit. Among people who are twisted enough to follow this stuff closely (like me), it’s been common knowledge that Newman had this deal with Mulroney: Regular, not-for-use-til-after-tenure interviews, to be used in a biography of the PM. Newman honoured the deal, despite the fact that a lot of the interviews would have made sensational copy while Mulroney was in office. And Mulroney knew all along — he acknowledged it explicitly — that the material would be used in a book. (Newman quotes Mulroney saying he didn’t want a puff job.)
It was Mulroney who first violated the terms of the deal in 1995 by backing away from his commitment to Newman to make his prime ministerial papers available for the book. Once the deal was dead, Newman was free to use the interviews in whatever way he saw fit.
As for Newman’s ethics in hoarding the material for later, sure, that kind of arrangement is debatable, but Newman hasn’t done daily journalism, with its implied obligation to report newsworthy material right away, for a long, long time. He’s an author, and he was researching a book, meaning his only ethical obligation was to publish the fruits of that research, including the interviews, when he published the book.