"It was back in May, 1995 when Barrick Gold’s Peter Munk established his International Advisory Board – chaired by none other than George H. W. Bush [and other opportunistic former world leaders] and with representation of Mr. Clinton through his White House legal counsel, Vernon Jordan;"

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/tungsten%20genesis.pdf

http://www.goldensextant.com/CanadaGoldGrams.html

Diligent investigation last year by an interested Canadian citizen failed to draw from the Canadian government any explanation for the sale of its gold reserves. See E. Steer, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," LeMetropoleCafe (November 13, 2002). Joe Clark's short-lived minority government fell before it had an opportunity to carry out a plan announced in December 1979 to sell some gold to diversify Canada's official reserves. This idea made some sense at the time, particularly as gold prices rallied to record highs in early 1980. However, diversifying foreign exchange reserves is one thing; eliminating all gold reserves is quite another.

Although the Bank of Canada commissioned a full report to justify its handling of foreign gold during World War II and obligingly provides figures on Canada's gold sales since 1985, it directs all inquiries regarding the reasons for these sales to the federal government's Department of Finance. Suffice it to say that here, despite months of effort that ended at the "risk management" office, Mr. Steer ran into the proverbial stone wall. However, he did extract an intriguing admission:

But in the dying seconds of that last phone conversation with the "risk management" department, the person I was speaking to dropped a bombshell! We had spoken twice before, and he was a real decent and honourable fellow. This is what I remember him saying; "Well Ed, you may not be happy with the answer you got, but I can tell you that your enquiries regarding what happened to Canada's gold, set off alarm bells all over the Department of Finance. There are two things that this department is extremely sensitive about, and that is one of them." If he hadn't said that, this article would never have been written. [Emphasis supplied.]

Absent any official explanation, Mr. Steer offers his own fascinating theory to explain Canada's gold sales and invites others to do the same. He suggests that at the 1985 "Shamrock Summit" in Quebec, Ronald Reagan obtained Brian Mulroney's support for a plan to bankrupt the old Soviet Union by suppressing prices for oil and gold, its two major sources of hard currency. On this hypothesis, Canada's gold sales were its unsung but important contribution to winning the Cold War, and they had the additional and not wholly incidental effect of burnishing the vain Mr. Mulroney's image with his fellow world leaders.

Compared to the United States and other major western powers, Canada's gold reserves in absolute size were rather modest. Assuming the existence of the plan suggested, and as Mr. Steer himself mused, it seems rather unlikely that Canada would have been asked or have agreed to shoulder almost the entire burden of gold sales by itself. Other internationally coordinated schemes to control gold prices, e.g., the London Gold Pool from 1961 to 1968, have not put most of the burden on a single country. What is more, by ultimately declining to support Mr. Reagan's "Star Wars" defense initiative, the Mulroney government passed up what for Canada would have been a far cheaper as well as more effective means to squeeze the finances of the Soviet Union, which in any event had collapsed before Canada's gold sales really shifted into high gear in 1992.

Countries do not unload large chunks of their gold reserves lightly. More often than not even gold sales ostensibly undertaken to diversify official reserves are in fact motivated by reasons touching more important national interests or even national survival. As prime minister from 1984 to 1993, Mr. Mulroney faced two problems that by historic standards might have warranted gold sales if they could have contributed to a solution: securing a comprehensive trade agreement with the United States and dealing with the constitutional challenge presented by the separatist movement in Quebec.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Mr. Mulroney set about making good on his campaign promise to "refurbish" Canadian-U.S. relations, which had fallen into serious disrepair under his predecessor, Pierre Eliot Trudeau. See, e.g., K.R. Nossal, "The Mulroney Years: Transformation and Tumult," Policy Options (June-July 2003). The new prime minister, in a reversal of his earlier policy stance against free trade, soon committed his government to the campaign that culminated in the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (signed January 2, 1988; effective January 1,1989) and later the North American Free Trade Agreement (effective January 1, 1994).

The Canadian government appointed its chief trade negotiator in November 1985, and trade negotiations with the U.S. representative began in Ottawa the following May. But a year later, with the negotiations stalled and American support for an agreement waning, the outcome remained very much in doubt. Then, as Michael Hart recounts in A History of Canada-US Free Trade (1999 conference paper, part 8):

The pundits and pessimists in both countries, however, were proved wrong. The Canadian government stuck to its guns and determined that it had to have an agreement. Also surprisingly, both the US administration and the Congress demonstrated that they were prepared to come to terms with the hard issues and to look forward rather than backward. In a dramatic series of events during the fall of 1987, political leaders from both sides hammered out a satisfactory package that had until then eluded the professional negotiators.