Canada Replaces Defense Chief Who Was Linked to Stripper

OTTAWA â€”  Deputy Prime Minister Erik Nielsen was named Canada’s defense minister Wednesday, filling the post opened by the resignation of Robert Coates in the wake of reports that he entertained a stripper at a sex-oriented West German nightclub.

Nielsen, 61, who has represented the Yukon Territory in Parliament since 1957, is an influential member of the government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He will retain his role as deputy prime minister but is giving up the job of president of the Privy Council--a key post in controlling the government bureaucracy.

Like Coates, his predecessor, Nielsen is believed to be more conservative than either the prime minister or External Affairs Minister Joe Clark, who represents the conservative party’s moderate wing.

“I think he’s very hawkish,� Len Hopkins, the opposition Liberal Party’s spokesman on defense issues, said of him.

The new defense chief was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II for piloting a crippled bomber back to Britain from a raid on Germany. His brother, Leslie Nielsen, is a Hollywood television actor.

Nielsen gained a parliamentary reputation against former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau as the toughest opposition critic in the Progressive Conservative Party.

A Clark supporter in the 1983 battle for party leadership, in which Mulroney ousted Clark, he was named deputy to the new prime minister after last September’s landslide election victory as a way of healing party divisions.

Among his first tasks will be to complete negotiations on plans to replace the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations, built to track Soviet bombers crossing the Arctic but now almost obsolete. Officials have said they plan to have an agreement ready for signing when President Reagan visits Quebec City for talks with Mulroney in March.

Coates resigned Feb. 12 hours after an Ottawa newspaper, the Citizen, reported that he visited the German club and suggested that in doing so, he raised the risk of a security breach. He said details of the newspaper account were false and filed a notice of intent to sue the paper for libel, but said he was resigning out of respect for Parliament.