A storied career of achievement, political pain

At the peak of his career, Don Mazankowski was as powerful as it’s possible to get in Canada without being prime minister.

As deputy PM to thenprime minister Brian Mulroney, he was often and accurately called the country’s “chief operating officer.”

But Mazankowski never seemed lofty around his home base of Vegreville, near Edmonton.

He was just “Maz” — enormously popular, and not only because he controlled the spout of pacifying funds to the entire West.

Jeff Dubois, a fervent New Democrat who shared experience in the car business with Mazankowski, recalls how they would agree to coffee for 15 minutes and “come back four hours later.”

“The good old days, the good old ways,” Dubois said Wednesday as word of Mazankowski’s death at 85 was coming out.

“Don was never partisan and always a man of his word. Even when we brought Tommy Douglas in for a provincial campaign rally, Maz went out of his way to greet Tommy and welcome him.”

It is coincidental, although not fitting at all, that Mazankowski died the day after the 40th anniversary of the Pierre Trudeau Liberals’ introduction of the hated national energy program.

The memory is corrosive to this day. For a sense of what it meant in Alberta, there’s no better guide than Postmedia colleague Licia Corbella’s retrospective.

The Mulroney Progressive Conservatives were elected four years later, in 1984, with massive support from the West.

One of Mazankowski’s key jobs was to keep that loyalty by erasing the remnants of the NEP while showing Western Canada that fair treatment was coming.

But Mazankowski’s political efforts ultimately failed because Preston Manning’s Reform party was on the rise and would ultimately destroy the PCS.

Maz tried, though. Oh, how he tried. The background sadness of his career is that he did so much only to see the whole enterprise collapse.

He was instrumental in talks for the free-trade agreement, which has done more for Prairie economies over 25 years than any federal government policy.

NAFTA took effect Jan. 1, 1994, three months after voters had crushed the PCS. They never got any political capital from it, the party being basically dead already.

But 25 years later, when the Trump administration threatened NAFTA, nobody was more panicked than the Liberal forces who had originally fought the deal.

One of Mazankowski’s last acts as he retired was to decline Mulroney’s offer of a Senate seat. He’d been a politician for 25 years but was never a careerist.

Personally, Mazankowski had irrepressible energy. He conveyed authority without ever seeming threatening or elitist.

One day in 1989 I interviewed him in Edmonton for a book my wife, Sydney Sharpe, and I were writing, called Breakup: Why the West Feels Left out of Canada.

In his office, sparse to the point of penury, Mazankowski was exasperated.

He was working with a storied bureaucrat, Bruce Rawson, on the Western Diversification Initiative.

Deals had already been signed for 1,289 projects worth $ 665.4 million. There had been $20 billion in farm aid, and a $380-million commitment for a Calgary-based project to build a computerized air traffic control system for the whole country.

The Tories were pouring in the benefits on a scale to equal anything happening in Ontario and Quebec. Hilariously, Ontario premier David Peterson said “we don’t get any breaks out of the federal government.”

But the GST was coming. Albertans didn’t like the Meech Lake accord or little matters like federal loans to strip clubs near federal offices in Hull.

“We started out in 1984 in an attempt to scale down government spending ,” Mazankowski said.

“We were clobbered. There was a sense that just as the West was about to get its due, you guys are going to cut back.

“And we did. We went through that, and came out with the GST, and now we’re hammered with the charge that we’re spending too much money.

“We’re somewhat exasperated ... It’s not getting any easier.”

It got harder still until election day in 1993.

Mazankowski went on to many honours and projects. His record is almost uniformly positive.

And yet this quite brilliant man, devoted to both his country and the West, saw many of his dreams chewed up in the meat grinder of regional politics in this country.

Just as sadly, it’s all happening again.