Brian Mulroney an ambitious campaigner in timid Tory times

Cin Toronto entral to Caroline Mulroney’s pitch to become the next leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives is the notion that she offers “generational change.”

“Relative to whom?” and “so what?” are valid questions.

The next leader will certainly be older than Patrick Brown, and a fair chunk of the party was thrilled to see him leave. Twice. Tim Hudak was younger than Mulroney is when he won the leadership, and, well, it was unfortunate.

Watching 79-year-old Brian Mulroney campaign for his daughter on Tuesday, I’d be hard-pressed to argue age matters at all.

The public-facing aspects of this leadership campaign have often been stilted, joyless and jittery, with Doug Ford carefully keeping his powder dry and Mulroney trying to build confidence without screwing up. Only Christine Elliott has often sounded passionate, confident and halfway credible all at once.

Mulroney père, on the other hand, waltzed into a packed banquet hall in Vaughan at noon on Tuesday like a conquering hero, to a standing ovation, and settled in behind the lectern like it was a favourite sweater and a mug of hot cocoa. When he was done, but for the greyer beards, the camerawielding mob that escorted him out of the room might as well have had Justin Trudeau at its centre.

Mulroney regaled us with a smorgasbord of chucklesome anecdotes, bons mots and name-dropping. He cheerfully batted away several entreaties that he return to politics. He said he mooted the idea to Mila during Jean Chrétien’s infamous “I don’t know if I am in West, South, North or East Jerusalem” press conference in 2000.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” she supposedly replied, “and I know your new wife is really going to love the experience.” Much mirth!

Mulroney pooh-poohed the need for legislative experience in an aspiring premier — perhaps the biggest knock against his daughter — arguing he had none when he won the Tory leadership in 1983 and rampaged to a majority government, and suggesting he “want(s) no part of ” the sort of experience that Kathleen Wynne and Co. have in spades.

“I knew Ontario when it was the driver of Confederation, the engine of Canada’s economy, a glorious leader in this country,” he prated, crediting the “strong, consistent and brilliant” leadership of Tory premiers John Robarts, Bill Davis and Mike Harris for “the large measure” of its success. “And now Ontario has been reduced to accepting equalization payments from Newfoundland and Labrador.”

Mulroney recounted the story of his immigrant parents, scrimping and striving and launching their kids into prosperity — the Canadian dream, so to speak. But it’s all changed, he lamented, changed utterly.

“We’ve lost the vision, we’ve lost the hope, we’ve lost the opportunity — we’ve wasted it all on gas plants that don’t work and debts that bring us nothing but crippling payments, $18 billion a year,” he thundered. “Can you imagine if you had that in your back pocket for the health care system, for universities, for highways, for GO trains?”

“Caroline and Stephen (Lecce, the Tories’ candidate in King Vaughan and emcee at the event) and people like that are going to recapture that dream, going to rebuild that for the children and grandchildren of tomorrow,” Mulroney promised.

Well, blimey O’Reilly. I mean, maybe they will. But to watch Brian Mulroney on stage, fielding question after question about NAFTA in the age of Donald Trump, is to be reminded of just how many big swings he took in office: free trade, deregulation, privatizing 23 Crown corporations — gas stations, a uranium mining concern, two aerospace firms — that no one in their right mind would consider renationalizing today. Acid rain. Apartheid. Not one but two attempts at constitutional reform.

And it’s to be reminded of how few swings today’s Canadian conservatives seem willing to take.

Mulroney’s execution certainly wasn’t entirely conservative: asked how he and Caroline differed on policy, he suggested she might be tougher on the government’s bottom line — and he said he wished he had been. His ideas weren’t necessarily great ones, in hindsight: all that constitutional mountaineering almost ended in disaster in 1995, and the reconstituted national conservative coalition still doesn’t seem entirely comfortable in its own skin.

Nor does Ontario’s, frankly. Before everything went cuckoo bananas, the Tories were poised to win on a platform that basically promised not to change much of anything — and one of its biggest changes, a revenue-neutral carbon tax to replace cap-and-trade, has since been curb-stomped to death by every candidate in the race.

Demonstrably, in Canada, you do not need a huge, room-filling personality to govern effectively. But if you haul out Brian Mulroney to campaign for you, you’re going to invite comparisons. And if you’re going to claim that the current government has literally laid waste to the province, a guy like Mulroney is liable to highlight just how modest the Conservatives’ proposals are to rebuild it all from scratch.