It’s time to re-evaluate Mulroney
For much of the past four years, Brian Mulroney has been raising money — $60 million of it — to establish a new centre to teach public policy and governance at his alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University.
At Wednesday’s unveiling ceremony for the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government in this bucolic campus town, the former prime minster said his efforts were met with “magnificent assistance” — the Nova Scotia government, for example, chipped in $5 million, as did Tim Hortons co-founder Ron Joyce. Mulroney himself donated $1 million.
But conspicuous by its absence in the list of contributors was the federal government — this despite the fact that former Conservative cabinet ministers like the late Jim Flaherty and Peter MacKay urged Stephen Harper to support the project.
Former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, another to have come off the St. FX conveyor belt of Canadian political leaders, acknowledged the lack of federal presence but said Justin Trudeau’s government is “not disinterested” in supporting the project.
The expectation is that the Liberal prime minister will step up to support the new four-year undergraduate degree in a way the former Conservative prime minister did not. The saga is instructive because it suggests the shifting status in which Canada’s 18th prime minister is held by the people he governed for nine years.
Mulroney was always deeply polarizing — something McKenna put down to him “always having his eye on the tiller,” rather than merely chasing popularity. When Mulroney left office, his approval rating was just 15 per cent, and it averaged just 23 per cent during his time in office.
His reputation was dented further by the Karlheinz Schreiber controversy, with its allegations Mulroney received kickbacks from the German lobbyist in connection with Air Canada’s purchase of Airbus planes in the 1990s.
Commissioner Jeffrey Oliphant found the cash dealings between the two men “inappropriate” in 2010, but Mulroney explained away the payments as an “error of judgment.”
Harper was determined to keep his Conservative predecessor at arm’s length but negative memories fade with time, there can be little doubt Mulroney views this school as a shot at redemption — a chance to rehabilitate his reputation and focus on the triumphs of his long career.
Mulroney’s achievements, from NAFTA to the acid rain treaty, from the fight against apartheid to tax reform, were all in Canada’s longterm interest. Nobody focused primarily on political popularity would have ushered in a goods and services tax, as Mulroney did in 1991.
These accomplishments and others will be celebrated in the university’s $40-million Mulroney Hall, which will contain memorabilia from his time as prime minister, including correspondence with Nelson Mandela and a replica of his office. (A further $20 million will be used to endow academic chairs, scholarships and bursaries, including $1 million for aboriginal Canadians.)
Yet a re-examination of Mulroney’s career is overdue and it is to be hoped a more balanced understanding enters the public consciousness while the 77-year-old is still with us.
“He is a prime minister who left a large footprint in the sand — in the full sweep of history, he will be remembered as one of our greatest prime ministers,” McKenna said Wednesday in his introduction.
Mulroney clearly enjoyed McKenna’s recap of his greatest hits. “In the green room, Frank said he was going to speak for seven or eight minutes and was worried he might go on too long,” Mulroney said when it was his turn to speak. “But Frank, that was too brief.”
But in his speech Mulroney echoed McKenna’s philosophical terms. “I can recall the splendour of the view from the highest mountaintop and the sorrow one feels in the valley of painful defeat. Life is an unending sequence of challenges from which no one emerges unscathed,” he said.
It was 62 years ago that he entered St. FX, the boy from Baie-Comeau with “no money, no connections and no influence.” He credited the small liberal arts school with forming him as a politician and a leader.
He could have taken this legacy project to any university in the country. But as he put it, “My roots are here — this is where my heart is.”
It’s easy to see why. St. FX grads wear their X-rings — awarded in a closed ceremony to senior students every Dec. 3, the feast of St. Francis — with a cultish pride. Mulroney has claimed that without St. FX, he would have been “back in BaieComeau driving a truck.”
But Wednesday was not just about nostalgia for the former prime minister.
“The words of an Irish poet seem appropriate today: ‘The past is consumed in the present and the present is alive only because it gives birth to the future,’” he said.
The Brian Mulroney Institute of Government sees the ex-PM not only birthing the future but reclaiming the past — reminding Canadians that, for all the vanity, blarney and bluster, he was and is a man of social conscience, commitment and public service.