Brian Mulroney, 18th prime minister and PC titan, dead at 84
There was no in-between with Martin Brian Mulroney.
Canadians loved him: In 1984, they handed the youthful charmer a blank cheque and the largest majority mandate in history so he could change the country.
Canadians hated him: When he announced his departure from politics in 1993, his charm was dismissed as blarney, his youth faded into a lugubrious middle-age.
He entered the job with massive support; he left with the lowest approval rating in the history of polling.
Voters pleaded for reforms when they elected him. When he tried to deliver that change — be it free trade, tax reform or a new Constitution — they reacted with wariness at best and hostility more often.
News of Mulroney’s death Thursday at the age of 84 elicited a very different response.
“I was an opponent of him all my political career, but in politics, opposition is opposition,” former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien said in a rare appearance on Parliament Hill.
“It’s like playing hockey. You can fight on the ice and have a beer together after that. And we had a lot of things in common.”
A spokesman for Mulroney’s daughter Caroline said he died surrounded by family at a Palm Beach hospital, where he was being treated after a recent fall.
“He was committed to this country, loved it with all his heart and served it many, many years in many different ways,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters in Thunder Bay.
“He had the courage to do big things.”
Even after leaving office, Mulroney couldn’t shake the suspicions that dogged him, especially allegations that swirled around an Air Canada purchase of Airbus jets in 1988. In 1997, he won an out-of-court settlement with the then-Liberal government in a libel suit over an RCMP investigation of the Airbus matter.
But in 2008, Mulroney faced an embarrassing public grilling before a public inquiry charged with looking into his relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian businessman with ties to the Airbus file who eventually ended up in a German jail for tax evasion.
Before he went to jail, though, Schreiber spent a decade fighting extradition through the Canadian legal system, dropping tantalizing hints throughout that he and Mulroney were much closer than the former prime minister had claimed.
Before becoming the first Quebecer to lead the Conservatives in the 20th century, Mulroney was the Boy from Baie-Comeau.
Born March 20, 1939, in the isolated smelting town on Quebec’s North Shore, his BaieComeau years had a profound influence on him.
The town was overwhelmingly francophone. Most of Mulroney’s playmates spoke no English and he grew up thinking there was nothing unusual about a bilingual existence.
The town mill was Americanowned. Mulroney was raised on the notion that American investment meant jobs for his father and the other families in Baie-Comeau. He would go on to ease restrictions on American investment in Canada.
He worshipped his father Ben, an electrician who taught him the importance of loyalty. His father had always voted Liberal, but during his university years Mulroney became a prominent young Tory.
His political choice was a bizarre one for a young Quebecer at a time when the Liberals had a stranglehold on federal politics in that province.
He headed to the Tory leadership convention in 1956 intending to vote for Davie Fulton, but was mesmerized by the oratory of John Diefenbaker.
The 17-year-old student from Quebec and the 61-year-old Prairie populist would go on to form an unusual friendship that the young Mulroney would flaunt before his amazed chums by gathering them in a room and reaching the Chief on the telephone.
Mulroney’s university years would also bring him into contact with those who would later help him win the leadership and serve in his government: eventual senators Lowell Murray,
Michel Cogger and Jean Bazin, and the man who would become his soulmate, Lucien Bouchard.
These friends would get him to the ball. They would also be among those who would bring him some of his greatest heartache at evening’s end.
On Sept. 4, 1984 — election day — Mulroney’s Tories kicked the Quebec door down. The province elected 58 Tory MPs, most of them political unknowns outside their ridings.
Mulroney had won the largest number of seats ever — 211 of 282 MPs — to become Canada’s
18th prime minister. It was an achievement paralleled in the 20th century by only one other Conservative leader — Mulroney’s hero, John Diefenbaker.
The bilingual Mulroney did what the unilingual Diefenbaker could not: On Nov. 21, 1988, he won a second majority mandate after a hard-fought election on free trade with the United States.
His honeymoon with the Canadian public actually lasted less than a year after his 1984 win.
Tories hoping Mulroney would become Canada’s version of John F. Kennedy had those hopes dashed when age-old political practices such as patronage begat age-old political scandals.
Eight ministers were forced to resign from Mulroney’s cabinet during his first four-year term. None of the scandals touched Mulroney personally, but his judgment was called into question for appointing ministers of dubious character.
Many involved in scandals were his cronies, including Cogger and Bazin.
Two years after the election, polls suggested the Conservatives had the support of some 20 per cent of Canadians, putting the party in third place behind the Liberals and the New Democrats.
Mulroney seemed unencumbered by a guiding political philosophy. He often sought to reconcile opposing views rather than boldly state his own.
He electrified voters during the 1984 election debate with his attack on John Turner and the Liberal party’s history of patronage. But he wasted little time after his election in giving his old friends Senate seats and other plum posts.
“Universality is a sacred trust,” Mulroney declared. Six months later, the sacred trust was up for review in an economic statement by thenfinance minister Michael Wilson.
After widespread protests, the government backed down on a plan to remove part of the inflation protection on old-age pensions. In 1993, the baby bonus was scrapped in favour of a program that aimed the money at more needy families.
During the 1983 leadership race, he lampooned John Crosbie’s support for promoting free trade with the United States.
“It’s terrific until the elephant twitches, and if it ever rolls over, you’re a dead man,” Mulroney said.
No mention was made of the subject during the election. In 1985, his government opened negotiations with the Americans and the free trade deal took effect Jan. 1, 1989.
If there was vacillation on some policy fronts, there was no shaking his commitment to Quebec. He persuaded first ministers to make it their priority to win Quebec’s backing for a renewed Constitution.
No one expected him to play midwife to a deal that would win the unanimous backing of all first ministers when he invited them to a little-known government retreat in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa in 1987.
The whole country was surprised when their meeting produced the Meech Lake accord. The package included recognition of Quebec as a distinct society and gave all provinces a greater say in the appointment of senators and justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Not since Confederation had any prime minister been able to strike a unanimous agreement on the Constitution.
That unanimity lasted as long as it took to change three provincial governments. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, long retired but still influential, attacked the pact to great effect.
Changing the agreement to satisfy three new premiers in 1990 came at a crushing personal cost for Mulroney.
Lucien Bouchard, his best friend for almost 30 years and the man Mulroney brought into politics and his cabinet, turned his back on the prime minister and his party over the changes.