Blustering, funny, vain, exceptional and inexplicable
It was appropriate that the fall leaves had turned golden in October 2016, as Brian Mulroney gathered his friends and family to his intellectual home of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
Canada’s 18th prime minister, who passed away Thursday, said that without STFX, he’d be back in his hometown of Baie-comeau, Que., driving a truck.
He was revisiting his alma mater to unveil the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, for which he had raised $60 million.
By then, he was already in the autumn years of his life, an elder statesman more concerned about the next generation than the next election, though intensely conscious about how he might be viewed by that next generation.
He need not have worried. As he himself noted, his glittering political career had granted him the splendour of views from the highest mountain tops and the valleys of painful defeats.
He was achingly human — vain and blustering but funny and wise.
By 1992, his approval rating had dipped to the lowest ever recorded for a prime minister. “Popularity is bad for you. I try to avoid it like the plague and I’ve been reasonably successful,” he joked.
He defeated Liberal leader John Turner in 1984 on the patronage issue and then proceeded to erode the public trust in him by filling the Senate with his acolytes.
And then there were the inexplicable episodes, like his dealings with shady German-canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber that saw hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash change hands, allegedly for consulting work. A commission of inquiry led by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant found the cash dealings inappropriate and the former prime minister admitted it was “an error of judgment.”
But Mulroney contained multitudes, to coin Walt Whitman’s phrase, and Canadians should give thanks for his leadership.
As Frank Mckenna, the former New Brunswick premier, said when he introduced Mulroney at STFX, “He is a prime minister who left a large footprint in the sand and in the full sweep of history, he will be remembered as one of our great prime ministers.”
That is a view with which Mulroney would have been in violent agreement. “You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done so many significant things as I did because there are none,” he once boasted.
His record as a transformative prime minister is second to none: the Canada-u.s. Free Trade deal (and later NAFTA), the Acid Rain Treaty, sustained opposition to apartheid, the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax.
These things didn’t just happen on his watch; they often happened because of him. NAFTA negotiations nearly broke down because the Americans would not agree to Canada’s red line — an independent dispute resolution mechanism. As the clock ran down toward a negotiating deadline, Mulroney called president Ronald Reagan and made the point that the U.S. had struck a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Soviets but could not get a free trade deal over the line with its best friend. Reagan subsequently told his negotiating team the dispute settlement mechanism had to be included.
Art Milnes, who worked
with Mulroney for four years as researcher on his memoirs, recalled an occasion he found in the archives in which the prime minister was involved in a heated exchange with Reagan’s successor, president George H.W. Bush, about the future of Europe.
According to the notes, Bush politely told Mulroney that the Europeans were tired of Canada speaking up too much.
“Mulroney got ticked off and said to Bush: ‘Tell the Europeans we’re not renting a seat in Europe. Tell them to go to the graveyards in France and Italy and Belgium. We paid for our seat’,” Milnes recalls. “I was moved by that, him keeping faith with the Canadians who died overseas ... Bush was moved by it too and referred to that phone call in his own book.”
On the fiscal front, the Chrétien Liberals often blamed Canada’s debt-servicing mess in the 1990s on the “dismal financial legacy of the Mulroney Conservatives.”
But, as Mulroney pointed out in his memoirs, it took his government nine years and the Chrétien government another six to clear up the fiscal situation inherited from the Liberals in 1984. “The truth is that Michael Wilson and Don Mazankowski (former Progressive Conservative finance ministers) planted the garden and Paul Martin (the Liberal finance minister) got to pick the flowers,” Mulroney wrote in his memoirs.
The GST was “as unloved as any measure could possibly be” and explained Mulroney’s unpopularity after 1991.
The Liberals campaigned on repealing the GST, as they had done on NAFTA.
“(But) in the end, they recognized the value of the GST and left it in place, knowing full well that it was right for the country and right for the time,” Mulroney wrote.
It’s as well for the current Trudeau government that they did — the GST is forecast to bring in $51.4 billion this fiscal year — more than
10 per cent of all federal government revenues.
Mulroney was back on Parliament Hill in April 2017 to brief the Liberal cabinet on Canada-u.s. relations, ahead of negotiations with the Trump administration. He knew many of the players, including the president, whom he told over dinner that the young prime minister was not as left-wing as his father. Throughout the negotiations, he offered counsel and perspective. “This is a pretty big storm but it’s not lethal,” he would remind the Trudeau folks.
They may have avoided making age-old mistakes for the first time if they had heeded some of his other advice.
Politics isn’t always about polls, it’s about leadership, he said in his memoirs. “Offer it to citizens and they’ll vote for you every time,” he said.
He was critical of Canadian complacency: “There are days when we seem to be like the fellow who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”
And he urged leaders to think long-term, “not for the easy headline in 10 days but for a better Canada in 10 years.”
I arrived on Parliament Hill long after Mulroney left, which perhaps explains why we got along. He was not a fan of the press in general, saying the only two headlines he really liked was the one that said: “Mulroney wins big majority” and the other that read: “Mulroney re-elected with big majority”.
But after I travelled to Antigonish to cover the opening of his governance institute, I would get periodic phone calls from that unmistakable baritone to comment on this or that issue of the day, or, increasingly frequently, on the passing of a former parliamentary colleague.
Milnes said some people have ascribed cynical motives to the former prime minister’s habit of phoning up friends and contacts.
“He’s Irish, it’s what you do. They were genuine and he did it across party lines. He called me when my father died,” Milnes said.
He called me too, just before I left National Post’s Ottawa bureau to join my wife on a diplomatic posting. He thanked me for my service to Canada and wished me all the best.
Now it’s my turn to reciprocate. Thank you, sir. Travel well.
IT’S AS IF I HAVE JUST LOST MY SECOND FATHER ... WHEN I WAS SICK AND OFF WORK FOR FOUR OR FIVE MONTHS, HE CALLED ME EVERY DAY TO CHEER ME UP OR COMMENT ON THE NEWS. HE WAS A FAMILY MAN. — Luc Lavoie, former Mulroney spokesperson
OFFER (LEADERSHIP) TO CITIZENS AND THEY’LL VOTE FOR YOU EVERY TIME.