Mulroney was a reminder of a different time in Canadian politics
Others will remember and reflect upon the Mulroney years better than I. Journalists who covered him, academics who studied him. The electorate that first lauded, then condemned him.
I was not there. I could barely read. But I do remember flashes.
The 1984 campaign: Next to rumpled opponents, here was a young, tall candidate with a big smile, well dressed but not a dandy. In later years, the grown-ups would wring their hands over free trade and the Americanization of Canada at the hands of a madefor-american-tv prime minister.
The consummate communicator, who, when sticking the political knife into a hapless John Turner in the 1984 leaders debate over patronage appointments, did not forget to call him “sir.”
The man who implemented the GST. Whenever my parents took me to the WH Smith bookstore, the cashier would slip into the bag stamp-like stickers with Mulroney's (or finance minister Michael Wilson's) smiling face, cheerfully captioned “Hi! I tax books!”
His willingness to be at the vanguard of tough issues and face the backlash squarely. Where Mulroney did not care about spending political capital to fight acid rain or apartheid, we have a Conservative leader in Pierre Poilievre today who votes against a trade package aimed at helping Ukraine because it isn't popular with his base.
That aforementioned freetrade deal. And most indelibly, the failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements, the constitutional deals Mulroney staked, and lost, his career over. By the end, his approval rating had bottomed out at 12 per cent (no other prime minister has been that low in modern times). His beloved Progressive Conservative Party was reduced to two seats in the 1993 election.
One could dedicate an entire column to unpacking each of these moments in Mulroney's all-or-nothing, go-for-broke years leading the country. Let us focus, however, on this: with the death of Brian Mulroney at 84, Thursday, Canada loses its second to last “big tent politics” prime minister.
Only Jean Chrétien is left to carry this distinction now, as a standard-bearer of an era of politics when it might have been impossible to tell a red Tory from a blue Liberal. A time when space was made to accommodate party members whose views spanned a political continuum.
There are those who will argue Mulroney's attempts at papering over the English-french divide in the name of national unity ultimately made things worse. The years after he left politics saw the rise of the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois and the western populist Reform Party. And that's fair criticism.
But how much can you put the blame in the past? It's been 30 years since he left politics. Today, right- and left-leaning voters are being pulled ever further apart. I have written extensively about the extent to which our modern-day political leaders are fuelling this, dismissing and undermining those who disagree with them. On the economy, the environment, social issues and foreign policy, Liberal and NDP voters are now chasms apart from those in the Conservative base. The two camps' opinions intersect little now, save over a tiny overlapping patch of issues related to cost of living and affordability.
It's not as if Canadians today are particularly pleased with this state of affairs. In recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute, as many in this country say there is “no room” for political compromise as say there is. Mulroney, the consummate dealmaker, was an astute watcher of domestic politics until the end. It must have hurt him to know this.
There can be a tendency to romanticize the past. But at a time when Canadians find themselves increasingly sidelined by an atmosphere of political debate driven and policed by those with the loudest voices on opposite sides of any given issue, Mulroney's death is a reminder of a different time in politics. Gone, but not forgotten.