Here’s to the blustering, funny, vain, exceptional and sometimes inexplicable Brian Mulroney
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 St. F.X., 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 St. F.X., “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.