Brian Mulroney, who was Canada's Prime Minister from 1984-1993, died on February 29. Mulroney was a controversial leader who almost caused the breakup of the country and who in 2012 had to admit that he basically took a bribe from an ultra-shady German businessman. When he resigned in 1993, he was so unpopular that his Progressive Conservative Party (a wonderfully oxymoronic name) was almost wiped out entirely. But he was also a very pragmatic and sensible conservative. Mulroney was a supremely gifted politician (not necessarily a compliment) and his nine years in power were filled with impactful legislation, the results of which are still being felt today. In an interview in 2006, Mulroney stated he was the one of the “most consequential prime ministers in Canadian history." He wasn't exaggerating.
Mulroney turned the 1988 election into a referendum on the free trade agreement he had negotiated with the US. The issue was extremely emotional and polarizing, with opponents prophesizing that Canada would turn into the 51st state. With the help of a lot of ads paid for by business groups, Mulroney easily won the election and free trade with the Americans became a reality. There have been a lot of studies done on what the economic impacts have been, but coming up with hard numbers has been difficult. Suffice to say, larger businesses benefitted but many manufacturing jobs were lost. This is always the way it goes with free trade – there are going to be losers. The world was moving in the direction of free trade at the time and it would’ve been futile for Canada to resist. What benefitted us was our much stronger social safety net, which helped people who lost their jobs survive. The US failed on that front, and the dismal results of that failure can clearly be seen today.
Mulroney’s determination to get Quebec to sign on to Pierre Trudeau's constitution nearly resulted in the breakup of country. After acrimonious negotiations with the provincial governments, the Meech Lake agreement was killed by newly elected Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells. A new deal was made, the Charlottetown Accord, and put to the Canadian people in a referendum. (I voted yes, but I wouldn’t do so now.) Opposition from the newly created right-wing Reform Party, Quebec separatists and most importantly, Pierre Trudeau himself, led to its defeat, after which another Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1995 came within a few thousand votes of succeeding. Trudeau was Mulroney’s white whale, and at least part of Mulroney’s motivation on the constitution was his desire to outdo Trudeau. It was a huge miscalculation and showed one of his flaws – his ego often drove him to swing for the fences, without really considering the consequences.
The GST - bitterly referred to at the time as the "gouge and screw tax"- is still with us, even though Jean Chretien vowed to repeal it in 1993. The money it brought in helped Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, balance the budget and fend off the bond vigilantes who were stalking Canada throughout the 1990s. The GST was hugely unpopular, and most people at the time seemed unable to process that it at least partly replaced another hidden tax. But consumption taxes are regressive and prone to widespread evasion. Mulroney believed that a consumption tax would do the least harm to the economy ( this belief is the subject of contentious debate among economists) and would encourage people to save more money, which he considered necessary. Subsequent events show that his thinking on the latter at least was erroneous; people just borrowed an extra 7 percent and kept right on spending.
The best thing about Mulroney was his pragmatism and moderation. He respected the political process and his opponents. He understood that many issues were complex and he could see both sides. He allowed several free votes in Parliament on difficult social issues like abortion and capital punishment. He attacked Apartheid in South Africa and demanded that Nelson Mandela be released from prison; when Mandela was released in 1990, one of the first calls he made was to Mulroney to thank him for his support. Mulroney also cared about the environment, passing legislation to deal with acid rain, CFCs, and toxic waste. He even came up with a plan for climate change in 1990, but it was never implemented.
Taken all together, Mulroney's record as PM was pretty decent. But there is really no getting around the corruption. As Stevie Cameron detailed in her book On the Take, Mulroney arrived in Ottawa accompanied by a coterie of leeches hoping to cash in after being out of power for almost all of the previous 17 years. After memorably ripping John Turner for patronage appointments in the 1984 election debate, Mulroney stacked his government with conservative bag men and old cronies. The free-for-all culminated with Mulroney, needing to pay for his extravagant Westmount mansion, accepting a $300,000 payoff from a German businessman connected to the Airbus consortium. In truth, not enough has been made of this, and predictably upon his death, most of the tributes downplayed it. While Mulroney was out of office when the payoff occurred, it was clearly a thank you for his pushing through a deal in which Air Canada, then a crown corporation, bought $1.8 billion worth of Airbus planes in 1988.
But let's compare Mulroney's ethics to the two people he is frequently grouped with from that time, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan had a propensity for racism and violence, at least in rhetoric. He spread the lie of the black ‘welfare queen’ who drove a Cadillac, and in the 1980 campaign he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi - the site of the notorious murders of three civil rights workers by police officers - to make a speech on "state’s rights", a coded term for "let us be as racist as we want to be." He also talked about bombing Vietnam into a parking lot (this would be genocide) and repeatedly encouraged using violence on anti-war protesters. Most disgustingly, he persuaded the Iranians to delay releasing American hostages until after the 1980 election, helping ensure that he would defeat Jimmy Carter. Comparing these despicable acts to Mulroney’s payoff is pretty much akin to equating a serial killer to a shoplifter.
Thatcher ardently supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa and repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and never advocated for his release from prison. But when the vile Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested by Spain, Thatcher vehemently maintained Pinochet was an innocent victim and should be immediately set free. Pinochet murdered and tortured tens of thousands and he and his family stole millions of dollars from the poor Chilean people, but all this added up to a big nothingburger in Thatcher's addled brain. I'm convinced that were she alive today, this supposed conservative paragon would be happily onside with the extremist dirtbags who now dominate the Right. You certainly can’t say that about Mulroney.
Over the last 30 years, there has been a steady drift among conservatives away from the pragmatic, moderate conservatism Mulroney embodied. I can say from experience that Steven Harper had no respect for people who disagreed with him, and the idea that he could be wrong about something never occurred to him. This is the disease of ideology, which turns politics into a team blood sport where every member must fall in line with the prevailing opinion and whatever the other side says must be maliciously attacked without fail. When reality doesn’t conform to ideology, a new reality is invented, whereby pigs like Pinochet are suddenly innocent as lambs. Mulroney never succumbed to this lunacy. He was always a realist and a conciliator (he even praised the son of his arch nemesis). As such, I’ll take Mulroney, warts and all, over the likes of Harper and Poilievre any day of the week, and if given the choice, I suspect most Canadians would do the same.
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