In the end Brian Mulroney was widely disliked in western Canada, despite some of the best policies the region has ever seen
Mother Martin’s bar in Montreal was always lively, especially when Brian Mulroney entertained reporters with stories about his arch-rival Joe Clark.
Mulroney was on the rise in the mid-1970s. The lawyer from Baie-Comeau became suddenly famous for his work on the Cliche Commission into intimidation, corruption and violence in the Quebec construction industry.
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Mulroney, who died Thursday at age 84, was a big part of that crime-busting effort. He was all over the news and played on his renown with obvious ambition and unique charm.
“Brian Mulroney — remember the name because he will be prime minister one day,” Dominque Clift, the brilliant Montreal Star political writer, remarked in the newsroom one day.
Mulroney ran against Clark for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1976, lost, and then finally beat him in 1983, after Clark called a leadership convention even though he’d won 67 per cent support from the party.
(Prince Charles, sitting beside Clark at a dinner, leaned over and said, “What I don’t understand is: Why was 67 per cent not enough?”)
Mulroney grabbed his second chance and went on to be prime minister in two majority governments, from 1984-93.
The great irony of Mulroney’s career is that he ended up reviled in much of Western Canada even though he may have been the best prime minister the West ever saw.
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Mulroney dismantled the hated National Energy Program brought in by Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1980. The complicated unwinding took several years, which led, predictably, to widespread grousing.
But the Western Accord of 1985 finally killed the system that tried to bring oil prices under federal control, installed a state-owned oil company, and made every effort to divert the industry out of Alberta to Canada Lands.
Mulroney also neutered the Foreign Investment Review Board, which hindered the flow of capital into the West with rulings that seemed suspiciously discriminatory based on region.
Mulroney’s greatest achievement, though, was the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1992.
It abolished the last traces of the old National Policy that protected central Canadian manufacturers and turned the West into the permanent breadbasket and supplier of raw materials.
The Liberals and NDP fiercely opposed free trade. It was amusing, therefore, to see their panic in 2018 when U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to blow up the pact.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged Thursday that Mulroney, then nearly 80, was one of the key players in reaching a settlement.
On the world stage, Mulroney fiercely advocated for ending apartheid in South Africa, even as other leaders turned away.
At home, he advanced the role of women in his caucus and cabinet.
“This was not something that came naturally to Brian Mulroney,” Pat Carney, a minister and then a senator, told author Sydney Sharpe.
“I admire him for that. This was something he took on, even though the leader we elected really was a chauvinist.”
Alberta was solidly entrenched in Mulroney’s government to a degree that wouldn’t be matched until Stephen Harper took office in 2006.
There were three powerful ministers — Harvie Andre, who had a variety of posts; then-deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski, and Clark, who was an able minister of both foreign affairs and constitutional affairs.
Clark’s gracious retreat into that secondary role showed his own strength and decency. He praised Mulroney generously in his comments Thursday.
Mulroney was personally and politically loyal. He didn’t play his ministers or MPs against each other. Unlike many leaders who get into trouble, he never saw his own people as opponents.
He earned rare loyalty in return. Even when his PCs were in their death throes, about to win only two seats in the 1993 election, there was hardly a word spoken against him from his caucus of MPs and senators.
Jim Stanton, then a senior officer in Canada Post when Andre was minister, recalls attending a couple of caucus meetings to give briefings.
“It was incredible. Everybody talked away, disagreeing with each other, freely debating all kinds of issues — and the language! I hadn’t heard anything like it since I was a paratrooper,” said Stanton, now a crisis communications expert.
Calgarian Ron Ghitter, a former Alberta MLA and later a senator appointed by Mulroney, worked on both his leadership campaigns.
“I was an avid supporter of Mulroney and what he was doing as prime minister and as a man. I really respected him.
“You know, there are few people you run into in life who are mentors and friends in the way he was to me.”
The MPs, he says, “all really admired him, even loved him because he cared for them. You could rely on him. He didn’t play games with people.”
The biggest stain on Mulroney’s career was accepting $225,000 in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber, a lobbyist for Airbus. That happened after he left office, but the lapse baffles his friends to this day.
Notably, Schreiber circled former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, too. But Lougheed maintained a chilly distance and had nothing to do with him.
In the end, Mulroney’s PC Party was destroyed by twin defections — Preston Manning’s Reform Party in the West, and his dear friend Lucian Bouchard’s Bloc Quebecois in Quebec.
Mulroney never seemed to grasp the depth of anger he faced in the West, despite his policies that were so obviously helpful.
In the West, he often seemed too focused on Quebec. He was almost obsessed with bringing Quebec into the Constitution, making two failed attempts with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords.
Then came the GST in 1991. Mulroney replaced an invisible tax on manufactured goods with one that stared Canadians in the face every day.
There was also a style problem. Mulroney’s polished look and sonorous voice annoyed many westerners. He seemed too smooth, glib and citified, even though he was a small-town kid.
Mulroney could be mischievous. He once embarrassed me mortally when, during a walkabout with Queen Elizabeth in Ottawa, he suddenly steered her in my direction and presented me.
I wasn’t ready for this and flapped my gums like an idiot. The delighted glint in Mulroney’s eye told me that was the whole point.
This was Brian Mulroney: funny, flawed, kind, tough and unforgettable.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald
X: @DonBraid
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