Brian Mulroney has re-impinged himself on the Canadian consciousness with the impending publication of his memoirs, thus inviting his countrymen, including the sages in our liberal media, to take a few more kicks at his legacy, just as they were beginning to forget. I have seen only such excerpts as have appeared, from which I am a little disappointed by the “capture” of the man’s voice. For here is a good enough place to begin distinguishing what was best from what was worst in both the man and the politician.
I always liked Mulroney, the man, and always defended him, in politics, against even worse political opponents. This will not be seen as a confession of profound enthusiasm, however, except for the man.
Behind the scenes, and speaking (he hoped) off the record among “the boys,” he was at his best. There he revealed himself as a person with an old-fashioned, “conservative” outlook on life, including an intense distaste for priggishness and hypocrisy. He was instinctively honest and candid, to a remarkable degree in a practising politician, and I think better loved by his closer associates than most.
But in front of the cameras he was ever trying to be “prime-ministerial,” as he thought he ought, and ever coming across as conceited and smug. There was, alas, a similar divide between what he wanted to accomplish, and what he did.
He is a man of his generation, who came into adult life in the 1950s—sowed his wild oats briefly, settled down with a good woman, was loyal to his woman and to his friends. He had ambition: a thing not well-understood today. It was innocent ambition, and he was justifiably proud, of having raised himself and his family to the pinnacle of Canadian society from more humble origins than almost any preceding Canadian prime minister.
He had also the sincere belief that his own remarkable skills as a labour negotiator could be used in national politics to resolve many of the terrible conflicts that had emerged from decades of progressive Liberal party “envelope pushing” on economic, social, and constitutional issues. He is a true Canadian patriot, in a way that for instance Trudeau never was, with a misty sentimental streak; and in all, the best sort of “boy scout,” willing to take the crunch for the team.
But his view of Canada itself was too much anchored in Quebec, and his disastrous misunderstanding of western Canada led to the near-destruction of the Conservative party. It took him years to get rid of the National Energy Policy that was killing Alberta, and he spent more years in tandem with Robert Bourassa trying to assuage Quebec’s nationalist aspirations in a way that most of English Canada could not accept. The irony being that he was acting against his own instincts throughout the Meech Lake bargaining, “trying to make the best of a botch.”
That was one of three large and courageous projects he set himself as prime minister, and his most complete disaster. The two others were unpopular, and perhaps poorly sold, but we should realize today that we owe our continuing national prosperity to them.
The hideously unpopular, because unnecessarily visible, GST, corrected vicious anomalies in our tax system, in which Canadian manufacturers and service-providers were actually put at a disadvantage against foreign competition. Nobody remembers, because nobody was forced to remember, the ridiculous (but largely invisible) MST it replaced.
The GST was only a start to reforming the tax system, however.
The other was of course the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, extended in the NAFTA. In this he accomplished what Laurier had attempted nearly a century before, and in the nick of time, for open access to our huge American market was becoming precarious. It was Mulroney’s work and will. The glib view that he was playing running dog to U.S. capitalist imperialism will not stand to a moment’s examination, for the Free Trade Agreement advanced Canadian trading interests much more than American.
With this, however, came Mulroney’s failure to remove any significant inter-provincial trade barriers, and so the natural consequence: that the lines of trade today flow even less east-west, and even more north-south, than geography commands.
To my mind, the real “tragedy” of Mulroney is that he offered too little, too late, to correct the Pearson-Trudeau legacy of statism and fiscal profligacy; while doing nothing whatever to restore our country’s legal, constitutional, and symbolic traditions, from Trudeau’s eviscerations. For this he deserves purgatory, not hell.
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