A very charming Brian Mulroney once invited me to his private club in Montreal in which he had reserved a private room and in which our waiter wore white gloves.
Yes, it was up a notch from the place I usually frequented in that city, the claim to fame of which was pork knuckles and sauerkraut with red hot mustard which needed glasses of foaming draft beer to cool the burning sensation.
At the time, Brian, full of sophistication, was the head of Iron Ore Company of Canada, having lost the Progressive Conservative leadership battle to Joe Clark, an individual sadly lacking both charm and sophistication.
Mulroney was rightly embittered about that loss, and after I’d put my notebook away, he stopped drinking soda water, ordered a bottle of the finest Scotch, and gave me a cutting assessment of Clark and all the other leadership contenders.
Let me tell you right now, his takes were accurate and hilarious.
Since it was a confidential conversation, even almost three decades later, I would breach a confidence were I to recount it.
Yet, Mulroney was certain not one of the other candidates had the golden jelly to win the public over in a federal election, and Clark certainly didn’t.
He eked out a razor-thin minority in 1979, even though voters were heartily sick of Pierre Trudeau, and threw it away within a handful of months.
Had Mulroney won the leadership, he would have romped to a huge majority in 1979, as he did in 1984 and 1989.
In my column “True leader” (May 31), I recounted, despite optimistic pronouncements about Mulroney’s health, his friends were terribly worried.
In and out of hospital since March 15, the surgery to remove benign lesions from his lungs lasted fully three hours.
A month later, he had serious pancreatic trouble, necessitating another three-hour operation.
It’s doubtful if he’ll ever fully maintain his old work schedule.
Some readers were upset I praised his accomplishments so much.
An equal number had forgotten what those accomplishments were.
Refreshingly, most did agree in retrospect he was a far, far better prime minister—and world leader—than Jean Chretien or Paul Martin.
They thought I was unfair to Mulroney’s successor, Kim Campbell, and described her as a sacrificial lamb.
To me, she was just a silly, silly woman. Recall how she declared election campaigns were no time to discuss serious issues?
In “True leader,” I noted some of Mulroney’s accomplishments—the North American free trade pact, a newer, friendly Revenue Canada, post office outlets in shopping malls.
Let’s now add—the abolition of Trudeau’s notorious National Energy Program (NEP), the relocation of the National Energy Board to Calgary, the dismantling of the Foreign Review Investment Agency, the privatization of Air Canada (which ended a huge drain on the taxpayers’ pockets, and opened up fare-cutting competition), and setting a fiscal foundation that would allow Martin to continually balance budgets.
For this, Martin takes all the credit, and Mulroney none.
Internationally, Mulroney was a star.
He is credited with helping to bring down the evil South African apartheid regime and, this past week, Mulroney was named the greenest PM in Canadian history in a poll of prominent Canadian environmentalists.
Yes, he made mistakes.
Capitulating to his Quebec wing, he gave the Air Canada maintenance contract to Montreal rather than the lower bidder in Winnipeg.
That set the Reform party rolling in a big way.
Now I come back to my final point in “True leader,” which concerned Canada’s relations with the U.S., and which deserve more credit.
Right now, our relations with Washington are at rock bottom, almost ruinous.
Chretien and Martin can’t even get their feet inside the Oval Office, which is why the ban on beef exports remains in force, and the softwood lumber issue is still unsettled, costing Canada billions of dollars over the years and thousands of jobs.
Canada’s ambassador to Washington during the Mulroney years, Allan Gotlieb, frequently recites an anecdote from those times.
In a nutshell, Gotlieb says whenever Mulroney phoned President Ronald Reagan or President George Bush Sr., they would call in their top aides and say, “Brian wants this doing. See it gets done.”
That’s how close the friendship was back then.
Mulroney got everything from Washington for Canada that he wanted. Chretien and Martin—and their aides—have insulted President George W. Bush and his administration so much there are no favours owed and none given.
Britain is now seen as America’s closest and most-trusted ally.
The deterioration of our relationship with Washington has been to the detriment of all of us.
Mulroney told me a few years ago that one day he would be vindicated.
I think he now has been.
Don’t you?
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