Not too long ago this reporter wrote a piece about electoral reform for rabble.ca, in which he had positive things to say about the late prime minister Brian Mulroney.
Then, mere days later, Mulroney died, in Florida, at the age of 84.
My point in mentioning Mulroney, who was the Progressive Conservative prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993, was to contrast his approach to politics with that of the current (not Progressive) Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
When Poilievre paid homage to Mulroney, he talked about the late prime minister’s dedication to free enterprise and free trade. Poilievre also referred, in general terms, to the late prime minister’s opposition to apartheid in South Africa, but he gave short shrift to Mulroney’s stellar record on the environment.
For the most part, the current Conservative leader left those parts of the Mulroney record to others, such as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Green leader Elizabeth May.
Singh pointed out Mulroney’s key role, in 1987, in getting the Commonwealth to impose economic sanctions on South Africa’s white minority regime, which, at that time, was growing increasingly repressive.
Mulroney broke ranks with the other white Commonwealth leaders, who supported Britain’s Margaret Thatcher in opposition to sanctions.
Apartheid was genuinely anathema to Mulroney. In 1985, when the apartheid regime hanged the poet Benjamin Moloise, Mulroney’s voice cracked with undisguised fury when he condemned the execution.
After his death, Elizabeth May described Mulroney as Canada’s most environmental prime minister.
The Green Party leader was no doubt thinking of two of Mulroney’s notable successes: the agreement Mulroney managed to negotiate with U.S. president George H.W. Bush to control the acid rain that was killing our forests, and the 1987 Montreal Protocol to protect the earth’s ozone layer.
Open to consensus
Mulroney was a small-c as well as big-C conservative, a politician of the political Right. But he did not see human rights and the environment as right-left issues.
If folks on the Left and in the Centre, including New Democrats and many Liberals, opposed apartheid and supported vigorous environmental regulation, that did not mean, to Mulroney, that he had to take the opposite view.
There was room in Mulroney’s worldview for non-partisan consensus.
Here’s one reason he had such a worldview. In addition to being a proud lifelong Conservative, Mulroney was also an equally proud, dyed-in-the-wool Quebecker.
Indeed, Mulroney was the first leader of his party from Quebec – aside from John Abbott, who served as an unelected caretaker PM for a bit more than a year following John A. Macdonald’s death in 1891.
In 1984 and 1988 Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to victories in an overwhelming majority of seats in his home province
For nearly three decades prior to 1984 the Conservatives had never won more than a handful of seats in Quebec, on some occasions as few as one.
And the Conservatives’ Quebec drought really goes back even further, to the 1930s. Exceptionally, in 1958, the Tories did win big in Quebec, part of John Diefenbaker’s landslide victory. But that was a blip. The Conservatives lost most of those Quebec seats four years later.
It was Mulroney who established his party as a force to be reckoned with in Quebec, and planted deep roots there.
In understanding Mulroney’s politics, it is important to recognize that Quebec attitudes don’t always line up on the same right-left continuum as those of English Canada.
Take the death penalty, for instance. Quebeckers of all stripes tend to be opposed. Even today, polls often indicate a majority of English Canadians in favour.
Early in his first term of office, Mulroney threw a sop to his hard right English-speaking base and allowed a free vote in the House on the reinstatement of executions.
The Pierre Trudeau government had abolished the death penalty in 1976, and the last executions in Canada had taken place much earlier, in 1962.
Mulroney was personally opposed to capital punishment and so were the majority of his Quebec Conservative MPs. Together with most Liberals and New Democrats, Mulroney and the Quebeckers managed to vote down the reinstatement motion, which non-Quebec Conservatives mostly supported.
Thus, Mulroney spared Canada a return to the death penalty, with all the ghastly injustices it entails.
Bad on abortion and crazy for privatizations
As Judy Rebick has pointed out in these pages, Mulroney was not as enlightened on other social issues as he was on the death penalty. Take abortion, for example.
In 1988 the Supreme Court threw out Canada’s long standing prohibition of most sorts of abortion. A few years later, Mulroney’s government almost succeeded in passing a new law which would have re-criminalized abortion. Mulroney’s nemesis was one of his former cabinet ministers, who subsequently served in the Senate, Pat Carney.
Then there was Mulroney’s free trade deal with the U.S., which led to our economy becoming even more of a branch plant operation than it had been.
These days, Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. and other foreign-owned corporations do not do much in the way of research and development. Such activity is mostly reserved for the home operation.
Through his trade policies, Mulroney helped tilt Canada’s economy away from manufacturing and innovation and toward services and the export of unprocessed natural resources.
As part of his kow-towing to Washington, Mulroney also did away with the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), which Liberal minister Herb Gray had set up in the early years of Pierre Trudeau’s government.
FIRA was itself an outcome of a 1960s’ task force on foreign ownership chaired by the late economist and political activist Mel Watkins.
Of even more consequence was Mulroney’s privatization agenda, which went hand in glove with his trade and investment policies.
Mulroney’s government sold off more than 20 publicly-owned crown corporations, including: Air Canada, Petro-Canada, the federal government’s stake in the Canada Development Corporation, Eldorado Nuclear Limited, the Canadair and De Havilland aircraft manufacturers, and Teleglobe Canada.
Perhaps Mulroney’s most tragic and short-sighted privatization was that of the publicly-owned pharmaceutical company Connaught Laboratories. As Linda McQuaig explained in 2021 in these pages, Mulroney’s fateful choice left Canada without a top-notch vaccine producer when we needed one desperately.
And so, Mulroney’s record, looking back, was mixed, at least from the perspective of those interested in economic as well as environmental and social justice.
The late prime minister was deeply influenced by the prevailing pro-market ideology of his time, most closely associated with the U.S.’s Ronald Reagan and the U.K.’s Margaret Thatcher. And Mulroney did not seem to worry too much about the growing gulf between rich and poor that ideology engendered.
Ironically, a key part of Mulroney’s legacy is the fact that the Liberal government which succeeded him maintained and continued most of his policies, and even doubled down on some.
For instance, the Chrétien-Martin Liberals, first elected in 1993, slashed social program spending and social and health transfers to the provinces far more deeply than Mulroney would have dared.
Liberal minions of the time privately gloated that by constantly brow-beating Canadians about the need to tighten their belts, Mulroney had well prepared public opinion for the Liberals’ even more extreme slash-and-burn fiscal approach.
Songs for an American press baron
Brian Mulroney grew up working class, in the small pulp-and-paper town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec, on Quebec’s lower north shore. But he aspired from a young age to climb as high as he could up the socio-economic ladder.
One of the main employers in Baie-Comeau was the U.S. daily, the Chicago Tribune, which owned a newsprint plant there. We are told that when the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, would come to town a very young Brian Mulroney, who always had an excellent voice, would sing for him.
Mulroney spent much of his life singing, figuratively as well as literally, for the economic elite.
That elite included such unsavoury characters as German arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber. The sad episode with Schreiber, at the end of Mulroney’s active political career, is a whole other story, which has been told many times.
But Mulroney was also a practical, old-school politician, who could not stomach the most flagrant forms of injustice, such as apartheid, and who was, on such matters as the environment, open to the views of experts and scientists.
Pierre Poilievre, by contrast, has barely uttered a word during his political career in sympathy with any oppressed group. As a Stephen Harper cabinet minister, he preferred to attack independent parliamentary officials such as the Chief Electoral Officer.
It is impossible to imagine Brian Mulroney would have even been tempted to engage in such crass behaviour.
Plus, these days, when he is not promising to privatize the CBC, Poilievre devotes most of his rhetorical energy to denouncing any and all measures to deal with climate change and other environmental threats
Such anti-science rhetoric would have been entirely foreign to Mulroney.
And so, for us, Brian Mulroney’s death should provide a useful occasion to consider how much the political movement he once led has changed.
Editor’s note: 2024/03/07: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Pierre Poilievre failed to mention Mulroney’s opposition to apartheid. That error has now been corrected.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
