Mulroney Has Much To Be Proud Of

When U.S. President Harry Truman got mad, he would write an angry letter to the person who had offended him, seal it in an envelope, put a stamp on it--and then wait until the next morning and throw it away. Brian Mulroney would have been well advised to try this technique. Instead, he talked and talked and talked into a tape recorder in the hands of Peter C. Newman. Newman has now used those tapes in just the way that anybody could have predicted.

The question is: What use should Canadians make of these tapes? Newman has given Canadians a glimpse of Mulroney at his most unguarded. That is not necessarily the same as giving Canadians a glimpse of the man as he really was. Newman offers Canadians secret, titillating revelations. But the most important truths about the Mulroney government have always lain open to public view.

In nine years in office, Brian Mulroney put an end to Pierre Trudeau's disastrous experiments in state control of the economy. He re-opened the border to foreign investment, liberated the energy sector, and began the privatization of Petro-Canada. He shifted the border of taxation from production to consumption, by cutting income taxes and introducing the GST.

It was Brian Mulroney who extracted from the U.S. the 1991 deal that radically reduced emissions of pollutants that cause acid rain: In 2005 a panel of 10 environmentalists reluctantly voted Brian Mulroney the title of the greenest prime minister in Canadian history.

He negotiated a U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988, which later grew into the North American Free Trade Agreement. Some suggest that any 1980s prime minister would have put through an FTA. Well, to borrow an old radio-era joke, "I vas dere, Sharlie," and it did not look so automatic at the time. Opposition to the FTA was hysterical, really often close to insane. Opponents charged that it would force Canada to abolish medicare, to scrap unemployment insurance, to ship the waters of Lake Superior to Arizona, to sell the wombs of Canadian women to American corporations in search of surrogate mothers.

Instead, cross-border trade surged from US$192-billion in 1989 to US$441-billion in 2003. By 2003, one Canadian job in three was sustained by exports to the U.S.--and thus by Mulroney's Free Trade Agreement. And no, medicare did not disappear. Indeed, it's arguable that Mulroney's trade agreement may have saved--or anyway postponed the day of reckoning for--the Canadian welfare state.

Even many of those who broadly supported Mulroney's economic policies condemn him for the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords. But let's remember please the challenge Mulroney faced. During the 1980 Quebec referendum, Trudeau had promised major constitutional reform if Quebec voted "no." Quebecers did as asked--and Trudeau then pushed through a constitutional package that the government of Quebec refused to ratify. This would seem like rather a large problem for Canada, not to mention a serious breach of faith.

Meech attempted to solve this problem. It failed, and since its failure, separatists have dominated the politics of Quebec. They didn't quite win their second referendum in 1995, but they are poised to try again in another year or two. Probably they will lose, but maybe not. It all seems a very high price to pay to uphold Trudeau's dreamy utopian vision of what a constitution should look like if only language, ethnicity, history and culture mattered as little to the rest of humanity as they did to him.

Was Brian Mulroney a good prime minister?

He never did dare cut spending very much, and so despite solid economic growth, Canada's debt continued to grow--one reason that the 1991-92 recession hit Canada harder than any other major industrial economy. His political coalition fell apart, the Liberals returned to power, and balanced the books by imposing crushing taxes on Canadian families. They also engaged in an explosion of patronage and corruption that make Mulroney look like Archibald Cox by comparison.

So the record is very far from perfect. But then it always is, isn't it? In politics, everything is a matter of balance, triumphs against defeats, courage against opportunism, human flaws against human nobility. And weighed in that balance, Brian Mulroney ranks among the very best leaders Canada has ever had, certainly the best since Louis St. Laurent. And if he ranks behind the very greatest, behind for example that boozy, cunning, patronage-dispensing old rascal John A. Macdonald--it may well be because Macdonald had the sense never to trust a Peter C. Newman.