1988 — Canada’s 34th federal election returns Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for a second term. The campaign, fought largely on the issue of the free trade deal with U.S., ends up reducing the number of Progressive Conservative seats in the House by 42. But it is still enough to give Mulroney a majority government.

The Liberals under former Prime Minister John Turner end up with 43 additional seats, more than doubling their previous count. Still, it’s a disappointment for Turner who resigns as party leader six months later.

1982 — Brian Mulroney, president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada, announces the company’s Schefferville, Quebec, mining operation will close next year, virtually ending the company town’s viability. Despite glowing media coverage about Mulroney’s ability to raise Iron Ore’s profitability to $100 million in 1981, the 1982 result was a $38 million loss.

In the midst of preparing to defend the closure in front of a Quebec provincial committee a few months later, Mulroney learns that Joe Clark has resigned as Conservative leader, re-opening the possibility of assuming the leadership role he missed winning in 1976.

1992 — More than 54% of Canadians do not agree that “the Constitution of Canada should be renewed on the basis of the agreement reached on August 28.” And so, the Charlottetown Accord chauffeured by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is dead by referendum.

Despite its endorsement by the federal government and all 10 provincial premiers, the complex deal made it hard for most voters to give it across-the-board approval.

2006 — Prime Minister Stephen Harper received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service last night from the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The award has gone to public figures ranging from Tom Ridge, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, to entertainer Dolly Parton. The other Canadian Prime Minister to win the award was Brian Mulroney.

2004 –Prime Minister Paul Martin’s two recent appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada are now official.

Rosalie Abella and Louise Charron, both from Ontario’s Court of Appeal, bring legal track records as activists and feminists to their new jobs. In 1988, Abella moderated a televised election debate among leaders Brian Mulroney (Conservative), John Turner (Liberal) and Ed Broadbent (NDP).

Photo: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press

I have to say that I was quite literally blown down when I read about Brian Mulroney’s endorsement of Barack Obama’s adventurous changes to the health care system in the United States. The former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister praised President Obama’s health care reforms, comparing it to his own experiences in Canada, to a speech of 1,500 supporters in Montreal:

“Political capital is acquired to spend in great causes for one’s country,” Mulroney said Thursday.

“Prime ministers are not chosen to seek popularity. They are chosen to provide leadership .… President Obama is fighting for a form of universal health care and is encountering ferocious resistance.

“The attacks on President Obama are often bitter and mean-spirited and his approval ratings are sinking like a stone. Still, he fights on .…

“Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, ‘Obama.’”

Of course, quoting Brian Mulroney’s position on the American debate only serves to draw interest to Stephen Harper, who hasn’t ventured an opinion. Naturally, Mr.Harper will not be offering an opinion on the matter, now or in the near future. Mr.Mulroney speaks of political capital, but there is little to be gained by a sitting Prime Minister taking a position that could be seen as interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign nation. And there is certainly much to be lost among those conservatives on both sides of the border who do not agree with the direction that Barack Obama is taking.

Kelly McParland elucidates:

Gee, I wonder why. Mulroney isn’t in charge of anything any more, so his opinions as a private citizen carry minimal weight and no political baggage for the country. A sitting prime minister inserting himself into the middle of one of the most bitter political disputes in recent U.S. memory is something altogether different.

Mr. Harper would be nuts to stick his nose into this mess. Imagine how Canadians would react if Barack Obama, despite his wild popularity here, was to arrive in Ottawa and start instructing us on the superiority of the U.S. healthcare system. One thing guaranteed to ignite a population is to be condescended to by the leader of another country.

Recall the controversy that only one unknown Canadian woman played in American advertisements about our health care system. Now imagine how that might appear if the leader of our country made such overtly divisive remarks. How quintessentially Liberal Party that would be.

Of course, there’s a good reason why Brian Mulroney praised Barack Obama. The President enjoys a lasting honeymoon here, and in Montreal where he made his speech he is even more popular. Innovative Research Group found that 62% of Quebeckers believe that it’s a good thing that Barack Obama is in the Oval Office, compared to 52% across Canada [compare that to his diving numbers in the south]. Many Canadians, former Progressive Conservatives included, believe that Barack Obama’s policies are reflective of their own ideals. Perhaps most curious part is that the Liberals are criticizing Mr.Harper for not openly embracing President Obama’s health reforms as a means of developing closer ties to the United States, when they used to allege forging close ties with the Bush administration was a mistake for Canada.

The most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory yesterday lauded U.S. President Barack Obama and threw his support behind efforts to reform healthcare in the United States:

Brian Mulroney used a speech to 1,500 Conservative supporters to wade where Prime Minister Stephen Harper has steadfastly refused to venture: the bitter U.S. debate over health reform.

The former prime minister drew parallels between Obama’s uphill fight to reform health care to his own struggles as prime minister, which may have cost him popularity but benefited the country.

“Political capital is acquired to spend in great causes for one’s country,” Mulroney said Thursday.

“Prime ministers are not chosen to seek popularity. They are chosen to provide leadership. . . President Obama is fighting for a form of universal health care and is encountering ferocious resistance.

“The attacks on President Obama are often bitter and mean-spirited and his approval ratings are sinking like a stone. Still, he fights on…

“Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, ‘Obama.’ Because like his Canadian predecessors, he chose the tough responsibilities of national leadership over the meaningless nostrums of sterile partisanship that we see too much of in Canada and around the world.”

The “vast, crowded hotel ballroom” was reported to have fallen completely silent at that specific part of Mulroney’s speech and one woman out of the 1,500 attendees was even noted by a CTV reporter in attendance to have openly snickered.

25 years ago today, Brian Mulroney was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada. His reign as Prime Minister began with an election landslide where his party won more seats than any before or since. Less than 9 years later, his reign ended with him earning among the lowest approval ratings for any Prime Minister. Months later, his party was decimated in the general election, and barely recovered in the next decade before merging with the Canadian Alliance.

After leaving office with an approval rating of around 20% (doubling his number from a few months prior), and seeing his party reduced from a majority government to 2 seats in an election, you might think we’d have heard the last of Prime Minister Mulroney. You’d be wrong, and I’m not talking about any inquiries that have come before Parliament. Brian Mulroney is still with us, because in many ways, the major issues of his tenure still define us politically.

The GST: Good Economics, Bad Politics
In its second term, Mulroney’s government brought in the GST, replacing the old tax on manufacturers. Economics like this, regular citizens generally don’t. Sales taxes still come up. Talk of harmonizing provincial and federal sales taxes still draws controversy, and in 2006 the Conservative Party made rolling back the GST from 7% to 5% a centerpiece of its campaign.

Free Trade
The Mulroney government brought forward the FTA, which became the focal point of the 1988 election. Before leaving office, Mulroney signed on to NAFTA. Though the Liberals campaigned against NAFTA in 1993, they accepted it once in office. Trade issues still come up – see the concerns about the ‘Buy American’ push from our neighbour to the south, and concerns about a proposed free trade deal with Colombia. That is, of course, to say nothing about buy local and local food movements. We’re still trying to feel our way around the issue of free trade, with no resolution in sight.

Refoooorm and the Divided Right
His decision to award the CF-18 contract to a Quebec company instead of the Manitoba one that submitted a superior bid provided the spark for the Reform Party to coalesce. The ballooning deficits of his government helped give the Reform Party its defining issue in its early years.

Maybe a Reform Party would have emerged regardless, but undeniably the Mulroney government’s actions helped bring about its relevance and success. The red tories and their more conservative brethren split ways, a major cause of the right’s decade in the wilderness from the mid-90’s through the mid-00s. Though the PCs and the Canadian Alliance (successor to the Reform Party) united under the banner of the Conservative Party in Canada in 2003, there is still a divide within the party, one that could be exposed and potentially exacerbated whenever the next leadership contest is held.

Québec
We end with the big one. First, the Mulroney government ended the Liberal party dominance in la belle province that began with Laurier. For 90 years, the Liberals could almost invariably count on winning a massive majority in Quebec, helping it form a string of majority governments, and in later years, compensating for diminishing success in the west. Once the Quebec stranglehold was broken, the Liberal path to victory – especially a majority government – became significantly more challenging. The vote splitting that allowed them to win near sweeps of Ontario in 1993, 1997, and 2000 masked this for a while, but with a united Conservative Party, there is no longer a clear path to a majority government for the Liberal Party. As long as the sovereigntists and soft nationalists are voting (be it for the PCs or the BQ), success in Quebec is far from a sure thing. After the 1980 election, the Liberals have won more than 26 of the 75 Quebec seats only once – winning 36 in 2000. In most of the elections, they’ve hovered around 20 seats. Suffice to say, Mulroney brought about a significant realignment of politics at the federal level in Quebec, first through his push for support, then through the emergence of the Bloc Quebecois in response to the failed renegotiation of the constitution that he initiated.

Which brings us to the issue of Quebec sovereignty, nationalism, and national unity. Now, you might point out that Québec Nationalism has ebbed and flowed since at least the time of Honoré Mercier (great-grandfather of NDP MP Thomas Mulcair!), and you’d be correct. It very likely could have ebbed again in the 1990s, but Mulroney’s actions certainly brought it on and exacerbated tensions. He also brought Lucien Bouchard, his old law school classmate, into government. Bouchard became the charismatic leader of the sovereignty movement, and nearly succeeded in winning the 1995 referendum.

While support for sovereignty has waned since then, the struggle to define Quebec’s place in confederation still confounds federal politicians (see Harper’s attempt to solve the fiscal imbalance, and the debate surrounding the idea of Quebec as a nation).

Do We Owe These Issues to Mulroney, or Was He Simply in Power at the Right Time?
This is a fascinating question that deserves a lengthy essay at the least, if not a full book. It’s difficult to answer, particularly since in many ways the answer depends on examining the alternatives – namely, what would a Joe Clark, John Crosbie, John Turner, or Ed Broadbent government have looked like in the 1980s and early 1990s?

Perhaps we can agree on this. When Mulroney came into office, the only organized western protest movement – the Western Canada Concept – was effectively a failed project. Quebec sovereignty was on the wane, and within the PQ there was debate about how much emphasis to put on the issue. Canadians had just gone through a long, divisive process of hammering out a Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec didn’t sign on, but it didn’t appear to be a sticking point in any upcoming elections.

When he left office, an upstart western protest movement was squeezing his party out of the prairies; a sovereigntist caucus had emerged in parliament, led by his former Quebec lieutenant. Two rounds of constitutional debates had inflamed passions and hard feelings across the country. The GST and free trade, already in place, remained contentious issues.

What is undeniable is this: on two fronts – western alienation and Quebec nationalism/sovereignty – Mulroney’s actions made situations significantly worse. His constitutional dalliances brought the country to the brink of separation. He left office with most of the issues he took on unresolved and continuing to fester.

That being said, the economy likely would have struggled through most of the next 10 years, regardless of who was in power. Starting in the 1980s, and accelerating in the 1990s, the worldwide community moved towards greater economic integration. Free(er) trade likely would have happened at some point, and the 1990s were a fiscally conservative time worldwide – even without Reform, the PC Party likely would have veered right – as it did provincially in Alberta and Ontario.

16 years after he left office, we’re still dealing with the issues brought about by 9 years of government led by Brian Mulroney. As we head for the 8th election since his landslide, there are no signs of this abating any time soon. The Mulroney government and the issues of his tenure stay with us, even as the man at the centre of that period recedes from public life.