Remembering Brain Mulroney

The recently deceased former Canadian Prime Minister rose to power in a landslide election but, nine years later, made his exit in another landslide from the opposite direction. Letting Kim Campbell take over didn't help the Conservative Party in the following election.

But I have always considered Brian Mulroney as having a very important place in modern Canadian history. What basically happened is that he dismantled the old economic order so that the new order could take it's place.

Canada entered a free trade agreement with the U.S., and Mexico joined later. This NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, opened Canadian business to competition from outside, whereas before it had considerable protection. The process was painful but few people today would doubt that it turned out for the best. Brian Mulroney knew that Canadians could compete with anybody and he turned out to be right.

Introducing a new tax probably isn't the way to win a popularity contest but sometimes it has to be done. Brian Mulroney claimed that the Goods and Services Tax wasn't really a new tax but a reorganizing of existing taxes but, as we might expect, it wasn't a very popular move. But it must have been a productive move because it is still being used today.

Brian Mulroney stepped down as the most unpopular Canadian Prime Minister ever. But look what came shortly afterwards. Canada really had a boom time in the late 1990s. While Jean Chretien certainly deserves credit it was the difficult decisions and unpopular but necessary moves by Brian Mulroney that made this possible.

The opposition to Brian Mulroney was based on sovereignty. Air Canada, for example, was the state-run airline. This was a matter of sovereignty, so that Canadians wouldn't get dependent on foreign airlines to fly them between their own cities. His privatization of Air Canada was actually an expression of confidence in Canadians.

On the global scene Brian Mulroney was part of the conservative anti-Communist alliance of the 1980s, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. What Brian Mulroney did have going for him is that his two conservative compatriots came to power before him, Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981. When Brian Mulroney took office in 1984 he thus had an idea of how conservative reforms were being implemented and turning out outside Canada. Mulroney's scaling back of social benefits was pioneered by Reagan and his selling off of Government (Crown) Corporations was similar to what Thatcher had done, as well as Ronald Reagan breaking up Bell Telephone.

Mulroney's entrance landslide election was in the same year that Ronald Reagan won reelection in his own landslide. Mulroney's exit came in the same year that the political tide had turned in both countries and Bill Clinton took office as the American counterpart of Jean Chretien. This shows that the tenure of Brian Mulroney has to be considered in a global context.

Brian Mulroney had an entrance landslide and an exit landslide, from the opposite direction. I think the entrance one was closer to being right.