Do we like Brian Mulroney?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Big, real good on apartheid and acid rain, set against concealed cash payments and activists' complaints about his AIDS response.
Brian Mulroney was born in 1939 in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, and in 1984 he led the Progressive Conservatives to the biggest election win in Canadian history. He went on to serve as Canada's 18th prime minister until 1993. He's a big name in Canadian politics, and a polarising one.
His big-ticket items: the Canada-US free trade deal that paved the way for NAFTA, the 1991 acid rain accord with the US, and the seven per cent GST, which was hugely unpopular. The Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional deals both collapsed, and by the time he left office his approval rating was the lowest pollsters had recorded.
The best chapter is South Africa. He backed the liberation movement, called for Nelson Mandela's release and imposed sanctions on the apartheid government. After Mandela walked free, he reportedly told Mulroney “We regard you as one of our great friends.” That was a moral call made against some powerful friends, and it counts.
Now the stain. After leaving office he took cash-stuffed envelopes from the German-Canadian lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber: Mulroney said C$225,000, Schreiber said C$300,000. The 2010 Oliphant inquiry found he broke his own ethics code and “evaded the truth for years” by not disclosing it, though it found no evidence the cash came from Airbus. Mulroney apologised to a parliamentary committee in 2007 and called taking the cash his “second biggest mistake in life”.
The Airbus affair is the bigger shadow. An RCMP letter alleged he had profited from a kickback scheme tied to Air Canada's Airbus purchase. He sued, the government apologised, said it had no evidence of wrongdoing by him, and the RCMP agreed to pay C$1.44 million in a settlement. He has always denied taking kickbacks, and the inquiry said linking him to Airbus would mean speculation. The secret cash is why plenty of Canadians still squint at the whole thing.
On the harm check, nothing turned up in his own words or acts that targets LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. The sore spot is AIDS: activist Tim McCaskell recalls that the PM was “doing his best to ignore the disease”, and AIDS groups made his visits miserable. That's an activist's account of government inaction, not a hateful word from him, so it earns an asterisk, not a fail.