By Shachi Kurl, President
March 1, 2024 – Others will remember and reflect upon the Mulroney years better than I. Journalists who covered him, academics who studied him. The electorate that first lauded, then condemned him.
I was not there. I could barely read. But I do remember flashes.
The 1984 campaign: next to rumpled opponents, here was a young, tall candidate with a big smile, well dressed but not a dandy. In later years the grown-ups would ring their hands over free trade and the Americanization of Canada at the hands of a made-for-American-TV prime minister.
The consummate communicator, who, when sticking the political knife into a hapless John Turner in the 1984 leaders’ debate over patronage appointments, did not forget to call him “Sir.”
The man who implemented the GST. Whenever my parents took me to the WH Smith bookstore, the cashier would slip into the bag stamp-like stickers with Mulroney’s (or finance minister Michael Wilson’s) smiling face, cheerfully captioned “Hi! I tax books!”
His willingness to be at the vanguard of tough issues and face the backlash squarely. Where Mulroney did not care about spending political capital to fight acid rain or apartheid, we have a Conservative leader in Pierre Poilievre today who votes against a trade package aimed at helping Ukraine because it isn’t popular with his base.
That aforementioned free-trade deal. And most indelibly, the failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements, the constitutional deals Mulroney staked, and lost, his career over. By the end, his approval rating had bottomed out at 12 per cent (no other prime minister has been that low in modern times).
Read more from the article in the Ottawa Citizen here.
Image Credit – Naveen Kumar/Unsplash