| I’ve been getting worried of late – it seems that Brian Mulroney wasn’t such a son of a bitch, after all.
Less than a decade after his departure from office, there are several indicators that Canadians are ready to forgive and/or forget what life was like under Brian and Mila: reassessments of his nine years as prime minister; rumours of a "revisionist" biography in the cards; a reported war-chest of $1.5 million should he return – Napoleon-style – to once more lead the ailing Conservative party; and, most recently, the unveiling of that portrait in Ottawa.
Well, pardon me, but what have we all been smoking here? I thought the case against Mr. Mulroney had been made, for example by Jeffrey Simpson in Spoils of Power, or by John Sawatsky in The Politics of Ambition, or – most famously – by Stevie Cameron in On the Take. Or how about historian Michael Bliss’s Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney, in which the latter appears as "a gladhanding, ambitious throwback to the political world of the 19th century," who quit in 1993 with a "sense of bafflement at the ingratitude of Canadians for having scorned and rejected his honest efforts"?
That "sense of bafflement," of course, was compounded by the election of 1993, in which Mulroney’s short-lived successor, Kim Campbell, saw her party plummet from 169 parliamentary seats to just two. But even then, Mulroney himself remained unrepentant. History would be his only judge, he said, and the passage of time would prove him right. He’d already said this once before, after the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, and again two years later when the public kicked sand in the face of Mini-Meech, a.k.a. the Charlottetown Accord. And even as he quit in ’93, refusing to face the electorate’s direct verdict on his reign, he remained convinced (a) that he was right and (b) history would prove him so.
So, nearly a decade later, was he right? Did we just fail to appreciate Mulroney at the time? In one sense, current attempts to reassess a once-vilified politician are understandable. Journalists and writers have to make a living, after all, and there are only so many times you can denounce Mulroney in new and fresh ways before both editors and the public lose interest all together. So a more sympathetic spin was bound to appear, sooner or later.
But this soon? That’s what’s puzzling. After all, before the implosion of ’93, the Tories’ greatest collapse had come in 1935, when a depression-stunned electorate turned on prime minister R.B. Bennett, whose government fell from 157 to 40 seats. Rightly or wrongly, Bennett was and remained for decades after a much-despised figure – only in recent years have historians begun to view him more sympathetically. By comparison, the rush to re-cast Mulroney seems a matter of indecent haste.
What’s driving this scramble to rewrite history? Ironically, it’s as much to do with the federal Liberal party as it is about either Brian Mulroney or the Conservatives. Mulroney came to political maturity under the long shadow of Trudeau – or perhaps Trudeaumania, to be more precise. The public’s long love affair with Trudeau continued even after he quit politics in 1984, and long into Mulroney’s reign. This might have been fine, but the two men espoused very different visions of Canada. Trudeau’s was based on principles such as tolerance and justice; Mulroney’s was founded on "doing deals," with Quebec, with the provinces, and with the U.S.
And Trudeau just wouldn’t shut up. Indeed, it was his interventions against both Meech Lake and Charlottetown that helped to scupper the two accords. People just never took to Mulroney as they clearly did to Trudeau, and it’s perhaps no coincidence, then, that any serious campaign to rehabilitate Mulroney accelerated only after the death of his great nemesis in 2000. If Trudeau were still alive, who knows?
But the pro-Mulroney drive is also a response to the present Liberal regime of Jean Chrétien. A recent essay by outgoing Tory leader Joe Clark in the Globe and Mail made this explicit, contrasting Chrétien’s current preference for bumbling and authoritarianism in handling his caucus members to the smooth, consensus-building style of Mulroney. More than that, the fact that the Liberal government has long since adopted Mulroney’s policies in full – the GST, FTA, NAFTA, the dismantling of the welfare state, devolving power to the provinces, etc. – may be the single greatest admission that he was right after all. And now Mulroney and his supporters want the public to acknowledge that, too.
So expect the Mulroney bandwagon to gather speed. But don’t expect a return of Mulroney to federal politics any time soon. He’s too smart – no, too wily – for that. After all, as one letter writer to the Globe and Mail put it recently, at least then we could vote him out properly this time. Oh no, he’s much too much of a bastard to let that happen. |
