by Conrad Black
Trudeau had been the man of the longest and most dangerous hour the transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation has had, and he renovated the country’s government and delivered it securely to his successors. He had grasped and conserved the magic thread of a distinctive Canadian state, founded by Champlain, shaped by Carleton, reformed by Baldwin and LaFontaine, brought to maturity by Macdonald and built upon by Laurier and King and Lapointe and St. Laurent and, in his syncopated way, Pearson. He had grasped and preserved the French-English double majority. Even though he rarely had a majority in English Canada, he usually did in Ontario, and in times of maximum tension he led the whole nation with courage, eloquence, and distinction. For all his foibles and lacunae, Pierre Trudeau must rank behind Macdonald, Laurier, and King, as, sui generis, one of Canada’s great prime ministers.
7. Brian Mulroney and John Turner, 1984–1993
It was almost certain that John Turner would be the leader to succeed Trudeau, and their relations were poor; Turner was discreetly critical, and not unreasonably so, of many of Trudeau’s policies, and Trudeau, somewhat unfairly, regarded Turner as insufficiently loyal, and there were allegedly some indiscretions about Margaret Trudeau’s antics that aggravated relations. These factors may have contributed to Trudeau’s delay until the Liberal Party could not hold a convention and have a new leader in place until the end of June. Jean Chrétien was Turner’s chief rival for the leadership and gave it a rousing try, as was his practice, but Turner prevailed on the second ballot and was installed as prime minister on June 30.
This was a triple first for Canada, and in part a success for Trudeau and for the forces of conciliation in English Canada. Until this point, neither the Conservative nor the Liberal party had elevated a bilingual English-speaking Canadian to the leadership, and now both had, and it was the first time both parties had leaders competent to conduct political combat in Quebec since the 1887 to 1891 match-up between the young Laurier and the elderly Macdonald (who, though not bilingual, can be assumed, after nearly twenty-five years of government or joint government with Étienne Taché, George-Étienne Cartier, and other Quebeckers, to have known his way round the traps in Quebec quite well).
It was also a departure into uncharted waters for the federal Liberal Party. The Liberals had governed for sixty-six of the last eighty-eight years with only five leaders, all of whom were from unlikely backgrounds and had not run for the leadership of their party before. Edward Blake overruled Richard Cartwright’s leadership advisory committee to make Wilfrid Laurier the Liberal leader in 1887, a bold step in those times of acute secular and cultural divisions (and Blake’s greatest service to the country). When Laurier died in 1919, still the party leader, W.L. Mackenzie King, who was thirteen when Laurier took the leadership, was a defeated junior minister resident in the United States and working for Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. When King retired the leadership, he passed it to Louis St. Laurent, who had never in nearly sixty years dreamt of entering public life and came straight in as wartime justice minister, Quebec lieutenant, and effectively deputy prime minister. As King left office and St. Laurent entered it, they drafted Lester Pearson, a career foreign service official, to become external affairs minister, and parachuted him into a safe parliamentary district he had never visited before, in Northern Ontario. They foresaw Pearson’s succession to St. Laurent. Pearson drafted Trudeau – who, aged forty-six, had never been tempted by elective politics – immediately appointed him parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, and fifteen months later minister of justice, and eleven months after that helped install him as prime minister. Five party leaders in ninety-seven years. The Liberal Party of Canada was rivalled only by the Holy See among major international institutions for their original, unpredictable, and effective method of leadership selection (and, apart from King, made no claim to divine inspiration. The Holy See had had nine popes while the Liberal Party of Canada had just five leaders.) John Turner (b. 1929), a well-respected lawyer and company director who had been a distinguished justice and finance minister, had run third to Trudeau and Robert Winters in the 1968 Liberal leadership convention, and now, in a way the Liberal Party had never operated before, it was his turn. He should have taken advantage of his jump in the polls to recruit some excellent candidates, and he did round up a couple, and install them in the cabinet even without an election, as King had with General Andrew McNaughton. Trudeau had left Turner only a few months to make a mark before Parliament had to be dissolved, but Turner could have presented what would appear to be a new government, criss-crossed the country in July and August, called Parliament for September and put before it a solid program that would make the point that this wasn’t just more of the same, and squired both the queen and Pope John Paul II around the country on long-scheduled visits. Turner had also promised, in writing, to make seventeen departing Trudeau patronage appointments, of which the most controversial was that of veteran minister and public appointee Bryce Mackasey as ambassador to Portugal, an arrangement memorably apostrophized by Mulroney as “No whore like an old whore.” Turner should have told Trudeau to make his own appointments instead of being concerned that he could lose his majority in the House; he didn’t have to call the House and could have won some by-elections. This made him appear to be bound hand and foot to Trudeau, which was anything but the truth. By dodging the bullet, Trudeau began the practice, which would be emulated, of government leaders ducking out at the end of their terms so successors could take the hit for them. It would be frustrating for electors.
Turner dissolved Parliament on July 9 for elections on September 4. It was a terrible mistake; he was rusty and was put on the defensive by Mulroney, and his campaign came apart like a storm-tossed ship. Mulroney was sharper and more aggressive in the debates, and it was clear as the election approached that the country was going to make a clean sweep of the Trudeau era. It was easy for the author, as a close friend for decades (and still) of both the principal party leaders (and they are both among those to whom this book is dedicated), to share in Brian Mulroney’s rising tide of approbation and success, but painful to witness the grinding down of so good and capable a man as John Turner by an improvident weight of adversity. On September 4, the NDP won 30 seats and 18.8 per cent of the popular vote, a decline from the previous election of 2 MPs and 1 per cent. But between the two principal parties, the shift was the greatest in the history of Canadian elections up to this point: the Progressive Conservatives jumped from 32.5 to 50.03 per cent of the vote to win the first absolute majority since John Diefenbaker’s in 1958, and before that King’s in 1940; while the Liberals descended from 44.3 to 28 per cent, their all-time lowest percentage. The Liberals lost 107 MPs from the previous election to hold 40, and the PCs gained 108 to hold 211, the largest Canadian parliamentary caucus ever. Mulroney in Manicouagan, the county where he was born, Broadbent in Oshawa, and Turner in Vancouver Quadra (becoming only the second Canadian prime minister, after King, to represent three different provinces in Parliament*
) were all elected personally. The change of government was on September 17. Joe Clark was in external affairs, John Crosbie at trade, and Michael Wilson in finance.
The electoral sea change would be completed less than fifteen months later with the Quebec election of December 2, 1985. René Lévesque saw the writing on the wall and retired as leader of the Parti Québécois on June 20, 1985, exhausted and disappointed, and on October 3 as premier of Quebec, handing over to Daniel Johnson’s son Pierre-Marc, a lawyer and a doctor, as Robert Bourassa returned as leader of the Quebec Liberals. Lévesque had advocated not making sovereignty the main subject of the 1985 election and proposed instead the beau risque of a constructive engagement with Brian Mulroney, who was showing himself more flexible than Trudeau had been. Lévesque was repudiated by a sizeable section of his own party, and Johnson had even less time than Turner had had to prepare his party for an election. In the election, Bourassa, faithful to his role as a provincial e
mulator of the imperishable but unexciting Mackenzie King, was defeated personally, running in a constituency named after his former adversary from fifteen years before, the late premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand, but he carried the province to a third term as the Liberal vote rose from 46.1 per cent in 1980 to 56 per cent, and the Liberal members elected to the National Assembly rose from 42 to 99. The Péquiste totals declined from 49.3 per cent and 80 seats to 38.7 per cent and 23 seats. It was a sweet victory for Bourassa, but also for Mulroney and for Trudeau; the momentum of the twenty-year rise of separatism had been shattered and their founder was out of public life and their party divided. René Lévesque died two years later, in 1987, aged sixty-five. The Quebec Liberal Party now held all the old rouges, most of the old bleus, and almost all the non-French in Quebec.
If Trudeau’s legacy was acknowledged in matters of national unity, it was, in other respects, something which required much of Mulroney’s first term in office to dismantle. The Foreign Investment Review Agency was renamed Investment Canada and given a vastly reduced mandate; the National Energy Program was junked and replaced by accords with the Eastern provinces and Alberta that allowed for the fact that oil prices had declined to pre-1980s levels and that the entire premise of the NEP was false. Ed Clark, the surviving official who was chiefly responsible for it, was fired (although he went on to a very successful career as a senior bank executive).
Mulroney showed great agility holding his caucus together and generating a consensus for some ambitious policy initiatives, given that his party was the usual somewhat ramshackle coalition of a Progressive Conservative Party that had little of the discipline and tradition of power of its chief competitor and was a grouping of elements that did not have an unlimited amount in common with each other, aside from not being Liberals. There were the Toronto financial community, the smaller city and rural Ontario middle class, the Diefenbaker Prairie populists, the Alberta oil and ranching interests, the conservative but patronage-addicted Maritimers, and the resource industry and ecological blocs from British Columbia, and now a large bloc of Quebec nationalists who were spitting hate for Trudeau but had little in common with their fellow Tories in the parliamentary party of the government.
The Liberals, after twenty-one years of government, had a heavy majority in the Senate, and under Allan MacEachen, the parliamentary engineer of the debacle that befell the Clark government, there was a great deal of sophisticated and not easily visible obstruction of the government program. The Mulroney government privatized much of the Crown corporate sector, including Air Canada and Petro-Canada. The huge spending programs of the previous government saddled its successor with heavy obligations, and it was difficult to deal with the deficit, which generally increased in the Mulroney years. There were some spending cuts, but the government drew back from curtailing universality for the more well off after it came under withering attack from the heavy Canadian welfare lobby, which was motivated more by a fantasy about being more caring and compassionate than the United States than by concern for those who would pay more because they were wealthier. If Mulroney and finance minister Michael Wilson (who had a strong background in the securities industry in Toronto) wanted to attack the deficit on the spending side, this was the time and place to do it, by means-testing the beneficiaries of Canada’s relatively ample welfare system and concentrating policy on delivering care to those of modest means who needed it and not on the ideological purity of a futile effort to assure equal health care for everyone, a chimera and not even one that is particularly desirable. They eventually seized upon the Goods and Services Tax (GST), midway between a conventional sales tax and a value-added tax, as a revenue earner, but were inviting both fiscal and political turbulence by cutting income taxes in advance of the next election, having announced the GST for after the election and not applying it at a rate sufficient to assure a real reprieve from chronic deficits. These continued to accrue, and ultimately reached the very worrisome total of $42 billion at the end of Mulroney’s time, with a total national debt perilously close to 100 per cent of GDP and a dollar that was below 70 U.S. cents. The GST was, however, a brilliant policy initiative that enabled successor regimes of both major parties to rack up a world-leading record of deficit avoidance.
Despite the difficulties, Mulroney was not fiscally unsuccessful; he was digesting an inherited structural deficit, managing through tolerably well, and sweeping away most of the dreadful nonsense of the Trudeau era, such as the failed energy policy, but he was forced to scrimp and save in ways that got in the way of campaign promises and his own policy preferences. Brian Mulroney was a strong Alliance man and knew and admired the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada’s other principal associates in the Western Alliance, and unlike Trudeau got on well with, and was well-liked by, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom were more than happy to see the back of Trudeau, and not because he was in the slightest effective at discountenancing them in policy terms, but because they found it painful to see Canada’s leader conducting an absurd rodomontade on the world stage with the Soviet bloc.* Because of severe budgetary shortages, Mulroney had to forgo his expressed desire to strengthen the armed forces. He had planned to restore 60 per cent of the personnel reduction Trudeau had imposed, but the best he could do was to complete the deconstruction of Paul Hellyer’s mad plan to impose a single uniform on the forces and to reequip them to some degree.
Over-fishing, which had gone on for many years, required the temporary shutdown of the cod-fishing industry. The government provided remedial programs but was unpopular throughout the Atlantic provinces for atoning for the excesses of a previous era. The Mulroney government had, if anything, a record of over-compliance in environmental matters, and signed both the biodiversity and global warming conventions, although assumptions about global warming were based on rather slender evidence. Where Reagan had dismissed Trudeau’s concerns about acid rain as mere whining and carping, and his advisers told him that official Canadian films on the subject were just propaganda, Mulroney secured a useful agreement from Reagan.
In foreign policy generally, Mulroney was among the most successful leaders Canada has had. He came into office just as Ronald Reagan was swept back into the White House by one of the greatest pluralities in the country’s history, carrying forty-nine states against his opponent, former vice president Walter F. Mondale. The American economy was booming, and the Western Alliance was being led by the formidable duo of Reagan and Thatcher, working closely with West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and in the destabilization of international communism, with the Holy See under the strong and inspiriting leadership of the Polish pontiff John Paul II, a hero of his country’s resistance to the German Nazi and the Soviet Communist occupations.
Mulroney was naturally pro-American and had been appalled by Trudeau’s efforts to pretend that Canada had any vocation, will, or standing to pretend to occupy any middle ground in the Cold War. He further recognized, in exact contradiction of Trudeau’s methods and leanings, that the only way for Canada to maximize its possible influence in the world was to be perceived as having considerable sway with the regime in Washington. He managed this, and developed the closest and most useful relations with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush that any Canadian prime minister has had with any American president. King got on well with, and saw a lot of, Roosevelt, and did get quick agreement to the Hyde Park Declaration, which assured Canada would not be drained of its foreign reserves as a consequence of the Lend-Lease assistance to Britain and the Commonwealth in 1941 (Chapter 7). But King was a less relaxed and persuasive personality than Mulroney, and by the 1980s Canada was a good deal more substantial in the world and Mulroney had the talents of an ingenuous chameleon, in a good cause. And on the other side, the United States was in the front lines in the Cold War as it was not in early 1941, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. were much less enigmatic and devious personalities than the bonhomous but inscrutable and overpowering Roosevelt. It was soon well-kn
own that, next to Thatcher, Mulroney was the foreign national leader that Reagan liked and respected more than any other, and as American power in the world, under the impulse of Reagan’s immense military buildup and surging productivity and gross production boom, crested to its supreme historic point, that was a status that conferred considerable influence on Mulroney and on Canada.
Mulroney parlayed and levered his status with Reagan and Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president and would succeed him as president of the U.S., into a stronger position in the French-speaking world and in the Western Alliance than Canada had had before, either by virtue of indirect Kingsian lobbying, Pearsonian altruistic companion-ability, or renegadism of either the eccentric Diefenbaker variety or the nettlesome carping and posturing variety of Trudeau. Mulroney was not a blind follower; he opposed Reagan’s support of anti-communist guerrillas in Central America, a policy which went awry and caused Reagan significant embarrassment in the Iran-Contra affair but did help bring the democratic rejection of the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Mulroney also crossed swords with Thatcher over sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa. She did “not see how we will make things better by making them worse,” Mulroney told the author, but he was more concerned with sending a message to the non-white world of absolute hostility to racism. South African whites eventually jettisoned what Thatcher described as their “evil and repulsive” system of segregation, and it is doubtful that Canada affected the outcome or the timing, but Mulroney was certainly no mere camp follower.
