The Deplorable Legacy of Brian Mulroney

Brian Mulroney is no longer a household name having served his two tumultuous terms but his legacy haunts the Canadian political landscape, salting the earth, fouling political waters and clouding the future. Depending on how you look at it he was a stunning failure or brilliant success. For anybody who believed in a dynamic future for this country he was a stunning failure. On the other hand, for those who wanted Canada neutered as a nation(the continentalists) he was a brilliant success.

Mulroney was a vindictive politician arriving after the Liberals had a long and successful run in power. Finally, Canada’s Progressive Conservatives had acquired a majority government- and not just any majority, the largest ever. Canadians had sent a massage we wanted change and we got it! Mulroney was soon to show that he was not a moderate conservative and maybe even an anti-conservative as he set about to alter the fundamental definition of the country. Being in office was his greatest binge of all, recklessly tampering with both the economy and the constitution.

Even though Canada enjoyed a healthy and mutually beneficial free trade with the US, Mulroney was duped into the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement, later to become NAFTA. In the wink of an eye Canada went from being a branch plant economy to a captive economy and resource slave to the US. NAFTA has really nothing to do with free trade. It is really a constitutional bill of rights for corporate exploitation. It was a huge step forward in formalizing the corporate welfare state and marked the death knell of the social welfare state. While many Canadians saw from the outset the NAFTA was an economic Trojan horse, Americans on their side of the border were only later to have similar concerns.

Mulroney was totally oblivious to the fact that his political ambitions far out exceeded his political talents. He was willing to mindlessly roll the dice without forethought or consideration of consequence. Where he had been awarded tremendous political success and opportunity his eight years in power were endless testimony to his squalid inability to exercise power with anything resembling equanimity. Given the opportunity to establish a conservative dynasty he was a pathetic flash-in-the-pan squandering his fifteen minutes of fame; definitely and unwittingly preferring infamy.

He blundered from a controversial free trade debate to a constitutional donnybrook, which deeply divided the country pursued by his government for partisan gain. In order to establish his daunting conservative coalition he took known separatists into the party as winning in Quebec had always been the key to Liberal success. To break this hold on Quebec he had to make deals with separatists he couldn’t keep and when he couldn’t deliver on either Meech Lake or Charlottetown Accords, Lucien Bouchard, one of those separatists stormed out of the House of Commons and formed the Bloc Quebecois.

The Bloc, as a separatist party, has now taken up permanent residence in the House of Commons and denied the Quebec vote to either Harper’s CPC or the hapless Liberals. Where Canada once had an effective two party system the political dynamic has now been warped to where, we are, thanks to Mulroney’s seditious constitutional machinations, facing endless minority governments. Canada’s asymmetrical federalism has been pushed to a new and possibly chronic level of dysfunctionalism.

In the election of 1993 Mulroney left office in disgrace. He destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party and became, again unwittingly, a founding father of the Reform Party. Where he was so nimble at accusing Trudeau’s Liberals of fostering Western alienation, his tenure saw the founding of a Western separatist party (in response to his endless pandering to Quebec) and ultimately the Reform Party, which mutated into the Alliance Party and thanks again to the witless Peter MacKay became the CPC (Conservative Party of Canada) an alleged reuniting of Canada’s conservatives.

MacKay, winning the leadership of a forlorn PCP, and willing to betray a commitment made to fellow leadership candidate David Orchard saw fit to go into coalition with a dead-ended Alliance Party led by none other than Stephen Harper. Harper’s Alliance was doomed to political oblivion as it was trapped in the West with no appeal to Ontario voters-the key to any federal success and the possibility of being a national party. MacKay, instead of rebuilding the PCP, threw Harper a life line and the two parties united to form what was claimed to be a coalition, but this was the big lie. Harper’s Alliance was a different strain of conservativism, a long way from Canada’s unique Red Tory tradition, and more akin to US Republicanism. MacKay was most accommodating and allowed Harper’s thugs to dominate this so-called coalition and purge Progressive Conservatives from the party. A uniquely Canadian conservative tradition was dead.

The CPC, of suspect pedigree, born of cynical political expedience, are among the reasons Canadians distrust this party and are only willing to grant it the stingiest of minority governments.

Jean Chrétien has never been so gracious as to acknowledge the huge political debt he owes Brian Mulroney. Had Mulroney not been so accommodating as to split the Right Chrétien never would have slid to such easy victories during his tenure as prime minister. Chretien and Paul Martin were more than accommodating in propelling this new CPC party to power through their ongoing dispute over Martin’s ascension to the leadership. Once he got the leadership Martin was so inept as to walk right into the Quebec Sponsorship Scandal destroying his party’s fortunes before the eyes of a dumfounded Canadian public.

Harper’s ascendance to the PMO is one of the great political flukes of all times. Leading a newly minted party, short on talent and of questionable pedigree assuming high office was suddenly within his grasp thanks to the deplorable legacy of Brian Mulroney and a helping hand from suicidal Liberals. He assumed office by default, as the Canadian electorate faced a full slate of impractical and undesirable non-choices. Such is the bitter harvest of chronic political ineptitude.

The sad fact is that Harper does not need a majority to do in the country. Political gridlock, traceable to the Mulroney era and the vacant Opposition benches serve his dark purpose well. What Mulroney started, Harper, his Frankstein, can be entrusted to finish. He knows too well the present suspension of democracy guarantees his political survival and his wicked agenda and he is more than willing to exploit this situation ruthlessly.

Harper, like Mulroney before him, is a national wrecking ball incapable of serving high public office for the good of the nation but rather serving an insatiable egocentrism, destructive to both himself and the public he treats with contemptuous indifference. The damage politicians do lives long after them and Mulroney’s deplorable legacy paved the way for Harper’s monstrous behavior. By destroying his own party and a Canadian conservative tradition-thus crippling a salubrious federal two-party system- he left the door wide open to opportunists and self-serving ideologues itching to fill this political vacuum.

A spring election would be a further insult to Canadians.

As American activist Philip Berrigan once stated:

If voting made any difference it would be illegal.

… Never so true as in present day Canada.

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