Brian Mulroney, former prime minister who reshaped Canada, has died

“On behalf of my mother and our family, it is with great sadness we announce the passing of my father, The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister,” his daughter Caroline posted on social media late Thursday afternoon.

“He died peacefully, surrounded by family.”

Mulroney became prime minister in 1984 when his Progressive Conservatives won 211 seats in the House of Commons — the largest margin of victory for a political party in Canadian history and a feat that has never been repeated.

A self-professed “failed crooner” who made $50 a pop for singing ballads at his hometown’s paper mill, Mulroney’s unrelenting ambition won him friends among some of the most powerful leaders of his generation, but also made enemies of countless Canadians who scorned what they saw as his obsession with his own image and that of his legacy.

By the time he resigned in 1993, the consensus he’d built between Western populists and Quebec nationalists had collapsed, and the goods and services tax his government introduced was so wildly unpopular that it led to the near-annihilation of the PC party in the subsequent election, setting in motion a realignment of conservatism in Canada that continues to this day.

The Airbus affair, an alleged kickback scheme connected to the purchase of new aircraft for Canada, would further tarnish his political legacy, and he would spend the decades after he left office working to polish his image, ever confident that history would erase the blemishes.

“One hundred years from now, what will be remembered was that it was done,” he told reporters after clinching the Canada-U.S. free trade deal.

“The naysayers will be forgotten.”

Martin Brian Mulroney was born on March 20, 1939, the third of six children. He was the first of them to be born in Baie Comeau, a town set up in the 1930s to house a paper mill.

In a biography by L. Ian MacDonald, Mulroney recounted a childhood spent playing sports, devouring books from the library, and making a name with mill owner Col. Robert McCormick as a boy who could sing any tune, upon request, and being paid $50 for the job.

He left Baie Comeau for high school in New Brunswick, and from there went on to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S.

His undergraduate years laid the groundwork for his life in politics, as he became active in a Progressive Conservative campus club and started working on regional political campaigns.

At Laval University law school, his political network grew to include Lucien Bouchard, who would later commit a Shakespearean act of political sabotage by double-crossing Mulroney during negotiations over changes to the Constitution known as the Meech Lake accord and siding with Quebec separatists.

After law school, Mulroney found work as a labour lawyer in Montreal and there, at age 33, he met then-18-year old Mila Pivnicki, spying her at the Mount Royal Tennis Club one weekday afternoon.

They would marry two years later and go on to have four children — Caroline, Ben, Mark and Nicolas — and 15 grandchildren. 

Caroline Mulroney is now a minister in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government.

In a statement Thursday, Ford said he sees some of Mulroney’s best qualities in his children. 

“Brian was also so generous with his time. When faced with tough decisions, I often leaned on him for advice and benefited from his experience and his political instincts,” Ford said.

“He was a role model to me and taught me countless lessons on how to be a better leader.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also reflected on the insights Mulroney shared with him over the years.

“He never stopped working for Canadians, and he always sought to make this country an even better place to call home,” Trudeau said in a written statement, calling him generous, tireless and incredibly passionate. 

“As we mourn his passing and keep his family and friends in our thoughts, let us also acknowledge — and celebrate — Mr. Mulroney’s role in building the modern, dynamic, and prosperous country we all know today.”

By the time of the 1984 general election, the Liberals had been in power for nearly all of two decades and Mulroney — elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives in 1983 — capitalized on dissatisfaction with their track record, perhaps summing it up best in the knockout punch he landed on Liberal leader John Turner during a leaders’ debates.

As Turner deflected Mulroney’s attacks on his patronage appointments, Mulroney jabbed a finger across the top of the lectern and his baritone voice belted out what would become a classic political quip: ” You had an option, sir.”

Mulroney would go on to win a landslide victory — 211 seats, including a record 81 in Quebec, where fallout from the constitutional talks of 1982 had led to great frustration with the Liberals.

With a decisive mandate, Mulroney embarked on twin talks to reshape Canada: the Meech Lake accord and a free trade deal with the U.S.

The accord was the sequel to the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982, a bill that Quebec refused to sign at the time.

The accord, however, needed to be formally ratified by all the provinces and the subsequent three years of debate saw the national consensus around its provisions collapse as the political landscape in some of the provinces shifted toward staunch opposition to the proposals.

Among the outcomes: a resurgence of the Quebec separatist movement, and the creation of a new federal separatist party the Bloc Québécois, led by Mulroney’s old friend Bouchard.

Current Quebec Premier François Legault called Mulroney a visionary Thursday because of the Canada-U.S. trade agreement, also celebrating his fight against apartheid in South Africa and his work against acid rain, one of the biggest environmental challenges of the day.

“He was a real ambassador who made Quebec and Canada shine in the world. My thoughts are with his family and friends,” Legault said.

Mulroney never campaigned on free trade with the U.S.

As Opposition leader in the House of Commons, he met U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the two  men developed an affinity for one another, rooted, as Mulroney himself would later observe in his biography, in their shared Irish heritage and their conservative global outlook.

That they were allies was cemented in the so-called “Shamrock summit” of 1985, when the two men took to the stage to belt out the song “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”

Talks towards a new trade agreement began that year and concluded at the 11th-hour in 1987, when, in Mulroney’s telling, he won a last-minute concession from the U.S. for a trade dispute mechanism.

The deal reshaped the Canadian economy, ushering in a boom in two-way trade and investment, but also marked the beginning of a major upheaval in Canada’s manufacturing sector, and the globalization era that followed is often directly referenced as the birth moment for the modern era of populist politics.

Current Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who also sought guidance from Mulroney, saw his economic legacy differently. 

“These changes gave thousands of working-class families the same opportunities he had, that is, the chance to work hard, buy a home, and build their dreams,” he said in a statement.

The 1988 election became the “Free Trade” election, and while the Liberals were opposed to the deal, Mulroney still won a second term.

Through his time in office, Mulroney attempted to rein in government spending, embarking on rounds of cuts and freezes to social spending and then ultimately did what many thought unthinkable for political survival — introduced a new tax, the Goods and Services tax.

The opposition leader at the time, Jean Chrétien, promised the bill would get quashed in the Senate, but Mulroney used an obscure constitutional provision to stack the Senate and the new tax passed.

Chrétien said Mulroney did his best to do what he thought was right for Canada, and while he was involved in many controversial files, it was better to be involved than not to be involved.

“He left a mark as prime minister, there is no doubt about that,” he said Thursday.

His mark was also international.

In one of his last public appearances, Mulroney took pride in the fact that in 1991 his government was the first in the Western world to recognize Ukraine’s independence from Russia, and urged the current government to stand firm against Russian tyranny.

He also led the global fight to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime, eventually convincing even a recalcitrant British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to drop her opposition to imposing sanctions. 

But despite his international stature, his social service cuts, the GST, the recession of the early 1990s proved too powerful a political force to keep him in office.

He resigned in 1993, and in the subsequent election, the party was destroyed in the polls — a campaign that also marked the rise of a new Conservative party, the Reform party, formed from the seeds of western discontent. 

Two years after he left, a scandal exploded: Mulroney was alleged to have taken kickbacks from the sale of airplanes while he was prime minister, and the ensuing allegations would see him under scrutiny for well over 10 years, culminating in a commission of inquiry being called by the next conservative to replace him as prime minister, Stephen Harper.

That commission ultimately concluded Mulroney had acted inappropriately by taking $225,000 — but it was after he left office.

Harper — who had successfully united the tatters of Mulroney’s PCs with the reformers who broke with it — paid his tribute Thursday to a man he once refused to even speak to, calling Mulroney a historic figure, an environmental champion, and a freedom fighter.

The Mulroney family did not specify the cause of death, but last year the former prime minister had been treated for prostate cancer, and also underwent a heart procedure.

His post-political life saw Mulroney play an active role in the private sector, sitting on numerous corporate boards.

He also played a role in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade deal, acting as Canada’s unofficial emissary to the political elite in Washington, and once even reprising his duet with Reagan at a fundraising gala where then-U.S. President Donald Trump was in attendance.

When asked by reporters in 2017 what he was doing at a Liberal cabinet meeting, his dedication to the country shone through: 

”There’s no Conservative or Liberal way to negotiate a free-trade agreement,” he said.

“There’s only a Canadian way.”

With files from Tonda MacCharles