Mulroney
Mulroney became the 18th prime minister of
Canada on September 17, 1984, after
his party, the Progressive Conservatives
won the greatest parliamentary victory
ever in Canadian history. Mulroney was
born in 1939, the son of an electrician,
in the paper mill town of Baie
Comeau, Quebec. Mulroney attended a very strict
military type all boys’
school until the age of 16 when he entered Saint
Francis Xavier
University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. There he earned an honor
degree in
political science. While at St. FX he was active in on campus
politics.
During his first year he became a member of the youth wing of the
P.C.
Party of Nova Scotia. Before he graduated he was to become the Prime
Minister of
St. FX’s famous mock Parliament, a position that had been
held for years by
Liberal students. After graduation he studied law at
Dalhousie in Halifax and
later at Laval University in Quebec, from which he
graduated in 1962. It was
during these years in Quebec that Mulroney became
known as the life of the
party. He frequented most Montreal nightclubs and
was quite a lady’s man.
Mulroney also became a slightly more than social
drinker. After becoming a
lawyer in 1965 he joined a prestigious law firm
known as Cate Ogilvy, later
becoming a partner in that firm. In May 1973 at
the age of 34 he married a
beautiful 20 year old Mila Pivnicki, daughter of
Yugoslav immigrants. The
Mulroneys would go on to have three children.
Mulroney worked energetically for
the Progressive Conservative Party as a
young lawyer, serving on the party's
finance and policy committees and on its
1968 and 1972 campaign committees. He
first came into the public eye in 1974
as a member of the Cliche Royal
Commission, which investigated corruption
and violence in the Quebec
construction industry. Also involved in this
commission was Mulroney’s friend
and future Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard.
Although Mulroney had not yet held
public office, he ran for election as
Conservative leader at the party's 1976
national convention. He waged a
vigorous and expensive campaign but lost to Joe
Clark after being
critisized as the Cadillac Cantidate for spending so much
money. Following
this failure, Mulroney became very depressed and bitter. This
was a very
bleak time in his life. His drinking and his tongue often got him in
trouble.
During this period he would often attend social events, get very drunk,
and
make an ass of himself. He took the Leadership loss very personally and
it
almost ruined him. A few years after taking the job of President of the
Iron Ore
Company of Canada in 1977 he decided that he would clean himself
up. He went to
special Alcoholics Anonomous meetings for famous people who
didn’t want the
world to know they had a problem. After this time in his life
he almost never
had a drink and never repeated his drunken outbursts at any
social functions.
During his years as a corporate executive, Mulroney
remained active in politics,
taking every occasion to increase his visibility
among the public and to gain
support from within the party for his upcoming
leadership bid. In 1982, because
of an economic depression, the Iron Ore
Company of Canada was forced to close
one of its mining and milling towns in
Quebec. At first this appeared to be a
disastrous political setback for
Mulroney. However, he turned it into a public
relations triumph by making the
people of the town in question believe that
there were other alternatives
when there were none and by negotiating generous
settlements for the workers
who had lost their jobs. This earned him respect and
won him general support
and his reputation as an expert labor lawyer and
industrial relations
specialist was enhanced. After the election most of his
promises were shown
to be false hopes but by that time the people had already
decided. In
mid-1983 Clark's leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party
was being
questioned, forcing him to call a national party convention and
leadership
review. Brian Mulroney was again a candidate, and he campaigned more
shrewdly
than he had done seven years before. He actually had been paying people
to
ruin Clarks chances of getting the nomination again. He had suffered
through
one dark period in his life he resolved there would be no more. He
was elected
party leader on June 11, 1983, after attracting broad support
from among the
many factions of the party, especially from representatives of
his native
Quebec. After a by-election in the riding of Central Nova
Mulroney entered the
House of Commons on August 28, 1983. Despite
inexperience, he was an effective
leader of the opposition against the
well-respected Liberal Prime Minister,
Pierre Elliot Trudeau. When
Trudeau retired in June 1984, the Liberal Party
chose John Turner as its new
leader. Turner called a general election for
September. The new Prime
Minister was hampered by a lack of political skills,
having been out of
politics for some nine years. In addition, his party was top
heavy and old
after 16 years in office. Consequently, Turner's electoral
campaign against
Mulroney was difficult. The campaign featured three debates
between the two
party leaders, during which both English and French were spoken.
In these
debates, Mulroney, who is bilingual, speaking both English and
French
fluently, won wide support for the Conservatives. The election result
was the
greatest triumph for a party in Canadian history. The Conservatives
led in every
province, emerging as a national party for the first time since
1958. Their
greatest success was in Mulroney's native province of Quebec,
which up to then
had been a Liberal stronghold. Canadian politics was
transformed from
Conservative domination of the west and Liberal
domination of the east to a
nationwide majority for the Conservatives. After
being full of energy constantly
the entire campaign Mulroney calmly sat in a
chair in his hotel room and took
the news of his victory with hardly a word
spoken. He said "I didn’t realize
the full implications of what had happened
until the RCMP followed me into the
bathroom." Under Mulroney's leadership,
the party took
"middle-of-the-road" positions on most issues and attracted
widespread
support. Mulroney possessed the essential ingredients for a
successful Canadian
politician: bilingualism and identification with both
English-speaking Canada
and French-speaking Canada. Also, since his wife was
Yugoslavian, the public
associated him with immigrant groups. In addition,
Mulroney's emphasis on the
need for national unity and improved relations
between the federal and
provincial governments promised Canadians a new era
of harmony after the
difficult years under former Prime Minister Trudeau.
During the election
campaign, the depressed state of the Canadian economy and
Canada's somewhat
tense relations with the United States (stemming from
economic protectionism on
both sides and from environmental issues) were
problems that Mulroney promised
to deal with if his party were returned to
power. With unemployment at more than
11 percent, Mulroney also pledged
to make job creation his first aim. As Prime
Minister, Mulroney presided
over an economic upswing. Unemployment, however,
remained very high. Although
U.S. President Ronald Reagan was uncompromising on
environmental issues such
as the reduction of industrial pollution Mulroney
pressed ahead. Later
negotiating a free-trade treaty with the United States
under which all
tariffs between the two countries would be eliminated by 1998.
However,
the benefits of free trade were undone by a combination of an
overvalued
Canadian dollar, a new goods and services tax (1991), and a severe
recession.
In 1993 the Canadian government signed a further agreement with
the
United States and Mexico to create a free-trade zone. The North
American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect January 1, 1994.
Another concern for
Mulroney was the widening division in national unity.
For years, many people in
the province of Quebec had believed that their
French-Canadian culture merited
distinct status within the Canadian
Constitution, and a widespread movement to
separate from Canada had developed
in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1987 Mulroney
orchestrated the Meech Lake Accord,
a series of constitutional amendments
designed to satisfy Quebec's demand for
recognition as a "distinct
society" within Canada. However, many other
distinct societies within
Canada objected to Quebec’s special treatment.
This led to its failure when
Manitoba and Newfoundland, distinct
societies themselves, did not ratify it
before the 1990 ratification
deadline. This failure sparked a major separatist
revival in Quebec and led
to another round of meetings in Charlottetown, Prince
Edward Island, in
1991 and 1992. These negotiations culminated in the
Charlottetown Accord,
which outlined extensive changes to the constitution,
including recognition
of Quebec as a distinct society. However, the agreement
was defeated in the
national referendum of October 1992. As well as some great
failures in his
career as P.M. Mulroney would be remembered for some good things
such as the
Nunavut Agreement with the Inuit of the eastern arctic, which set in
motion
the creation of a third Canadian Territory. Also his
reputation
internationally was boosted by his tough stand on South African
Apartheid. He
was also an architect of the Francophone summit, which is a
yearly meeting of
the leaders of the worlds French speaking nations. Though
Mulroney had retained
a parliamentary majority in the 1988 elections,
widespread public opposition to
the free-trade agreement and his inability to
resolve the Quebec problem caused
Mulroney's popularity to decline
sharply, and he resigned in 1993. He was
replaced as P.M. and head of the
Progressive Conservative Party by Defense
Minister Kim Campbell, a
girl.