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Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has passed away.
Mr Mulroney was Prime Minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993. His leadership brought a greatly improved relationship with the United States. A personal friendship with President Ronald Reagan was a great assistance to him attain the Free Trade Agreement. It ended with the Goods and Services Tax, which, until the current carbon tax, was the least popular tax ever to be imposed on an unwilling population.
From Brian Mulroney's Eulogy of President Ronald Reagan:
Ronald Reagan was a president who inspired his nation and transformed the world. He possessed a rare and prized gift called leadership - that ineffable and sometimes magical quality that sets some men and women apart so that millions will follow them as they conjure up grand visions and invite their countrymen to dream big and exciting dreams.
I always thought that President Reagan's understanding of the nobility of the presidency coincided with the American dream.
And further:
I have been truly blessed to have had a friend like Ronald Reagan. I am grateful that our paths crossed and that our lives touched. I shall always remember him with deepest admiration and affection and I shall always feel honored by the journey we traveled together in search of better and more peaceful tomorrows for all God's children, everywhere.
And so, in the presence of his beloved and indispensable Nancy, his children, family, friends and the American people he so deeply revered, I say "au revoir' today to a gifted leader, historic president and gracious human being. And I do so with a line from Yeats, who wrote: "Think where man's glory most begins and ends and say - my glory was that I had such friends."
While I spent a lot of years strongly disliking Brian Mulroney, I have to admit that the country and the world are better places for his leadership.
Discussion (16)
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I remember the "Shamrock Summits" of Mulroney and Reagan (both had Irish ancestry.)
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I remember my parents going over to a neighbors house in 1987 for a meeting as part of the early organizing for the Reform Party in response (partly) to some of Mulroney's political decisions and I definitely recall the furor over the Free-Trade Agreement and the awful imposition of the GST, but in retrospect his leadership was definitely an improvement over the Trudeau Liberal years. His upside was that he was a Conservative and came through on privatizing a lot of Crown Corporations. His Quebecker-background ended up being his political undoing, especially with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords and screwing over Manitoba with moving the CF-18 servicing contract in favor of Bombardier in Quebec essentially ended the viability of the PC Party as it was then constructed.
In retrospect; I, too, have to echo @OccupantCDN and say that Canada is a much better place having had him as Prime Minister. RIP Brian...
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Yes, it was his friendship with Reagan that went a long way to rehabilitate his reputation with me. I didnt think it was more than a political convenience back in the 80s, it just seemed to be a performance for the news cameras. It wasnt until Reagan's funeral, and Brian Mulroney was giving a Eulogy that I realized it was real.
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Met him briefly, just a shake of the hand, in '94. A friendly and open impression, you honestly couldn't imagine him a PM, and then he spoke and you could.
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More conservative Canadians were disappointed by the short term of Joe Clark- he was a several month break from Trudeau -the old SNL joke was that he was voted out b/c his wife wouldn’t sleep with members of parliament like Trudeau’s would. Luckily for Canada Mulroney emerged to end the slide orchestrated by Trudeau-unfortunately for Canada the nut didn’t fall far from the tree.
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