The response of my Alberta Progressive Conservative friends — for so they still for the most part call themselves — to the recent death of Brian Mulroney has been astonishing.Almost to a person they recall with fondness and nostalgia his personality but pretty much ignore his policies, especially his domestic policies and the effect they had on this province and the prairie West more broadly. Most of these former PCs began their political life as friends and supporters of Joe Clark, which makes expression of their positive emotional response to Mulroney’s death all the more surprising.To simplify somewhat, when Clark won the party leadership in 1976, Mulroney was not a good loser. He ignored the obvious fact that the leadership ambitions of Claude Wagner were responsible for dividing the Quebec votes at the convention. He blamed Clark for winning and began a seven-year stealth campaign to remove the young leader from High River.This was one of the most well-known secrets of late 1970s Ottawa. In 1983, in response to growing criticism, which had begun following the PCs ignominious defeat in the 1980 election and despite winning the endorsement of two-thirds of the party members at the regular biennial party convention, Clark decided to call a leadership convention.Clark apparently judged that two-thirds of his party’s support was not enough. Even the Prince of Wales was surprised, as he remarked to Clark in 1987 at an official dinner at Rideau Hall.The 1983 leadership was a murky affair. It later came to light that Karlheinz Schreiber, who was subsequently involved in the Airbus scandal during the Mulroney years, had provided financial support to a collection of Quebec delegates and instructed them to vote against Clark and for Mulroney. And, for the record, after Mulroney left office, he admitted that Schreiber subsequently paid him $225,000. (Schreiber said it was $300,000.) Mulroney’s supporters say they are still dumbfounded by his action. Really, it doesn’t seem that complicated. After all, Peter Lougheed, whom Schreiber also tried to “benefit,” knew how to say “no.”In the 1983 leadership convention, Mulroney challenged Clark on the grounds that Clark was too much a “Red Tory” and Mulroney a true-blue business conservative.This is nonsense.The term “Red Tory,” however appealing to journalists and political operatives, is a Marxist confection invented in a 1966 article by Gad Horowitz, a political science prof at the University of Toronto. It is unsupported by historical evidence.Mulroney won in 1983 because he was a Quebecer. End of story.Or rather, repeat of an earlier story.The 1983 contest reminded me of the purge of John Diefenbaker nearly twenty years earlier by Dalton Camp and the Bay Street business wing of the party. This interpretation was confirmed by Peter Newman’s great book, Renegade in Power.In short, what happened to Dief in the 1960s and to Clark in the 1980s was an expression of the intolerance of Laurentians for political leadership from the prairie West.At the time Mulroney said the Tories were “a bunch of losers” because they could not win in Quebec. He promised to change that, but never looked at the cost.In his recent assessment of Mulroney in these pages, Nigel Hannaford provided a broad hint: our 18th prime minister was obsessed with “national unity.”National unity, thanks to Mulroney, has become a coded way of excusing the endless appeasing of Quebec. David Bercuson and I demonstrated this at some length in our 1991 book, Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec.To understand fully Mulroney’s place in pan-Canadian history it is important to acknowledge his undoubted foreign policy triumphs: helping to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa and negotiating the free trade deal with the Americans.His domestic policies, however, were more important to Canadians. Mulroney is often praised for having wound down the National Energy Program imposed by Pierre Trudeau. In fact, doing so was easy. Imagine what would have happened if he had refused!The real problem was Quebec. As his biographer, John Sawatsky put it, by the time he left law school at Laval, “Quebec’s priorities had become his priorities,” at least in the sense that the province deserved a much more prominent place within Canada.Because Canada without Quebec was unthinkable to him, “profitable federalism,” as his contemporary Premier Robert Bourassa called it, was the obvious alternative. Emphasizing “national unity” was the key. It meant working to ensure that Quebec accepted Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 Constitution “with honour and enthusiasm,” as Mulroney said.The signature documents of appeasement, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, did not do the trick. Special status for Quebec was not enough. Lucien Bouchard, whom Mulroney had personally recruited, quit the PCs to found the Bloc Quebecois, claiming that the Anglophone premiers were out to “humiliate” Quebec.Mulroney’s obsession with Quebec had been duly noted in the prairie West. Hence the Reform Party, whose founder, Preston Manning, Mulroney called “the architect of disunity.”Which brings us back to why so many former PCs remember Mulroney so fondly. First, many of them still view Manning the way Mulroney characterized him, thus conveniently absolving both him and themselves of responsibility for the Western consequences of Quebec appeasement. Second, Mulroney was a man of undoubted good humour and charm. “He kissed the Blarney Stone,” one of my good friends put it. But most of all, it seems to me, is that the myth of “national unity,” a bilingual Canada, and all the other Laurentian fantasies, can still seduce the souls of otherwise commonsensical Albertans.The reality, which has been proven daily ever since Mulroney tried, is that Quebec cannot be appeased and will not leave. Albertans without a PC hangover know it.
