Among conservatives the late Brian Mulroney, who died on Thursday at the age of 84, will remain always a controversial figure.Gregarious, good-humoured, famous for his Irish charm and for getting along with the equally Irish US President Ronald Reagan, and frequently accompanied by his glamorous wife Mila, he was a charismatic and larger-than-life figure in whose path for many years, rose petals were strewn. (So to speak.) For old school Progressive Conservatives he has been and will remain, something of a tribal totem.Yet, his is a mixed legacy. For by failing to take western Canada seriously, he also destroyed the Progressive Conservative party.First though, it is undoubtedly to his enormous credit that free trade between Canada and its largest trading partner was settled on his watch. The 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was controversial at the time, and fiercely resisted by both the Liberals and the NDP.However, the judgment of Canadian voters was overwhelmingly in favour. The free trade deal gave Mulroney a super majority — i.e. more seats than the other opposition parties combined.And, it took: when the FTA was expanded to include Mexico as the North American Free Trade Association in 1994, newly elected prime minister Jean Chretien couldn’t wait to ink the deal that laid the foundations of Canadian prosperity to this day.Especially in Ontario, Canadians never had it so good.As prime minister, Mulroney also twice did his best through first the Meech Lake Accord and later the Charlottetown Accord to have Quebec consent to the 1982 Constitution Act. To satisfy Quebec, the Charlottetown Accord in particular would have ceded many federal powers to the provinces. Thirty years later, as Albertans grapple with a federal government prone to overreach and the expansion of its own powers at the expense of the provinces, it is still too early to calculate the cost of that failure.It cannot however be blamed entirely upon Mulroney. It was Canadians themselves who voted it down in a 1992 referendum.Mulroney is also credited with taking a stand against the South African government, hastening the end of apartheid. In that matter, as with free trade, he stood on the right side of history. Nevertheless, not all Canadians were pleased to see him standing with notorious Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, at a 1990 commemoration of the Zimbabwean war of independence. It was after all upon Mugabe’s orders that the Zimbabwean army, assisted by the North Korean 5th Brigade, had slaughtered 20,000 members of the rival Ndebele tribe a few years before.For a Canadian prime minister, with the resources of the Privy Council Office to advise him, it was an inexplicable lapse in judgment… It was a lapse equalled only by his unfortunate association with rogue financier — some would say con-man — the charming and persuasive Karlheinz Schreiber.Nevertheless, for some years he looked like the supremely successful politician. Apart from free trade, the electoral success he enjoyed in 1988 was based on a remarkable coalition of Quebec nationalists led by the charismatic cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard and western conservatives, even though the latter were now visibly and increasingly reluctant.Two things shattered Mulroney’s legacy.First, when the Meech Lake Accord failed, Bouchard concluded that the rest of the country had rejected Quebec, assembled the Bloc Quebecois, and thereby robbed the Mulroney PCs of their Quebec strength.Meanwhile out West, the chickens came home to roost. To Mulroney, it must have seemed in 1986 a relatively quotidien piece of brokerage politics to award a maintenance contract for the RCAF’s newly acquired CF-18 fighter to a Quebec company (Bombardier) when Winnipeg’s Bristol Aerospace had in fact offered the better bid.But when it came to a toss up between keeping westerners happy and looking after the interests of Quebec, Mulroney hardly thought twice. He went with Quebec. It was the Laurentian way.It was a huge disappointment and seen as a shocking betrayal. After the Pierre Trudeau years and the National Energy Program, Western alienation was hardly a novelty. But in 1984, the cheerful, glad-handing Mulroney had seemed to westerners like somebody they could vote for. And they did.But with the Bristol Aerospace debacle, they had learned the truth — that nothing had changed. And in that 1986 moment of clarity, the animus of what would come to be the Reform Party was born.It took a few years.But in 1993, as Bouchard led the Quebec exodus, the western Reform Party won 52 seats. And so, the Chretien Liberals took power, the Bloc Quebecois became the official opposition, and the party of Mulroney was cut down to two seats.Members of the Reform Party, and years later even members of the Conservative Party of Canada have endured the complaints of tribally minded Progressive Conservatives, that if the "Reformers had not ‘walked away,’ the PC Party could have lived to win again."About that, we’ll never know. What western conservatives believe with a passion however, is that they weren’t the ones who walked away. It was Brian Mulroney, from Baie Comeau, who tossed them aside to favour Quebec because… that’s how things were done, wasn’t it? Who else could the West vote for anyway?Brian Mulroney was a decent man, a family man and loyal to his friends and those who worked for him. And, we have had worse prime ministers.But in the end, for all the good Mulroney did and tried to do, his signature achievement was that with one foolish decision, founded upon an insouciant disregard for honest dealing in a contract of secondary importance, he blew up his party.Alas for what might have been. It could all have been so much better.Now, may he rest in peace.
