Mr. Mulroney's Legacy

Willy Loman - Death of A Salesman

Brian Mulroney - Late Canadian Salesman

In a previous post, I discussed what I considered to be one of the shortcomings of the late prime minister, Brian Mulroney: his essential shallowness. But it is the damage many say he did to this country thanks, in part, to his fawning admiration of America and American corporations, that he may be best remembered for.

Amidst the many encomiums that have followed Mulroney's demise, two columnists write critically about what his unseemly trait led to: the original free trade deal with our neighbours to the south. Our delusional Willy Loman surrogate, Brian Mulroney, thought of it as one of the highlights of his life, but those columnists beg to differ.

Reflecting on the praise heaped upon the late prime minister, Rick Salutin writes:

The result of his 1988 free trade deal with the U.S. was that good industrial jobs shifted to low wage nations while workers stayed put and rummaged for poorer jobs at home. As manufacturing ‘hollowed out,’ the economy got “financialized,” focusing on money manipulations like mergers among the wealthy players, while workers were marooned in areas like services, retail and eventually, precarious “gigging.” This in turn widened the gap between the rich and the rest, expanding poverty, while the middle classes diminished. The main source of wealth for the majority became their homes, not their jobs, a shakey situation that left the generation now entering the workforce with scant hope of even owning a home.

Mulroney initially opposed free trade when he ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, but more powerful interests came to prevail:

The impetus came from corporate headquarters, mostly American, as conveyed through the Reagan administration. We were guinea pigs, as Mulroney went along enthusiastically. What’s strange is that we remain, almost alone, fervent free traders while most others, including the U.S., got off that train a while ago. 

Linda McQuaig has a similarly negative view of Mulroney's legacy, which compromised our values as a nation:

... Canada had a different (vis a vis the U.S.) political tradition, with government playing an important role advancing the public interest through crown corporations and universal social programs.

Canadian business leaders wanted that changed, even though they understood that most Canadians didn’t. In a paper released just before the 1984 election, the CEOs who made up the Business Council on National Issues acknowledged that Canada’s higher social spending reflected “the greater priority that Canadians put on social welfare.”

Canadians would just have to learn to make their social well-being less of a priority, the CEOs had decided.

They had the perfect stooge in Mulroney, the lover of all things American. 

.. Mulroney largely delivered for the business world, introducing far-reaching changes that transformed the Canadian political and economic landscape, partly through his free trade deal with the U.S. that weakened labour and enhanced the rights of business and investors.

Earlier Canadian governments had developed more than 60 crown corporations. Mulroney privatized or began privatizing some key ones, including a national railway, oil company and airline, and completed the privatization of Connaught Labs, a publicly-owned biomedical company that had become one of the world’s leading vaccine producers. 

Canada’s corporate world has thrived in recent decades, which explains much of the elite adulation for Brian Mulroney since his death last month. But the world he ushered in has left many Canadians feeling like the workers he left behind in the snowbanks.

In Death of A Salesman, protagonist Willy Loman preached the cult of personality, believing until almost the end that the man who is well-liked has the world as his oyster. I doubt that Brian Mulroney ever came to understand otherwise.