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.

 

Dare I 'Blaspheme'?

I dare.

Given the hagiography that has unfolded since the passing of Brian Mulroney, I now take a step into waters that his enthusiasts might deem sacrilegious, even blasphemous. Despite his achievements (which largely look good in contrast to those of  today's 'leaders'), the late prime minister, in my view, was a shallow man who lacked insight into his own soul.

You may recall that one of his proudest achievements was that he sang for the Colonel  (Colonel McCormick) when he was nine years old. So impressed was he by this American's investment in Baie Comeau that he developed a fawning, life-long love of all things American, culminating in his onstage  singing of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling with Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the eighties. It was a performance he reprised in 2017 for Donald Trump, another man he greatly admired, at Mar-a-Largo.

The Globe's Lawrence Martin, whether intentionally or not, reveals the true shallowness of the man. Regarding his bond with Trump, he writes

Their relationship, Mr. Mulroney told me in an interview last year, went back decades to when they saw each other a lot in New York. It continued in Palm Beach, Fla., where he had a residence close to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which Mr. Mulroney and his family visited frequently.

He and Mr. Trump were such friends that shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, he sang When Irish Eyes Are Smiling for Mr. Trump at a Mar-a-Lago reception. He’d sung it with Ronald Reagan at the Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in 1985.

In fact, Mr. Mulroney believed Mr. Trump could be a highly successful president, just like the Gipper. 

Mulroney revealed to Martin that he thought Trump would be a good president, swept up in the majesty of office, and didn't see his right-wing populism coming. Those of us with both a pulse and critical thinking skills, I suspect, were not overtaken with the surprise Mulroney undoubtedly felt but never acknowledged when Trump turned out to be manifestly unfit for office.

During the interview, the late PM revealed he didn't blame the forces unleashed by Trump as responsible for America's current ills:

You have to look ... at “the capture of the Democratic Party by the extreme left-wing – The Squad and the unions. Joe Biden has been held hostage by the left wing of the party. And I know Joe well and I like him. But that’s what happened.”

He concurred that the U.S. democracy was in dire condition and the country brutally divided. “I understand all that, but that doesn’t change the reality that this is the greatest nation on Earth...

I submit that those dogmatic assertions would be met with less than universal assent.

For me, however, the greatest indication of Mulroney's lack of personal insight and reflective capacity is what he reveals about his ideas on free trade.

In our interview, Mr. Mulroney wanted to clear up a misconception: the idea that he was a johnny-come-lately to the idea of free trade. “Look, I had been president of the Iron Ore Company for nine years. And hell, the whole concept of the Iron Ore Company was trade. I was all over the world from Romania to China to Taiwan to Brazil, non-stop.”

While it’s true, he said, that in the 1983 Tory leadership campaign he stridently opposed free trade, it was because Canadians weren’t prepared to hear of it then and he couldn’t have won on it. “You have to remember the antipathy toward Reagan was horrific in Canada, disgraceful.”

What kind of man openly and shamelessly, even proudly, admits he lied both to his own party and the Canadian public?

The legacy of Brian Mulroney will, without doubt, be persistently promulgated and promoted in the days leading up to his state funeral. However, we do a grave disservice to critical thinkers everywhere not to challenge the elevation to secular sainthood many of his boosters clearly wish for him.

 

 

This Says It All

Brian ("There's no whore like an old whore") Mulroney's shameless pandering to Trump the other night confirmed yet again the shallowness of his character.

This political cartoon captures his abject sycophancy.


H/t iPolitics

A Voice From The Past

The always mellifluous Brian Mulroney offers some less than sweet-sounding words for the Harper government. As reported in The Globe and Mail, in an interview with Don Martin on CTV's Power Play, the former prime minister is quite critical of aspects of of the current, and warns that the electoral appetite for change is real and needs to be respected.

About Harper's very public and disgraceful dispute with Canada's Chief Justice, he says:

“You don’t get into a slagging contest with the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, even if you thought that he or she was wrong ... You don’t do that.”

On Canada's current relationship with the United Natons:

“When Canada, for the first time in our history, loses a vote at the United Nations to become a member of the Security Council . . . to Portugal, which was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time, you should look in the mirror and say: ‘Houston, I think we have a problem.’”

Without explicitly criticizing the Harper record on the environment, Mulroney says that

a “pristine environment” is important to Canada’s middle class.

“There are very few things that the middle class value more than the environment . . . and that’s one thing we can deliver on,” he said.

“The prime minister alone has to make it a very strong priority of the government, has to make sure it has the funds and the clout.”

About Justin Trudeau:

“His program is that he’s not Stephen Harper ... When I ran in ‘84... I won because I wasn’t Pierre Trudeau and then Jean Chrétien 10 years later won because he wasn’t Brian Mulroney. So it’s part of a desire for change, which is normal, and so I think it’s going to make for a great election [in 2015].”

Like a priest inspecting the entrails of a sacrificed animal, Mulroney's words suggest impending darkness for the Harper crew. And like many imperial presences of the past, Emperor Harper is likely to ignore these auguries at his peril and our gain.

The Legend of Brian Mulroney

Actually, our former Prime Minister is more a legend in his own mind, but then, confronting harsh reality has never been one of Mr. Mulroney's strong suits. His litigious past serves as ample testament to that fact.

But myth is always much more exciting than truth, and what better myth could Mulroney propagate than the one about the free-trade agreement his government negotiated 25 years ago with the United States? Last week, he made an appearance at the University of Toronto’s Rotman business school, where more than 700 guests gathered to commemorate his government's 'great' achievement. In his usual hyperbolic and self-congratulatory tone, in an hour-long chat with Rotman professor Joseph Martin, Canada's erstwhile 'leader' asserted that his accomplishments will stand among the greatest in Canada’s history, one of his proudest being the free-trade agreement. Indeed, he even went so far as to describe the pact as “the greatest in the history of the world.”

It is an assessment with which many would strongly disagree. One of the dissenters is The Star's Bob Hepburn who, on February 21, wrote a piece entitled Brian Mulroney and the harsh reality of Canada-U.S. free trade. He begins by reminding readers of some harsh truths that Mulroney seems unwilling to confront:

One morning 10 years ago, my brother lost his long-time job when the owners of the Scarborough electronic parts factory where he worked announced it was closing the plant and moving its operations to Chicago.

Soon after, his company shut down two other factories in Oakville, tossing 400 employees out of work. The jobs were shifted to the U.S. and Mexico. A bit later, the Markham electronics company where my niece had worked also closed its doors. It, too, moved its jobs outside of Canada.

The owners never admitted it, but workers were convinced a major reason why the companies closed the Ontario plants was the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement reached in 1987 under former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

The deal, which was the focal point of the 1988 federal election, eliminated import tariffs on most products, resulting in many profit-hungry companies closing plants here and moving the jobs to cheap-labour areas.

And Hepburn is not alone. Economist Jim Stanford, quoted in Hepburn's piece, wrote an article for he Progressive Economics Forum, replete with empirical date that shows those who extol the agreement are living in a world of fantasy and faith, a world typical of right-wing ideology, one fueld by the tactic of repeating something enough times so that its veracity is rarely called into question.

Citing government statistics, Stamford observes that our exports to the U.S. are at the same percentage level as in the mid-1980s, that our trade deficit is the highest ever, that our productivity has fallen in comparison with the U.S and that income levels of most Canadians in real terms are unchanged.

Then there are those who believe, using both anecdotal and empirical evidence, that people are decidedly worse off since the free trade deal was concluded. Youth unemployment hovers somewhere between 14 and 15%. People's lives are on hold. A study released today, conducted by McMaster University and the United Way, finds that the rate of insecure or precarious work has increased by 50 per cent in the past 20 years and is impacting everything from people’s decision to form relationships, have children and volunteer in their community.

Indeed, the statistic are grim:

- Barely half of working adults in the GTA and Hamilton have full-time jobs with benefits and expect to be working for their current employer a year from now;

- The other half are working either full- or part-time with no benefits or no job security, or in temporary, contract or casual positions.

And while statistic may seem dull and unevocative, the accompanying profiles are anything but, ranging as they do from a 27 year-old university lecturer struggling to cobble together a career that could take him far from his wife and young son to a 60-year-old home-care nurse whose working conditions and hours are anything but stable.

Just don't expect Mr. Mulroney, in his present and persistent self-congratulatory mood, to be moved by their plight.