Canadian Dopers, Brian Mulroney.

Great Debates
1

As a young lad, I used to enjoy watching BBC World, much to my parents horror and or amusement. When I started, it was 1993 and Canada’s PM was in the news. It seems he was a tad unpopular with the folks up there and he resigned to be replaced by a girl. A few months later the party lost the election and won IIRC two seats. Even my undeveloped mind grasped that that was not a good performance for an incumbent. My parents assured me that it was the fault of the guy who resigned, not the girl’s.

My parents are a cultured, educated and learned couple, but I doubt the intricacies of Canadian politics was their speciality.

Over the years I asked about Mulroney of many Canadians I have met. Initially they usually assumed a facial expression which would suggest I passed had just farted in their presence. This was invariably followed by a tirade about Quebec, free trade, GST, corruption etc etc.

However, recently I have actually read some good things about the man and his reputation. Seems some people are reconsidering their opinion of him and revising it upwards. Even one poster, RickJay unless I am much mistaken, stated that he thought the man would be regarded as a successful PM.

So, what do you think?

2

Why are you calling a 46-year-old political veteran who had held four separate Cabinet positions a girl? And no, it wasn’t her fault. Zena, Warrior Princess couldn’t have saved the PCs in that election.

3

^
Yes I am quite aware of Ms Campbell’s accomplishments. I was however, 9 at the time.

4

As a man, he was quite odious, and was corrupt as the day is long, but the vast majority of policy decisions he was reviled for at the time have become facts of life and in many cases quite positive developments for Canada. The GST? Replaced a higher tax, and the anger over its introduction seems quaint now. FTA/NAFTA? Without question a wildly successful policy, and the fears of a US takeover of Canada (either politically or economically) as a result of it had zero basis in fact. The Charlottetown accords? Hey, no one else has been able to figure out Quebec either. If the choice today were between Steven Harper and Brian Mulroney, I’d take Mulroney in a heartbeat.

5

Looking back on it, Brian Mulroney was Canada’s version of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Regan in terms of policies and outlook, and the range of opinion on their accomplishments is similar. They were all fiscal, but not particularly social conservatives, and what you think of them is strongly dependent on how you feel about that worldview.

6

Raygun99 pretty much nails it. Mulroney, as a person, was deeply, profoundly corrupt and dishonest. Mordecai Richler said of him one of the funniest things ever said of a person; “He lies even when he doesn’t have to, just to stay in shape.” His Cabinet had a variety of crooks in it and Mulroney himself almost certainly accepted bribes while in office though he hasn’t been formally charged for it. He gave the impression of being slimy.

Furthermore, by 1993, his government was pretty much doomed due to the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, half-assed attempts to get Quebec to sign on to the Constitution (a purely symbolic thing, since Quebec is part of it anyway.) While this did Mulroney’s person reputation no good, it broke up his entire party. The Progressive Conservatives split into three parts; its more conservative, Western-oriented wing became the Reform Party, and many Quebec nationalists Mulroney had drawn into the party because the Bloc Quebecois, and what was left over remained the PC party, so, split up, the PCs were devastated in the 1993 election. Without that breakup of the party it’s questionable as to whether the Liberals would have won in 1993, but it happened, and it happened, in large part, because of Mulroney.

Having said that, Mulroney’s government’s primary policy initiatives were almost universally successful, some very significantly so. The Free Trade Agreement with the USA is the single most important and successful government policy that Canada has done in the last forty years and will continue to help Canadians for decades to come. The GST was a good move. Privatizing Crown corporations the government should never have been in the business of, like Air Canada, was an excellent idea. Mulroney’s government had a remarkably intelligent and nuanced foreign policy, supporting the USA at times and opposing it when appropriate and taking a leading role on opposing apartheid (a subject on which he was in very strong disagreement with Thatcher and Reagan, who felt there was risk of creating a Communist South Africa by opposing the regime; Mulroney was right, and they were wrong.) Mulroney was a valued ally and advisor to George Bush 1.0 in the leadup to the Gulf War and is often credited as being the guy who convinced Bush he needed a true UN mandate fto go to war successfully. Mulroney’s government was, for its time (and times have changed really fast) very socially progressive. Slimy though he was, his government was in the right place at the right time to modernize Canada’s attitude towards the economy and international trade.

7

If I may, why was the Free Trade Agreement and GST so unpopular?

8

The free trade agreement was unpopular because a lot of Canadians saw it as a sell-out to the US. There was fear that our natural resources would be pillaged. Of course that never materialized, and there are still a lot of Canadians who think that NAFTA is stealing our jobs and would prefer to cancel the deal. I won’t mention which party they support.

The GST, well most people didn’t understand that it was a replacement for an existing manufacturer’s tax, and saw it only as an unfounded tax grab; the party didn’t enter an election with this new tax as a mandate. The cost of goods and services did increase with its introduction, but we’re no doubt better off now as a result.

9

Have you ever heard of a popular tax?

10

Here in Colorado we have several popular taxes. That’s because we have TABOR (The Taxpayers Bill of Rights) which absolutely prohibits taxes from being implemented or raised without permission from the voters.

11

As I recall, it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t save the PCs more like she was thrown under the bus by a man who wouldn’t face the defeat himself.

My favourite joke post that election went something like this: “Jean Charest’s wife is quite the tramp! She is sleeping with half of the PC MPs!!!”

12

We “have” a similiar law in Manitoba. Didn’t actually matter when the NDP bumped up the provincial sales tax this past summer.

13

I see him as a necessary part of the pendulum-swing; we need occasional periods of deregulation and Wild-Westery to shake off stagnation.

14

At the time of its passage, the main fear about NAFTA was that it fostered a race to the bottom for workers and consumers by enshrining in law a variety of ways in which our social safety net could be dismantled as unfair competitive practices. It didn’t help that the Conservatives were largely the pro-corporate, pro-resource-extraction party whose natural interest seemed to lie in this direction. This was also the period in which “The Walmartization Of America” was happening most visibly, so opponents had vivid examples to point to and say “that’s what will happen up here!”

15

Point of clarification since a few posts are a bit muddy on this: it was the Canada-US FTA that Mulroney brokered. NAFTA was during Chretien’s tenure and added Mexico. The concerns regarding them are not identical - concerns about the FTA were primarily zomg Americans will have rights to our fresh water and oil. NAFTA added the zomg Mexicans will steal our jobs dynamic. Of course both are unmitigated successes, but some people don’t understand basic economics.

Do carry on.

And I second most everything RickJay said.

Specifically on the unpopularity of the GST - it replaced an invisible tax most people never knew they were paying with a highly visible tax. That’s almost the entirety of why it was opposed. It was revenue neutral (initially at least - it has increased govt revenue faster than the MST would have since the service sector has grown much faster than manufacturing), but you couldn’t convince anyone of that.

16

Free Trade: Canadian are afraid of Americans and people in general don’t comprehend rudimentary economics.

GST: People hate taxes.

17

One might even note that Chretien campaigned on getting rid of both the GST and the FTA, only to pull a “what? I never said that” act once getting into power (and then, as you note, expanding free trade).

18

Didn’t he also oversee some temporarily successful truce in the never-ending but amusingly-named Canadian Soft Wood problems?

19

Even if Mulroney was corrupt (and I think any claims that he was are hyperbolic), keep in mind that corruption among recent PMs was brought to an art form by Mulroney’s (okay, Campbell’s) successor - Jean Chrétien.

In terms of “objective” data as to Mulroney’s legacy or performance, the two MacLean’s surveys cited by Wiki rank him a bit above average.

ETA: And, he was said to have a nice singing voice by none other than Maggie Thatcher - that must count for something.

20

The visibility of the new tax was one reason, but I’d suggest that opposition was also partly due to the previously invisible federal sales tax (MST) being applied (as GST) to things it had never been applied to before. Newspapers bore prices like “50c (47c + 3c GST),” barbers and taxi drivers and parking lots had to add GST to their prices, and postage stamps were taxed. Professional service providers–lawyers and accountants and similar–now had to add GST to their invoices. Such things had never been taxed before; now they were.

The GST was promoted as “it applies to everything,” but there were a number of exceptions, which created confusion (and thus, opposition) among consumers. Just what was GST-only, and what was subject to GST + PST? And was there anything not subject to GST? All provinces (except Alberta) had sales taxes, but they only applied to certain things; certainly not everything. In Ontario, IIRC, books were not subject to provincial sales tax (PST), but were subject to GST. Similarly, feminine hygiene products were exempt from PST, but were subject to GST. Groceries were to be exempt from GST, but you had to buy at least six muffins for it to qualify as a grocery purchase; buying a quantity of five or fewer was deemed to be “for immediate consumption,” and they, like a few muffins purchased at a coffee shop, would be taxed. Eye exams and corrective lenses (and any medical procedures and prescriptions and prosthetics, etc. not covered by provincial health plans) were not taxed at all, but the frames for your new glasses were subject to GST, and possibly PST. I’m going on memory here; I may have a few details wrong, and I know some of these examples depend on province, but I hope I’m illustrating the confusion that arose out of the fact that federal and provincial sales taxes did not always mesh perfectly.

Drivers and drinkers and smokers were hard hit, as now there was a fourth tax on gas, alcohol, and tobacco, respectively: federal excise tax, provincial excise tax, PST and GST. There was a worry that the GST would be applied on top of the others–effectively a tax upon tax, in other words. This was, naturally, a concern, which caused some opposition. (In the end, the GST turned out not to be a tax upon tax.)

Lastly, Canadians were informed that the introduction of a GST had done wonders for the economy of New Zealand. With all due respect to the people and government of New Zealand, Canadians wondered why we were emulating a country that had no sales tax of any sort before their GST, when we had been paying provincial sales taxes for years. Don’t the feds understand that unlike New Zealanders, we’re already paying sales taxes? Why do the feds want to make us pay their sales tax and our province’s sales tax? We’re not New Zealand, with one level of sales taxes; why are you treating us as if we were? Such questions were answered with (to many Canadians) inadequate responses from the federal government, which only fueled opposition.

As I recall, the federal government did a very poor job of explaining why this tax was being implemented, what we could expect from it, and how it was going to be implemented. In retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing; but at the time, with a poor explanation of all of the above, along with the consequent rumour and conjecture that arises any time something is poorly explained, it is no wonder there was opposition.