I find myself largely in agreement with Raygun99. In retrospect, Mulroney doesn’t look too bad. The only thing I would still really hold against him was his complete failure to get the deficit under control, since it would have been less painful if he’d done it than it was after he spent however many years letting it run out of control.
The worst thing to come out of his time in office, though, was the destruction of the PC party that has led to this era of regionalized opposition parties. However, I’m not really sure that can fairly be pinned on Brian. Not a great PM, but certainly not one of the worst.
I know we’re not going to see eye to eye on this. But there are a few aspects to this – one is economic, the other political.
First, the economics. I believe the switch to neo-liberal, Milton-Friedmann economics was one of the greatest disasters in Canadian history. Suddenly, we were told that free trade was inevitable, that our debt was spiralling out of control, that we had to kill off the social programs we’d worked so hard to build, and that we had to strangle inflation however we could.
None of this was inevitable. It was cooked up largely by Bay Street – including many of Mulroney’s business cronies. They knew they couldn’t sell such a radical reworking of the Canadian economy on its merits, so they sold it on a pretended inevitability.
The effects are obvious, particularly to those with lower incomes. I had the misfortune to be on welfare during the early days of the Chrétien/Martin regime, and have family who work in the hospitals. The care my elderly relatives receive every year deteriorates – last couple of years, they’ve had to lie in the emergency ward without beds. My grandmother injured her back about a year ago, and had to be shipped off to another town because they closed her hospital – budget cuts. They sent her home before she could really move again.
The reports I’ve read ay that Montreal’s homeless population doubled during the 90s, and Toronto’s tripled. That’s a lot of waste of humanity. To say nothing of the massive number of unemployed. Just how massive is difficult to say – the definitions keep changing. Now you have to be actively looking for work to be considered unemployed. And people with awful part-time jobs are counted as employed, even if they can’t make ends meet.
As for “employment insurance”, I can’t remember the last time anybody I knew qualified for it.
As for the environment, it’s continuing to erode, while our politicians sing in the choir of neo-liberalism – chanting that an unregulated, globalised market is inevitable.
And people suffer because of these policies. Real people. I’m not going to be told (though I frequently am told) that I shouldn’t feel compassion for them. That was me. That could still be me, except for dumb luck. It’s atrocious that welfare is such a diaster, in a country as wealthy as ours – a G7 nation. It’s atrocious that our health care system is in such a bad state. And cutting money from these things and giving it to corporations in the hope that some mystical alchemy will provide the poor with what they need was a feeble excuse when it was new, and decades of Reagonomics – under so many new names – have never provided it. It’s only made things worse.
Plus there’s John Crow’s inflation-fighting experiments. The effects of that on unemployment are well documented in Linda McQuaig’s Shooting the Hippo: Death by Defecit and Other Canadian Myths. In a larger context, the effects of these kinds of economic policies are detailed in John Ralston Saul’s End of Globalisation.
And you know what? The majority of this country agrees with me. Poll after poll after poll show that Canadians put medicare and social programs – sometimes even the environment – above tax cuts. Half the Liberal voters I know are actually NDPers who hold their nose and vote Liberal from fear of the Non-progressive (regressive?) Conservatives.
And this brings us to our other Mulroney legacy – the malaise in political culture. This malaise exists because people have been gradually giving up on the hope of effecting change through government. And a large part of that was Mulroney. Fresh out of the Trudeau years – and Trudeau showed us that we can actually be a country if we aren’t afraid to stand up to the US and corporate interests – Mulroney’s government was the fist to sing the mantra of inevitability, and bow to American and corporate interests.
Take as just one example the 1988 election. Mulroney ran on free trade and won. The Liberals and the NDP ran against it, and lost – but lost only because the vote was split. Mulroney treated the election as a referendum, and on that basis began dismantling our economic sovreignty.
Unfortunately, it was a referendum he lost 43% to 52%. Partly on that basis (though there were other things as well), Chrétien was elected with his quasi-co-prime-minister Martin, to end free trade and the GST (a regressive tax, unlike the income tax that Martin would so eagerly cut). Of course, they converted to neo-liberalism, not bothering to inform the public until after the election, and continued Mulroney’s economic plan. Now, the far-right-and-frequently-fundamentalist-Christian Reform Party was on the scene, and people felt they had to vote Liberal because it was too dangerous to vote NDP. It decimated our party.
Worse, the one area where Mulroney seemed to show promise was another spectacular failure: national unity. This was always Trudeau’s blind spot, and it was partly to fix these problems that Mulroney was elected: one of his biggest bases was in Quebec. But by the end of the next election, there were two regional parties in Ottawa, one of them separatist. We underwent a political fragmentation from which we never recovered. Two years later there was another referendum, and the vote couldn’t have been much closer.
What we have now is a political culture in this country where a lot of people feel that they aren’t voting for someone – they’re voting against someone. Lots of people just give up entirely, hence a dropping voter turnout. The Liberals, like the Mulroneyites before them, cry that they don’t have any power – it all belongs to an international marketplace, and the hand of God will come down and smite our trade tariffs.
We need a restore people’s faith in the political process. And to do that, we need a government that doesn’t buy into these bad economic theories – one that’s prepared to stand up for Canadian economic, political, and cultural sovreignty, even if it means telling the US and the corporate lobby groups “No,” from time to time. We need a party that’s willing to listen and work for the public – for what we want – instead of just using the “first past the post electoral system” and fear of another party to ensure their place.
We can sometimes get Martin to do that, if we put enough pressure on him, but we shouldn’t have to force our elected representatives to bend to our will. They have to remember who they’re working for.
And that’s what I mean by “damage to the country’s sense of itself” – we’ve come to feel that the government is a foreign power itself, a dangerous other. We’re losing the belief that we change it – in other words, we’re letting ourselves become convinced by the Mulroneyite mantra.
Ultimately, I doubt anything here will sway your view. We’ve gotten into this argument many times – you know my position and I know yours. Their difference between our views isn’t a factual one however – it’s one of different values and priorities and the sources we choose to trust. And I’ve lost hope that those kind of things can be changed on an internet message board – they can be changed, but not by the sort of rational argument among strangers that goes on here.
You can prove that the population of a country, at last census, was 32,233,955. You can’t prove that that country should be spending more money of health care, or cutting spending and income tax. Rational argument is just useless there. It’s why I spend so little time in GD, and generally enter against my better judgement. It seems like an exercise in futility.
But that works both ways. The Mulroneyites and their political descendants may have half-convinced the Canadian public that they can’t change things, but the last time I checked the polls, they still haven’t convinced us that lower taxes are better than medicare, or that a strong social safety net is a bad thing. So they can only implement their policies by encouraging us to lose faith in the political process, and through anti-democratic solutions such as “uniting the right” (ie, denying choice to right-wing voters to take advantage of centre-left vote splitting by the majority).
More bellyaching about national identity? I could take your word for it since I was 7 at the time. But I’m disinclined to since “I hardly ever hear that crap anymore” makes me wonder. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t hear about “that crap,” and it’s not like I go out looking for it. It’s not my main political issue.
I was just making a list. I thought of this as more of an IMHO that had worked its way into GD.
Well, I’m only going by municipalities I’ve lived in and know a bit about. All I know about Toronto is Mel Lastman, and that would seem to suggest that I should concede that point. However, in my defence, Toronto has a much larger population that Manitoba, so maybe we could just consider it a province and be done with it
I find this a truly odd statement, since I’ve been on it for one long period and two shorter ones within the last four years. anecdote data yada yada yada and all that.
Ultimately I’m still not seeing much of anything in your post that’s Mulroney’s fault, but rather, a bunch of things that happened while he was in office, and a lot that happened under the watch of other politicians. Why not be mad at Chretien – wasn’t he captain of the boat for almost the whole of the 90s? Surely that would have been enough time to change the course to one more amiable to your liking. Instead, Mulroney serves as a convenient boogeyman.
I don’t discount anecdotal evidence. Experience counts as much as numbers for me, and since so few people make their decisions based on purely objective information, I think it is necessary to bring things in.
It just so happens that my experiences are different from yours. But ultimately my post was just answering RickJay’s question about where I was coming from. I didn’t expect to convince anyone else.
Specific policies were his department. Free Trade didn’t happen on its own. He decided to make it happen. If we were to propose a parallel universe where Trudeau was still in power, it’s very doubtful there would have been an FTA or a NAFTA.
Somebody put John Crow in charge of the Bank of Canada. Somebody decided on the deep cuts. The Freidmanites could have shouted until they were blue in the face – they have no power to change policy without the approval of our elected government. Mulroney granted that approval.
Oh, I’m not letting Chrétien off the hook. If you look at them policy-by-policy, Mulroney was actually better. His cuts weren’t nearly so deep, levels of corruption were comparable. A good example is how an AIDS program implemented under Mulroney was killed by Chrétien.
But Mulroney established the pattern and chose the direction. I chose to name as my villain (and this a thread about the villains of Canada) the master, not the student who surpassed the master.
Purely my own bias, I admit. An equal case can be made for Chrétien and Martin, and no one will be denied responsibility who wants to take the blame.
I wrote a lot of point-by-point rebuttals but I think I make a better and more interesting point below. In short, though, so as to not lose those points. I think your impression of me and of Mulroney is plainly wrong, which I will summarize in three points:
I am not a Friendmanist. If that’s a word.
Neither was Mulroney. His government did NOT slash all our social programs. His government did not slash heatlh care spending; your grandparents’ health care misfortunes can be laid mainly at the feet of the Liberal government. His government did NOT increase interest rates, which - this is an absolute fact - peak during Trudeau’s last administration. His government spent as much money as any we’ve ever had and was not in the least concerned about our debt. Look it up.
If the economic direction taken since 1984 has been such a Godawful disaster, please show me where the rubble is. I certainly do not remember that people were richer in 1984, or that Canada the day before Mulroney was elected was some sort of subarctic Eden, but that is simply my personal opinion. How do you define poverty, and how has it changed since 1984? What is the unemployment rate? What is the rate of violent crime? What is the rate of substance abuse? The underemployment rate? What is the median household income, adjusted for a relevant inflation measure? What was the shift in income inequality? What’s our indebtedness per person? What percentage of Canadians have what levels of education now as opposed to then? Are we living longer or shorter? What’s the infant mortality rate now as opposed to 1984? Give me some evidence that we have undergone a disaster, understanding that when I hear the word “disaster,” I am assuming you mean, you know, a disaster. Kindly don’t pick and choose some anecdotes; I mean let’s take an honest look at whether or lot Canadians are really bad off as opposed to 1984.
Now, here’s the part I like, referring to free trade.
Last year in a thread about the 2004 federal election, I mentioned that the high tax rates proposed by the NDP - your political party of choice, if I am not mistaken - would possibly result in my family going bankrupt. Your response at the time was:
So then, at least, your own problems caused you to not be sympathetic about other people’s problems. That’s quite fascinating. I tend to be MORE sympathetic when people go through anguish I’ve personally experienced.
Hamish, you can’t just reserve your sympathy for people you say are hurt by the economic policies of your political opponents, and withhold it from those would are hurt by the policies of your party (which is what I was referring to in that post last year.) I mean, either you want people to avoid bankruptcy and poverty or you don’t. Trotting out the “but he destroyed the fabric of society” mantra every time someone mentions a politician who isn’t in the NDP - and why don’t we check how many of those homeless were created in Ontario while the NDP held power here, hmm? - means little. It sounds to me not like genuine concern for other people, but like pure partisanship.
Now, I’m sure you have real and deep compassion for people, of course. But what, I don’t? This “My side cares about people and yours doesn’t” line is the oldest, worst, and least honest line in partisan politics. It’s nothing more than bullshit mudslinging. In general, anyway.
Look, you like citing anecdotes, so I’ll return the favour. Let me tell you about my real life personal experience. In my job I visit different workplaces every week - I’m a quality auditor - and half of them owe their existence or their big workforces to the American market.
When you suggest that we need to close off that market, I don’t see “Canada regianing its economic sovereignty,” whatever the hell that means; nobody has ever explained the meaning of it in practical terms. What I see a lot of those people I work with every week losing their jobs and going broke. Not fat cat businessmen - in any case I’ve never met very many of those, most business owners work their asses off - but ordinary working folks who work for businesses that either didn’t exist before 1988 and couldn’t possibly have been as large as they are now. These are good, decent working people who have gotten decent jobs with good wages, not the “soul-destroying” jobs you’ve claimed are the only legacy of free trade. Many of these people - this is southern Ontario - are newcomers to our country who are now making in a month what they might make at home in three years, and now pay taxes and buy houses and TVs and stuff and help our economy. I would guess, conservatively, that the businesses I have worked with in Canada employ perhaps fifty thousand people, and at least a third of those people owe their jobs to access to the American marketplace. I am only one of 50 Canadian-based auditors my one company has.
Shit, MY job is heavily reliant on free trade; the U.S. market’s huge for us, too, and without the basic provisions of the FTA, we could not really operate our business the way we do; we would either have to give up all that business and lay off many, many people, or fire them all and rehire Americans who could do all the work in the USA. Instead, thanks to free trade, we were able to keep all our staff here, and even hire more, because the FTA allows our people to work there and live here. Without it, dozens of Canadians lose their jobs, including me. But hey, as you said, you aren’t sympathetic.
So when we talk about free trade, Hamish, I’m not supporting it because I’m one of Linda McQuaig’s boogeymen who sidles up to Bay Street fat cats and believes in everything Milton Friedman says. I SEE the jobs it’s created, and that would be lost without it. I see the dozen or so small Canadian-owned businesses that have sprung from nothing and now employ scores of people - and that’s just in my customer list, Hamish. We have fifty auditors in Canada, so do the math. I believe in free trade out of compassion. I honestly, truly believe that it helps ordinary Canadians, and that the average Canadian would be worse off without it, and I have looked up the facts and they support my subjective impression. And I have never been presented with a *fact-based * argument to the contrary. Never, not once, ever, in 17 years.
Incidentally, like a lot of people, in 1988 I didn’t like it. I was wrong. The facts say it’s worked.
As to your points about Mulroney contributing to the regional factioning of our politics, you’re 100% right. I have no argument there at all. But that has zippo to do with liberalism vs. conservatism, to be quite frank. It does give him points for the Worst Canadian title.
Oh God, what a disaster.
You have no idea. Remember when Toronto bid for the Olympics? The BID was millions of dollars over budget. I shit you not.
This may be a complete and utter hijack, but what the hell.
The bitching about what the feds have or haven’t done with regards to the economy, health care and welfare is totally wrong-headed, even if it is a common complaint back home. Why? Because health care and welfare are provincial responsibilities, not federal. Your province wants to close hospitals because it can’t afford to pay for them? Then how about raising provinical taxes! Don’t whine for a transfer for the feds, because it’s a provincial problem. Nothing’s stopping provincial capitals from increasing how much money they bring in…
Same goes for welfare. While EI is a federal responsibility, the reason welfare sucks is because the provinces have decided to save some money. Welfare is pitiul in B.C. because of what Gordon Campbell and his cronies did, not because of anything Ottawa did.
That’s not to say everything with NAFTA is fine and dandy either. I think free trade combined with a low dollar has let a lot of companies get very, very lazy and look to the U.S. as their only market. That’s a bad idea, because like everyone hears every RRSP season, you should diversify!
Okay, that’s my end to the hijack.
One last thing: I’m gonna add everyone at CSIS to my list of worst Canadians, with exhibit one being the handling of Air India, and exhibit two being Maher Arar.
I have to say, any country where nominations for worst citizen would include people like Jacques Parizeau and Brian Mulroney is a country that’s all right with me. You Canadians out there should take pride in your non-awfulness.
