As he turns 75, Brian Mulroney is serene. The former prime minister celebrates the milestone today with his wife, Mila, and their children at their winter home in Palm Beach, Fla.
“I feel happy, I feel serene, I feel very privileged,” he said the other day during a conversation at his corner office at his law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, in Montreal’s Place Ville Marie. “I have a great wife, four fantastic children, all happily married, and 10 wonderful grandchildren. I’m just enjoying it all, every minute of it, savouring it all.”
His office displays family photos of the Mulroneys, but also with the Queen, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and François Mitterrand.
It was with Reagan and Bush that Mulroney negotiated the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and later, the North American Free Trade Agreement, including Mexico. This year marks the 25th and 20th anniversary of FTA and NAFTA implementation. Neither was a given at the time of negotiation.
Canada had three deal-breakers in the Canada-U.S. round — fast-track authority for the U.S. president to negotiate a deal, “up or down,” without amendments by Congress; an exemption for Canada’s cultural industries; and a binding dispute-settlement mechanism.
Without the fast track — “a close run thing,” Mulroney admits — Canada wouldn’t even have come to the table in 1986. The U.S. Senate finance committee approved it by a 10-10 vote in which the tie went to the runner, and only after Reagan had personally persuaded a Democratic senator to change his vote.
And Canada got a deal on dispute settlement as the clock was ticking toward midnight and the expiration of Reagan’s fast-track authority on the night of Oct. 3, 1987. It was deal or no deal.
A quarter-century after FTA implementation, Canada’s GDP has grown from $700 billion to $1.8 trillion.
As much satisfaction as he takes from the success of free trade, Mulroney thinks the change in the Canadian mindset is even more important.
“We’re a much more confident, outward-looking people,” he has said. “We know if we can compete in the U.S., we can make it anywhere.”
That was not evident at the time of the 1988 free trade election, when the opposition accused Mulroney of selling out Canadian sovereignty, saying Canada would become the 51st state, with Canadians losing their public health care.
The FTA and NAFTA wouldn’t have happened without Mulroney’s privileged relationship with two American presidents.
Bush, for example, initially proposed a bilateral deal with Mexico, with Canada excluded from the talks. Mulroney told Bush that Canada had to be part of any NAFTA, and the White House finally agreed.
On Ukraine, Canada was the first country to recognize its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and as such, Mulroney is particularly incensed over Russia’s current bad behaviour in the region, with troop movements on the Ukrainian border and a military occupation of Crimea.
Mulroney predicts there will be “pressure on Putin” in the form of banking and trade sanctions, and that he is “embarking on a dangerous course that places in jeopardy his own country’s economy.”
As for the referendum in Crimea, Mulroney calls it “a farce” that few countries, other than Russia, will recognize Crimea seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia.
Mulroney agrees that the current Quebec campaign has been transformed into a referendum on a referendum, something most Quebecers don’t want to live through again.
As a director and vice-chairman of Quebecor, Mulroney put out a terse statement last week on the day Quebecor controlling shareholder Pierre Karl Péladeau announced he was running for the Parti Québécois.
“Canada is a democracy, and anyone has the right to run for public office,” Mulroney says. “But if you do, in this case, you have to leave the company. And the board accepted his resignation.”
There’s a side of Mulroney that still believes if the Meech Lake Accord had been adopted in 1990, with recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada, we wouldn’t be having another referendum conversation today.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine and author of Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister.
