Peter Black
March 6, 2024
Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
The Brian Mulroney political saga could well have come to an abrupt end on Feb. 22, 1976.
The slick Montreal lawyer with small-town Quebec roots was up against a little-known Progressive Conservative MP from Alberta in the race to succeed “the best prime minister there never was,” former Nova Scotia premier Robert Stanfield.
Mulroney and his rival Joe Clark, both 36, faced the perceived favourite, former Quebec Liberal justice minister and federal PC MP Claude Wagner, whose son Richard is now chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Clark narrowly beat Wagner on the fourth ballot, with Mulroney eliminated on the third, far back from the top two.
After the convention in Ottawa, according to The Politics of Ambition, the 1991 biography by veteran journalist John Sawatsky, a bitterly disappointed Mulroney quoted U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the day President John F. Kennedy was shot: “If you are Irish, you know that at some point the world is going to break your heart.”
Broken-hearted and broke from campaign debts, Mulroney retreated to Montreal and settled into a despondency that often involved drink and railing against Clark. There is even a story that the federal Liberals, hearing of Mulroney’s agonized state, tried to recruit him.
But then, faith and begorrah, the luck of the Irish shone brightly through the gloom enveloping the Boy from Baie-Comeau. On Dec. 13, 1979, the minority government Clark had won by beating the mighty Pierre Trudeau seven months earlier was defeated on a confidence motion in the House of Commons.
Your scribe happened to be in the gallery when the vote was counted that day, which, in retrospect, was one of the most momentous in recent Canadian history.
An election set for Feb. 18, 1980, would return a resurrected Trudeau and the energized Liberals to power, with a referendum on Quebec sovereignty to fight as a top priority. Holding court at the Ritz-Carlton Maritime Bar, Brian Mulroney knew he had been given a second chance to realize his ambition thanks to a fatal error by his nemesis.
The fight in the 1983 Tory leadership convention that followed a leadership review the previous year was bitter, but Mulroney finally edged Clark out on the fourth ballot. Still, it was a close vote, with Clark ahead on the first three ballots.
We raise this no-so-farfetched “what if …?” because it’s hard to imagine what might have transpired in Canadian politics if Joe Clark had won that fateful vote – as he easily could have with a little more procedural smarts – and Brian Mulroney was rendered a footnote of history.
Maybe he would have eventually swallowed his considerable pride and become a powerful Quebec minister in a Clark government. Maybe he would have stayed put in the corporate world and made a fortune – his stint between 1976 and 1983 as president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada had already given him lifelong financial security.
From the torrent of reflections on Mulroney’s legacy published since his death on Feb. 29, one gleans that his was a record of exceptional achievement, but also of failures and human weakness. This was exemplified by the fact the same man who won the largest majority in history for his party in 1984 also left it in a position to be all but wiped out in the 1993 election.
Two years after that epic defeat of the soon-to-be-extinct Progressive Conservative party, Canada came close to chaos and break-up in the second Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1995.
That national nail-biter was the direct result of Mulroney’s well-meaning but high-risk Meech Lake Accord, an attempt to repair what he perceived to be Pierre Trudeau’s error in adopting an amended Constitution lacking the signature of Quebec premier René Lévesque, who had just lost the 1980 referendum.
Mulroney’s aim 10 years later to have Quebec renew its vows with Canada with “honour and enthusiasm” backfired into a roaring backlash of humiliation and anger.
The Accord died in June 1990, the result of a baffling three-year deadline for ratification by all 10 provinces. Two years later, the Charlottetown Accord, an attempt to appease recalcitrant provinces, was defeated in a national referendum.
All political hell broke loose, and here we are 30 years later with the Bloc Québécois still a force in Quebec and an ascendant Parti Québécois threatening another episode of referendum drama.
That little quibble aside, we salute a remarkable character, a bold leader who achieved much and was not afraid to “roll the dice.”
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