Brian Mulroney

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Brian Mulroney with wife Mila (1984) Brian Mulroney Signature.svg

Martin Brian Mulroney PC , CC , GOQ (born March 20, 1939 in Baie-Comeau , Québec ), mostly known as Brian Mulroney , is a Canadian politician and lawyer . He was the country's 18th Prime Minister and ruled from September 17, 1984 to June 25, 1993. From 1983 to 1993, he was also chairman of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada .

The son of Irish immigrants initially made a career as a labor law attorney. Although he had not yet held any political office, he sought to be elected party leader of the progressive conservatives in 1976. From 1977 to 1983 he was President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada , a mining company specializing in iron ore, whose main mine in Schefferville was closed in 1982. In 1983 he managed to be elected party chairman at the second attempt. In 1984 his party won an overwhelming election. During his first term of office, he negotiated the NAFTA free trade agreement with the USA .

His second term in office from 1988 was marked by numerous controversies. Constitutional reforms that would have given the French-speaking province of Québec more autonomy failed twice . A severe recession, missed election promises and the controversial introduction of a new sales tax resulted in the worst opinion polls ever received by a Canadian leader and the fragmentation of his party. Four months after his resignation in June 1993, the progressive conservatives suffered the worst electoral defeat by a ruling party in Canadian history. Mulroney has since worked as a management consultant and board member of various international corporations. With involvement in a bribery scandal, he continued to cause negative attention.

biography

Youth and Studies

Mulroney was born in Baie-Comeau , a small town in northeast Québec Province . His mother, Irene O'Shea, and his father, Benedict Mulroney, who worked as an electrician in a paper mill, had both immigrated from Ireland . Because of this, their six children grew up bilingual. In Baie-Comeau as no English speaking school existed for Catholics because of the time strictly segregated denominations school system, Mulroney received his secondary education in Chatham in the province of New Brunswick , at one of the St. Thomas University -run Catholic boarding school.

From 1955 Mulroney studied law at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish ( Nova Scotia ). It was there that he became interested in politics after he became friends with the future Senator Lowell Murray . Mulroney joined the youth organization of the Progressive Conservative Party . He was a youth delegate at the party congress in 1956 and supported the future Prime Minister John Diefenbaker as a member of the Youth for Diefenbaker committee ("Youth for Diefenbaker") in the election of the party chairman .

In 1959, Mulroney moved to Dalhousie University in Halifax . The following year he supported the campaign for the Prime Minister of Nova Scotia, Robert Stanfield . Mulroney neglected his studies because of his political commitment and finally had to skip a semester because of a serious illness. He continued his studies at the Université Laval in the city of Québec . There he met numerous people who later also made political careers. These included Lucien Bouchard (later Prime Minister of Québec) and the then President of the Student Union, Joe Clark (later Prime Minister of Canada). In the summer of 1962, during the semester break, he worked temporarily as assistant to Agriculture Minister Alvin Hamilton and organized his election campaign.

Professional life and entry into politics

Mulroney graduated in 1964 and started working for Howard, Cate, Ogilvy in Montreal , then the largest law firm in the Commonwealth of Nations (now Ogilvy Renault ). Mulroney failed the bar exam twice. In 1965, he made the third attempt, was admitted to the Québec Bar Association and specialized in labor law . He showed skill as a mediator and was able to settle several strikes with negotiated agreements.

During the Progressive Conservative Congress in 1968, Mulroney was instrumental in Robert Stanfield's victory in the election of the new chairman and became one of his key advisors. Mulroney's law firm made him a partner in 1971. On May 26, 1973, 34-year-old Mulroney married Milica ("Mila") Pivnički, who was 15 years his junior from Sarajevo and who broke off her engineering studies at Concordia University . The couple have a daughter and three sons. The second oldest child, Ben Mulroney , is a well-known presenter on the Canadian television station CTV .

Robert Bourassa , the Prime Minister of Québec, set up the non-partisan Cliche Commission in 1974 to investigate the causes of violence and corruption in the construction industry, particularly in the hydropower projects in the region around James Bay . The commission was headed by Robert Cliche, a politician of the New Democratic Party , who appointed his former student Mulroney to it. Mulroney in turn appointed Lucien Bouchard as his advisor. The investigation uncovered entanglements in organized crime among trade unions and construction companies. As the media covered the hearings extensively, Mulroney became known to a wide public.

In 1976 Robert Stanfield, who had lost the 1974 general election, announced his resignation as chairman of the Progressive Conservative Party. Although Mulroney had never held political office before, he was encouraged to run for his successor. He spent by far the most money on the election campaign, but left the party congress after the third ballot. The main reasons were his “slippery” appearance, the lack of parliamentary experience and vague positions on numerous political issues. In the fourth round, it was surprisingly won by Joe Clark of the same age .

After this defeat, Mulroney temporarily withdrew from politics. He left the law firm, then became Vice President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada and, in 1977, its President. Building on his experience as a labor lawyer, Mulroney improved relations with the unions. At the same time, he was able to significantly increase the company's profit, not least due to higher raw material prices. He also built his network of relationships in the business world. In 1982 he had to announce the closure of the mines in Schefferville . However, since he was able to find an amicable solution with the workers concerned, this had no negative effects on his image.

Party leader

Joe Clark managed to oust the Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from office in the 1979 general election . But since he did not have a majority in the lower house , his government lasted only nine months. After a successful vote of no confidence and an early election , Trudeau came back to power in February 1980. Although he publicly supported Clark, Mulroney took advantage of his extensive ties within the party and began to undermine his leadership position. When Clark was only able to bring about two-thirds of the delegates behind him at the party conference in January 1983, he resigned as party chairman.

At the following party congress in June 1983, Mulroney ran alongside Clark. In contrast to 1976, he appeared much more cautious during the election campaign. He was also able to demonstrate with much-noticed speeches that he definitely had political substance to show. In addition, he was the only perfectly bilingual candidate, which seemed essential if it was to appeal to French-Canadian voters. After Clark had led in the first three ballots, Mulroney finally prevailed in the fourth ballot with 54% of the vote. On August 25, 1983, he won a by-election in the constituency of Central Nova (Province of Nova Scotia ) a seat in the House of Commons and was thus opposition leader.

Pierre Trudeau resigned in June 1984 and was succeeded by John Turner . Just four days after taking office, he called a new election, hoping to benefit from good poll numbers. But the lead of the Liberal Party quickly melted away. Trudeau had appointed a large number of senators , judges and supervisory boards in state-owned companies in his last days in office , which was seen by many as a benefit . Turner did not revoke these appointments because he was sticking to an agreement with Trudeau that he did not want to break. This earned him harsh criticism from Mulroney during the election campaign.

In the general election on September 4, 1984 , the Progressive Conservatives won 211 out of 282 seats, the largest majority in Canadian history, while the Liberals suffered the worst possible result. Particularly impressive was the election success in Mulroney's home province of Québec, where the progressive conservatives won 58 of the 75 seats, compared to a single seat four years earlier. Mulroney himself was elected in the Manicouagan constituency, which is his birthplace, Baie-Comeau. Governor General Jeanne Sauvé swore in him on September 17th as the new Prime Minister.

First term as Prime Minister

The first Conservative government in 26 years was seen by many as a welcome change, but problems soon arose. Many ministers had little political experience, which led to numerous conflicts of interest and minor scandals. Although Mulroney had an extremely comfortable majority, his room for maneuver was limited. The progressive-conservative party was an insecure coalition of various interest groups: supporters of a liberal social policy, socially conservative populists from Western Canada , nationalists from Québec and business representatives from Ontario and the Atlantic provinces .

Mulroney tried to win the most important faction , the social conservatives, on his side by closing the unpopular National Energy Program and appointing numerous representatives of Western Canada to his cabinet (including Joe Clark as Secretary of State). However, he angered that group when he moved maintenance of the CF-18 fighter jets to Québec in 1986, even though a Manitoba company was cheaper and rated better. When he called on the province of Manitoba to abide by the constitution and guarantee the rights of the French-speaking minority, he even received death threats.

Mulroney publicly advocated lowering the budget deficit , but contrary to his election promises, national debt soared to record levels. As the Liberal-dominated Senate slowed down legislation, it had to compromise on several occasions. A major concern for Mulroney was the privatization of numerous state-owned companies. Of 61 companies owned by the state in 1984, 23 were sold. The most important were Air Canada and Petro-Canada .

An important project of Mulroney's government was the attempt to stop the alienation of the individual parts of the country. In 1982 Québec was the only province that had not signed the new Canadian constitution negotiated by Pierre Trudeau . Mulroney wanted to get Québec more involved again with a new agreement. In 1987 he negotiated the Meech Lake Accord , a set of constitutional amendments with which Québec's demands for recognition as a “differing society” were to be met and some competencies were to be transferred to the provinces.

Mulroney's government actively fought the apartheid regime in South Africa . He often met opposition South Africans. His clear stance led to disagreement with the US and UK governments , but it also earned him respect. In addition, Joe Clark was the first foreign minister ever to travel to the Marxist-ruled Ethiopia and draw media attention to the catastrophic famine . The government strongly opposed the US intervention in Nicaragua and took in refugees from several Central American countries ruled by military rulers. Despite these political differences, Mulroney maintained a close friendly relationship with US President Ronald Reagan . This was an advantage for the negotiations for the Canada-American Free Trade Agreement , which were concluded in January 1988.

Critics pointed out that Mulroney had rejected a free trade agreement before the election as party chairman. The deal was controversial and the Senate called for a new election before voting on it. During the election campaign, the free trade agreement was the central issue; the Liberals and the New Democrats firmly opposed it. In the general election on November 21, 1988 , the progressive conservatives fell from 50% to 43% of the vote, but still achieved an absolute majority of the seats. Mulroney was the first (and only) Conservative Prime Minister of the 20th century to form a majority government twice in a row. He joined the newly formed constituency of Charlevoix, as his old constituency of Manicouagan had been dissolved in a new division.

Second term as Prime Minister

In 1989, Mulroney proposed the introduction of a national value added tax , the Goods and Services Tax (GST). It was intended to replace the existing Manufacturers' Sales Tax (MST), which taxed goods produced in Canada at the wholesale level. The deliberations in the lower house dragged on for nine months and the liberally dominated Senate was unwilling to approve the tax. On September 27, 1990, Mulroney took advantage of the little-known Constitutional Article 26, which allowed him to ask the Queen of Canada to appoint eight additional senators, thereby narrowing the Senate majority in his favor. The tax finally came into effect on January 1, 1991. Although the government asserted that the GST was a rearrangement and not an additional tax, it met with unanimous opposition from the population. Many resented Mulroney for having got his way through an "emergency clause" in the constitution.

Also in 1990 the Meech Lake Accord and the associated constitutional reform failed . The governments of the provinces of Manitoba and Newfoundland did not ratify the agreement before the agreed date. The failure led to a resurgence of nationalism in Québec; Environment Minister Lucien Bouchard and other members of parliament resigned from the progressive-conservative party in protest and founded the separatist Bloc Québécois . In by-elections, the Reform Party , a populist protest party in the West, won seats at the expense of the ruling party. Further negotiations took place in Charlottetown in 1991 and 1992 . This resulted in the Charlottetown Accord , which provided for far-reaching constitutional changes. But the agreement was rejected in a nationwide referendum on October 26, 1992, with 54.3% of the votes against.

Signing of the NAFTA treaty; back from left: Carlos Salinas de Gortari , George HW Bush , Brian Mulroney

Mulroney had more success on an international level. After the USA and Mexico had started negotiations on a free trade agreement , Canada feared disadvantages in their own agreement and demanded that they be included in the talks. On February 5, 1991, the three countries agreed to conduct multilateral negotiations. On October 7, 1992, the agreement establishing the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, which would come into force in 1994. Unlike in 1988, the liberals no longer resisted free trade. Another focus of foreign policy was environmental protection: Canada was the first industrial country to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change .

The widespread rejection of the Goods and Services Tax among the population, a severe recession, the gradual breakup of the Progressive Conservative Party, increasing national debt and the failure of the constitutional reforms led to increasingly poor poll ratings. A 1992 poll by Gallup showed only 11% approval, making Mulroney the most unpopular Canadian prime minister since public opinion polls were introduced in the 1940s. When Mulroney announced his impending resignation in February 1993, approval was 23%.

Disagreements and resignation

On June 25, 1993, Mulroney gave the office of Prime Minister to Defense Secretary Kim Campbell and withdrew from politics. During his final weeks in office, he made various decisions that would cast a shadow over his party's election campaign. He went on a “farewell tour” abroad, largely financed by taxpayers' money, without dealing with official government affairs. After Kim Campbell was sworn in, he did not immediately move out of 24 Sussex Drive , the Prime Minister's official residence. Instead, his family continued to live there for several months as their new home in Montreal was still being renovated. Campbell had to settle for Harrington Lake , the prime minister's summer residence. The general election on October 25, 1993 turned out to be a total disaster for Mulroney's party. She lost 149 seats and was only able to hold two. This was the biggest election defeat in Canadian history that any party has ever suffered.

Brian Mulroney in a television interview (2007)

In 1997 Mulroney won a defamation lawsuit that he had brought against the Canadian government two years earlier in the wake of the “Airbus affair” . He received a formal apology and an expense allowance of 2.1 million dollars . Mulroney was accused of accepting bribes in 1988. In return, the state airline Air Canada ordered 34 A330 and A340 aircraft from the European Airbus consortium and turned down an offer from Boeing . Since the investigating authorities could not prove anything concrete, the investigation was discontinued without result.

Ten years after his resignation, it became known that Mulroney had received a large amount of cash in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber , a German-Canadian businessman who had acted as a middleman for Airbus and other companies. On March 24, 2007, Schreiber, who at that time was in extradition proceedings because of his involvement in the CDU donation affair, brought an action against the Supreme Court of the Province of Ontario for breach of contract. He alleged that Mulroney had promised him in 1993/94 that he would provide financial and political assistance to build an armored personnel carrier in Quebec in exchange for $ 300,000. Mulroney is said not to have granted this help.

Schreiber's attorney filed a statement with the Ontario Supreme Court on November 5, 2007. This contained a number of allegations, including that Mulroney was still in office when the treaty was signed and that incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper should have received a letter from Schreiber through Mulroney. These statements caused a great stir in the media. Eight days later, Harper set up an independent commission of inquiry. Mulroney testified before the House of Commons Ethics Committee on December 13, admitting he accepted $ 225,000. But he asserted that the money came from Schreiber's private business and was not related to the aircraft orders from Airbus. In addition, the payments were only made after his resignation.

After the resignation

Since his resignation as Prime Minister, Mulroney has worked internationally as a management consultant. He serves on the boards of several corporations including Barrick Gold , Quebecor and Archer Daniels Midland . In addition, he advises various other companies and continues to be a partner in the law firm Ogilvy Renault .

Aftermath

To this day, the evaluation of Mulroney's tenure is very controversial. His work is primarily associated with the Canadian-American Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and the national value-added tax Goods and Services Tax (GST), but also with the failed constitutional reforms and the election debacle of 1993. Mulroney himself values ​​the statement that his At that time radical measures in the economic sector and in free trade were not reset by subsequent governments and regards this as a justification for his administration. When the Liberals under Jean Chrétien re-established government, they ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement with only minor changes, despite their previous vehement opposition .

The GST has proven to be very unpopular to this day, although it only replaced one previous tax. But since Mulroney had used a rarely used constitutional clause in order to be able to enforce it in the first place, many politicians and large parts of the population felt left out. The subsequent liberal government had promised to abolish the GST in 1993, but did not do so, whereupon two ministers resigned in protest. Mulroney's great unpopularity during his second term in office - at times the approval rate was below 10% - meant that many conservative politicians distanced themselves from him for years.

The socially conservative wing of his party criticized Mulroney's liberal position on social issues. This particularly concerned his rejection of the death penalty and an attempted compromise on the question of abortion . The economic wing, in turn, criticized him for various tax increases and the failed attempt to reduce government spending. By covering a very broad spectrum, Mulroney initially made his party eligible for election to many, but in doing so also caused its fragmentation. In the 1993 general election, the electorate of the Progressive Conservative Party in Western Canada almost completely defected to the Reform Party . It wasn't until ten years later that the conservative forces reunited when the Conservative Party of Canada was formed.

In the years after his resignation, Mulroney's supporters tried to restore his tarnished reputation, which was partially successful. But since the revelations by Karlheinz Schreiber and the admission before the ethics committee, many Canadians see their assessment confirmed and Mulroney remains one of the most unpopular and controversial politicians in the country. On September 10, 2007, he published his autobiography Memoirs 1939-1993 . The more than 1100-page work caused a sensation, as he sharply attacked his political rival Pierre Trudeau and did not mention the business relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Brian Mulroney  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Donaldson, p. 310
  2. ↑ Rawlinson, Graantstein, pp. 19-20
  3. ↑ Sawatsky, pp. 129-135
  4. ^ Newman, p. 211
  5. ↑ Lotz, p. 144
  6. ↑ Private life after public loss - CBC Archives
  7. ^ Donaldson, p. 320
  8. ^ Newman, p. 71
  9. ^ Newman, p. 116
  10. ↑ a b Newman, p. 427
  11. ↑ Lessons from the North: Canada's Privatization of Military Ammunition Production (PDF; 568 kB)
  12. ^ Donaldson, p. 334
  13. ↑ NAFTA timeline ( Memento from January 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ^ Russell Ash, The Top 10 of Everything 2000. , The Reader's Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., Montreal 1999. p. 80.
  15. ^ Political Scientists assess Mulroney - University of Waterloo
  16. ↑ Businessman files $ 300K lawsuit against ex-PM Mulroney - CBC News, March 24, 2007
  17. ↑ Harper orders inquiry, RCMP to probe affidavit ( Memento August 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) - The Globe and Mail, November 14, 2007
  18. ↑ Schreiber cannot be captured - Der Tagesspiegel, November 16, 2007
  19. ^ Truth lost between Mulroney and Schreiber's stories - National Post, December 13, 2007
  20. ^ Newman, p. 361
  21. ^ Donaldson, p. 327
  22. ^ Donaldson, p. 356
  23. ↑ Malloy, p. 2
personal data
SURNAME Mulroney, Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mulroney, Martin Brian (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian politician, lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Baie-Comeau , Quebec, Canada