MMR Weekend March 1-3 2024: Let Us Prey....

Horrible languages. Nobody speaks them.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has died. He was Prime Minister from 1984-1993

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/brian-mulroney-passes-away-1.7130287

The Mulroney-Turner debate in the 1988 election, particularly the free trade section, is routinely held as the standard for debates amongst older Canadians - enough so that one of my teachers actually showed it as a primer to discussing free trade. The 1984 election resulted in the largest number of seats ever held by one party (211) though not the largest as a percentage of the legislature. He was the first Conservative Prime Minister to win Quebec since Robert Borden in the 1917 election.

As Prime Minister, his most lasting achievement is probably NAFTA and his most lasting criticism is GST - the national sales tax. The latter he actually forced through extra Senators as it was one of the few times the Senate actively blocked the government. He joined the Reagan/Thatcher alignment towards more corporatist stances and the sunset of New Deal philosophies that we saw throughout the 80s in many western nations. I would say he's held in similar esteem to those two - extremely polarizing conservative but acknowledged to have been effective and significant, for better or worse

He also twice tried to get a Constitutional Amendment (Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords) to get Quebec formally signed onto the new Constitution, both of which failed fuelling the separatism fight and directly contributing to the 1995 nail biter of a referendum - not that I blame Mulroney for their failures and I give full credit to him for trying, but this is why I basically oppose everything that requires fucking with the Canadian Constitution because of some, IMO, minor annoyance. Sorry, the Senate is a minor annoyance. The Monarchy is a minor annoyance.

One thing that is not really his fault was the disaster that happened after he left. He retired from office in 1993, with Kim Campbell being selected as his successor to enter the 1993 election just 4 months later. Kim Campbell would take a strong majority government to a mere 2 seats. However, she entered the election as a slight favorite. It's generally accepted that a disastrous ad campaign where the actors mocked Jean Chretien's mouth movements backfired spectacularly. Chretien's mouth is partially paralyzed and had been from birth and he efficiently turned this into a comment about disrespect for the disabled. This coupled with the nascent Reform party (that might be Mulroney's fault) for rural and western conservatives to back decimated Campbell's support giving her no base to pull from which ended her chances and in some ways, ended the Conservative party as a political entity permanently - the modern Conservative party came from a merger with a descendant of the Reform Party which really was the dominant partner in the merger (Stephen Harper was from the Reform wing)

Not fatal as in people lost, as the ship was abandoned days before it sank. But this could cause a bad environmental crisis.

There really is no bottom when it comes to the deeply destructive and life threatening behavior of the modern republican party.

(Garry Trudeau, gocomics.com)