The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Brian Mulroney, The Passing of A Giant

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

The 18th prime minister of Canada was a force, a huge force. He changed the country in many ways, some worked, some didn't. He was also a major force on the international stage for himself and for Canada. Today the full hour on Brian Mulroney with Bruce, and filling in for a vacationing Chantal, the Toronto Star's Susan Delacourt. 

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Friday, welcome to Good Talk. Special day here on Good Talk, there's no question about that. We were all hit by the news last night about Brian Mulroney passing. You know, an icon on the political landscape of Canada, there's no question about that either. It was certainly through the 1980s and the early 1990s with some big thinking and big projects and big at times scandals as well. Brian Mulroney faced them all and dealt with them all in one way or another

and at times at some political price for himself. But nevertheless, I figured that we're going to spend the hour talking about today. There were other things that happened on the landscape this week, but really they seem kind of trivial compared with discussing the impact this one person had on Canada and Canada's place in the world, as well as the issues at home. So that's what we're going to do. Chantelle's away this week. She's hiking somewhere, I believe, in Iceland for a couple of weeks. Good for her.

Susan Delacorte from the Toronto Star is with us for her thoughts on Mulroney because she, like me, covered Mulroney for a good amount of time and had some remarkable interviews, one especially, with Mulroney post-Meach Lake. And Bruce is here, of course, as he always is. And Bruce worked with Mulroney and for Mulroney at different times during Mulroney's political career. So an opportunity to hear some thoughts from both of them, including some personal reflections, anecdotes, if you will, about Brian Mulroney.

But let's start with some kind of general assessments of where we are as we get up on this day, reflecting on his time in office and his time post office. Bruce, why don't you start? Yeah, let me just start by saying hi to Susan. I'm so happy to see you as part of this conversation. I always love talking with Chantal, obviously, but I've known Susan for a long, long time covering politics. She's one of the very best journalists I've ever had the opportunity to get to know. And I know that she has a lot to say and a lot of reflections about Brian Mulroney, as do I. Peter, I'm so happy also that we're having this conversation.

It's a sad occasion, but I'm happy that we're having it because in part, over the last few years, as we sort of see how society consumes information, it sometimes makes me wonder if from one generation to the next, people really understand as much about our political history, even our short-term political history, as would be ideal. And so I think it's good for people to have as many conversations as possible about Brian Mulroney, who in my lifetime was an extraordinary contributor to our political life, one of, if not the most effective and productive prime ministers of my life, certainly the most charismatic leader of our country during that period of time. And that's not to say there was no competition for that. But in my view, his charisma was, as I saw somebody use the term off the charts, it really was. Now, he also had the opposite effect, as politicians do on some people. He left office with a good deal of political scar tissue and people who didn't like him.

I was never one of them. I always thought that his flaws were his flaws. Everybody has flaws, but his charms were enormous. And he wasn't just charismatic. He was extraordinarily important from a policy standpoint. We'll spend some time talking about those things. But for me, sometimes I use the metaphor that some people think that politics is about math. Some people think it's about chemistry.

Brian Mulroney was a chemistry practitioner. And without equal in my lifetime watching politics in Canada. Your opening thoughts, Susan? It's so hard to just pin them down to one. You know, I didn't arrive in Ottawa until 1988. So he'd been in power for four years by then. So I had been one of those people on the outside and I was not a fan of Meech Lake. I think you both will remember.

So I think I got on Brian Mulroney's nerves, certainly. Not intending to, but I was young and new and I had strong opinions. And I was lucky enough to work for Globe and Mail that encouraged that. The editor at the time, William Thorssell, a very good friend of Brian Mulroney's. And to his great credit,

he wanted to make sure that I was covering Meech because he wanted all sides represented in the paper. So I thought, you know, a lot of people are talking about how gracious Mulroney was in private to them. I will say that he was that way with me too, even though I got on his nerves. So I think, I don't know whether I'd tell the story in the middle or... Ryan Mulroney wrecked my birthday. This was surreal. He was elected leader on June 11th, 1983, which was my birthday. So I didn't do anything for my birthday. And then as the years went on, he always did something to commemorate. I think the anniversary was... So I could never go out or do things so you alluded

to this famous interview roll the dice interview that was my birthday that was actually since my birthday with right and then mulroney for a while for him I said when his memoirs came out which I would encourage everybody to read I don't know if you guys have recently you've checked them but they are my favorite Prime Ministerial memoirs of any because he kept a diary and the the the thousand page tome keeps going into events that I was covering, and you're seeing Brian Mulroney writing about what was going on, even to the point of having a conversation with Joe Clark, very graciously, again, in his memoirs, he takes full blame for that roll the dice thing. Just to put it in context. I'll go through all the ways in which.

But it went on even after he was not prime minister anymore. No, there is always. He did write Reagan's eulogy the day of my birthday. There was something with June 11th and me and Brian Mulroney that was star-crossed and funny. Just to put that roll the dice comment in context, that was about Meech Lake. It was at that time one of his greatest victories that he got this deal on Meech Lake. It was a great victory until he sat down with you and some of your colleagues from the Globe. And he came up with the roll the dice comment in terms of how he pulled this off.

And it led to the unraveling of the deal, basically. Yeah, I'll tell it just because it's so very Mulroney. It's such a, I remember Frank McKenna talked about this too, and David Peterson, they all knew what Mulroney was doing. So we just had this long week, which you all remember, staying up all night, these negotiations at the old train station here in Ottawa. And the Globe and Mail was relaunching the newspaper, a big major design relaunch. And Brian Mulroney, feeling great about having saved Meech at the end of this week,

granted us an interview for this. So it was me, Graham Fraser, Jeffrey Simpson. And I said to Mulroney in the interview, you were accused of letting this build to a crisis. And in his very typical way, he puffs himself up and he says, that's not what happened. That's not what happened. I knew, I planned this. I said, that's the day we're going to roll the dice. And in trying to defend himself, probably taking a few liberties with the truth, I don't actually think he planned it that way, he got himself in trouble. And I remember Gary Doerr was then just a leader in Manitoba, a minority government,

a leader of the NDP, phoned me up the next morning. He goes, do you know what you have done? And he said, Elijah Harper and all the indigenous people here in Manitoba are walking around with the Globe and Mail, holding it rolled up as a fist. Right. That this thing is in trouble. I went, oh, what't really what I planned. You know, Peter, can I just pick up on that and drop in a thread about, it was a little bit his approach to politics, that he was willing to take risks.

And my wife, Nancy Jameson, who knows more about politics than I'll ever know, she and I were talking about Brian last night, and she reminded me of Lyndon Johnson, who is her favorite U.S. president, and in particular his characterization of what is the purpose of being power unless you're going to use it.

And I think Mulroney decided to become that prime minister. I don't know if he started that way at the very beginning of his time in office, but I think he certainly developed that sense that you're there for a reason. If you have political capital, you should spend it rather than what are you saving it for? It's no good to you after you're in office. And I think that was to his great credit. But on the role, and it does make somebody who thinks that way willing to roll the dice, whether or not that's the most apt or politically savvy term to tell to a room of the country's leading journalists. That's a separate question.

But he did in some ways do that again with the Charlottetown Accord and the referendum. he was aware that a referendum is a difficult thing to win on a simple proposition, and that it would be difficult for him to win that referendum looking at a policy that had, I think, six pieces, five or six pieces. I'm trying to remember the specific elements of the Charlottetown Accord, but there were a number of different things. It was about Senate reform and about the treatment of Quebec. You only needed to be against one of them. Yeah, it was easy to see, having looked at the way in which referendums and petitions and initiative campaigns work in other places, that if you didn't start with a very high level of support, you were unlikely to finish with the level that you needed. I think he decided that it was important to put the question to people. I

think he thought that his own campaign skills and his persuasion skills were going to be enough to sell it. And I think he was, again, willing to put at risk at least not, I don't think the country, but I think some of his political capital. And I think it was probably to his credit that he did that because he never stopped trying to bridge the divide between English and French Canada, as he saw it, and in the way that it was at that period of time. And he could be a divisive figure, but he always tried to be a unifying figure, I think, in terms of his role in the country. Let me tell a little story, and it's his own story, actually, because I thought of it when Susan was talking about her relationship with him. It was tense and difficult at the beginning and through the periods when certain reporting was going on.

But over time, he basically moved on, and he admitted certain things, as he did about Susan's story. But in his later years, he recognized the fact of how divisive he'd been on some issues and how some people truly disliked him, hated him. And, you know, we saw the results of some of that in the 93 election, even though he wasn't running, there was a lot of hangover from his time but eventually he got around to conceding that there were a lot of people that didn't like him and he would he would tell the story um about a period about a month after he left office and it was a classic Mulroney story you know don't assume that it's true but but it was a great story to tell in a speech situation. But he would tell the story about how some guy walked up to 24 Sussex Drive,

the prime minister's residence, a month after he'd left, and said to the RCMP guard, I'm here to see Prime Minister Mulroney. And the man, he says, I'm sorry, Prime Minister Mulroney doesn't live here anymore. He's, in fact, not the Prime Minister anymore. And the guy says, okay, fine, and he leaves. Next night, same guy, same Mountie, same question.

I'm here to see Prime Minister Mulroney. The Mountie says, no, no, no, no, you didn't hear me. He's not the Prime Minister anymore. He doesn't live here. The guy says, oh, okay, fine, leaves. Next night, same guy, same Mountie, same question. I'm here to see Prime Minister Mulrooney. The Mountie says, listen, buddy, I told you.

Two nights in a row, and now the third night. I'm not going to bother with you again. He is no longer the prime minister. Why do you keep asking me this question? The guy says, I just love hearing the answer. That Mulroney could tell that story on himself, show how far he'd come in terms of recognizing the divisive nature that some things he did caused. And there's no doubt about that.

But on a day like today, you tend to look beyond some of those things. I look at the international stage. I'm a huge admirer of his on the South Africa question, which was really him and Joe Clark to a degree. But it was really Mulroney who pushed so hard for that and went up against two titans at the time, Reagan and Thatcher. And I strongly believe, and I think you can make the argument, that Mandela would not have been released when he was,

as a result partly of Mulroney's work, and that apartheid wouldn't have ended when it did without the support of Brian Mulroney and his pushing of Thatcher and Reagan. So I think Canadians, for lots of other reasons, in terms of their feelings about Mulroney, don't recognize that one enough. Susan, you wanted to add something after that joke, that Mulroney self-poll joke.

Yeah, just so we talk a lot, you guys and me privately and on the air about the toxicity of Parliament. And it is bad. But I would say, you know, the inaugural period of that, the modern, was the early years of Mulroney and the Rat Pack. That was pretty rough. The likes of Sheila Copps, Brian Tobin, Don Boudria, people who... And Mulroney was shocked at how low they went. So years later, I was doing a magazine profile of Brian Tobin. And Brian Tobin had apologized to Mulroney for the days of the Rat Pack and for being against free trade in 1988. And I wanted to know what Mulroney thought. And I assumed then Mulroney

no longer, still didn't speak to me. You know, if I wanted to know what Mulroney thought. And I assumed then Mulroney no longer, still didn't speak to me. You know, if I wanted to know something about Mulroney, I would phone somebody like Luke Lebois or Ellie and McDonald and say, can you just get a comment from Mulroney about this apology? So my husband is home one night. I was away. And the phone rings at our house at 10 o'clock at night. And my husband just about drops the phone because it's Brian Mulroney who wants to talk about Brian Tobin apologizing. We eventually did the interview.

And at the end of the interview, this is so Brian. you know, once you leave politics, once you're out of it, some of the divisions that you had don't seem as important. So he's saying that he and Brian Tobin are now friends. And he said, you can get past all of the things that once would have made you crazy. And I said, and that and that mr mulroney is the spirit in which i take this call to me and he said and that susan it was the way it was intended and that was me and mulroney then i could get him on the phone whenever i wanted after that yeah no he was quite one of the things that uh that I think we all know about Brian Mulroney,

and it's more true about him than any of his predecessors that I knew of and his successors, is that he knew the power of a personal call, you know, a personal touch. He knew how much it was welcomed and how it was received, and he knew how to do it with such grace and humor. It never seemed like it was performative, like somebody had given him a list of things that he had to do, and he was kind of working through them or something like that. And in a lot of those situations that I would hear about over the years, these were actually very spontaneous things that he just had an instinct for

wanting to reach out and touch people. And he especially did when he knew that people were going through difficult things. I don't know how many people from different parties over the years I've heard. If you get into a conversation with them about Brian Mulroney, they will say, well, there was the time that and something had happened in their family or something was going on in their life. And without having had any expectation that they would ever have a conversation

with Brian Mulroney, he would have reached out to them or sent a note. And the power of that in politics, in a business, as Susan is saying, that where tempers fray and feelings run hot, really worked to his advantage. And I don't think he did it for those reasons. I think he did it because as a human being, it made him feel like it was what he should be doing. But let me finish that aspect of the story by saying, I remember as he was heading towards the end of his time in office, and his polling numbers were absolutely dismal, some of the worst that I've ever seen. There was no reason to look at those numbers and think that he had even the remotest chance of winning another election if he stayed on as conservative leader. But despite that, his caucus

was ready to go. If he said, let's go and take those liberals on, not one of them, I don't think, would have said, no, not with you, sir. They were all ready to go because he had developed such bonds of affection with them. Yes, they trusted his political skills, but I don't think they thought he could win. I think they were ready to go into that battle with him because of the way that he tended to the personal relationships and politics over the years. I want to talk about that and the impact that that had on the country and that he personally had on the country on a couple of fronts. But we're going to take our first break. We'll be right back after this.

And welcome back. This is a good talk for this Friday. Susan Dillicourt filling in for Chantelle Hebert. Bruce Anderson is here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel.

However you're doing all of that, we're glad to have you with us. Let me just tell one quick story about the personal relationship thing. You know, I talked very briefly about this last night on The National for the CBC, but I wanted to mention it again because I think it says something about this guy who reached out, this is Brian Mulroney we're talking about, obviously, who reached out at different times in different people's lives and made a difference by that connection and that personal connection that he had with people. His agriculture minister after he became prime minister was a

fellow by the name of John Wise from St. Thomas, Ontario. And I knew John because of relatives who live in that area. In 20, I think it was 13 or 2013, John Wise passed away and Brian Mulrooney I knew was in China on some kind of a trade mission or some kind of business venture. This is long after he'd left politics. And I thought, I've got to make sure he knows that John passed away. And so I was able to reach out and get through to him to tell him. And he, at that point, didn't know. But he knew he couldn't get back in time for the funeral. So what did he do?

He didn't tell anybody this. He just arranged it. And this is the kind of guy he was. He arranged by talking to the minister at the church in St. Thomas, where the funeral service was going to be, to set up kind of a Mickey Mouse audio system that he could phone in to the service and do a kind of, a bit of a eulogy, and a classic Mulroney eulogy.

It wasn't two or three minutes. It was like 20 minutes. And he had that whole room, as he always did when he spoke in a room. And he told stories about John. And it had people in huge gales of laughter and in huge moments of tears. It was a classic Mulroney thing that he'd reached out to do that for a friend. And I think you can talk to people in politics on all sides of the aisle who can relate stories similar to that about how Mulroney went out of his way

on certain days for certain people to say kind things, you know, about them. And sorry, Susan, you were going to say? I have a story. You guys may know whether this is, I don't know whether this is apocryphal or not, but I heard that after the 1984 election, which was a blowout victory for him, that the first people he called were the losing liberal candidates, the MPs who had lost their seats. And what I was told was he knew the conservatives who had won had enough reason to be happy that night, but he phoned the losing Liberals first, and a lot of them never forgot it. You know, like all those years where it got really tense

between the Liberals and Brian Mulroney, as it would, there were some veterans from that campaign who never forgot that they got a call from Mulroney that night. I don't know. Have you guys heard that one too? I hadn't heard that, but it does not it it could be apocryphal but it certainly could be true it sounds like the kind of thing that he would do yeah um and that you know not to uh not to be critical of any other politicians but that i haven't met very many politicians who had that kind of instinct to to do those kinds of things and the will to do it you know there's always lots of competing alternatives um so that to me

that personal disposition and the courtesies and the and the warmth and the wit i think he was a great storyteller i think he told jokes extraordinarily well um that was a big part of him as as a as a political personage in canada but so too was the policy stuff and i think we want to spend a little bit of time on that at least i wanted to because i in addition to the meach lake which i do think was a really important initiative to try to accomplish um that bridging of the divides that had widened. And I think it was, I take Susan's point, there were flaws with it and not everybody liked it, but it grew out of good intentions. Let me put it that way, at least in my view. But he also did free trade and GST, which were massive, massive undertakings from a political management standpoint.

Now, if somebody arrived here from Mars and they said, well, how complicated would it be to change one kind of tax into another kind of tax, which is the manufacturing sales tax, the GST? How hard could that be? Well, it was hard. It was politically controversial. And I spent some time working on it. It's one of the reasons why I was working on that when Mike Wilson was the finance minister. I was working on Meech Lake when Lowell Murray

was the federal provincial relations minister. And that got me closer to what Brian Mulrooney was trying to do and how he was going about it and led to me agreeing to help him and his party for a period of time. So I watched how that policy was developed. I watched the political management of it. I tried to give as good advice as I could around it. But I did admire the fact that these were big projects. They were not easy to do. They were big projects and they required such discipline and determination. It wasn't always perfect. I'm not suggesting that. It never is. But his policy mix stands up you mentioned apartheid i agree with that gst free trade um acid rain um he was a big and early proponent of a conservative perspective on the environment

um i think he sent uh my friend jean charre down to um brazil to uh the r Rio for a major environmental announcement. It was kind of a multinational breakthrough moment. And so he did a lot on the policy side that if people weren't alive or attentive to politics when he was prime minister, they should know about because it was no small track record of policy achievements on the domestic side and obviously significant renown for him in among world leaders as well, which we can talk about too. Didn't Elizabeth May on the environment, didn't she kind of award him the medal as the greenest prime minister ever in Canada? Yeah. And, you know, she was a big fan of his on that. How did he change the country? Did he change the country?

Certainly. Yeah, certainly. The country was changing under him as well, too. But I think he was a perfect prime minister for what was happening in the 1980s. You know, that politics had become, you guys will remember this, politics had become really fixated on the idea that it had to become more businesslike and more business friendly. You know, there's, and I think, you know, that's the, for good or for ill, that was a lot of the lefty kind of opposition to him was that he was corporatizing politics. But that was happening around the world. I think he also made us closer to the United States, again, for good or for ill. Free trade is definitely the engine of our economy. But Justin Trudeau, I remember he made a very sort of supposed to be sort of a set piece speech before he became prime minister back when he was just liberal leader. And he said a former prime minister had told him that there is no more important relationship internationally.

One of the most important things you can do as prime minister is tend to the Canada-U.S. relationship. And he said that advice did not come to him from his dad. So I figure it was Mulroney who probably told him that. And I always found Mulroney's posture toward the current prime minister interesting too. You'll remember he said early on, Justin Trudeau, what's not to like, you know, and he came in as an advisor during the NAFTA existential drama with Trump. And I think, I will think of Brian Mulroney, I think we do have, we're going to have to talk about Airbus. We can't have this. That's right. But I will think of Brian Mulroney as emblematic of the Conservative Party as it no longer exists. I'm sorry to say that.

I did hear Pierre Polyev saying lovely things about Brian Mulroney yesterday. But Brian Mulroney was a form of progressive conservatism, not afraid to do things on climate, for example, not afraid to reach out across the aisle and phone liberals who had lost, not afraid to have a very good friend of Paul Martin's. So I think that Brian Mulroney, he changed the Conservative Party, and I regret that it has changed away from what he did for it. Because he made it easier for Quebec to be part of the Conservative Party. He did a lot of things for the Conservative Party that should be exemplars for the Conservative Party of today. Yeah, I think that was the first instinct I had in answer to your question, Peter, is I thought he had changed the country, but I don't know exactly where the country is right now and how much it reflects what influence he had. I rather fear that some of his most important influences have dissipated. And there are a lot of reasons for that. But my question is not whether he had an influence in

changing the way that the country thought, but whether it's persisted. And for me, I kind of grew up more in the liberal party. I worked on the liberal side my first couple of years and first several years in politics. But he created a version of the conservative party that caught my interest, for which I developed enthusiasm. And it was because he was sensitive to the social programs that Canadians needed and wanted. He was interested in the environmental issues that were important to people across the political spectrum. He obviously came from a business background, and he wanted to build strong relationships with the business community. He believed in the importance of remodeling our economy rather than just taking it for granted. And so I think his free trade ambition was really

well put. And I think the change on the tax side was also important. When I think about the kinds of challenges that he faced on the fiscal side relative to what we see today, he took a lot of heat for spending a lot of money. But by today's measure, I don't know that he was one of the more happy to spend prime ministers, let me put it that way. But he did in politics convey a sense of both pride in what he did, but also that of the Reform Party in the context of a Mulroney government, a Mulroney conservative party that I thought did quite a lot to support ambitions in the West and to connect with Albertans in particular. Don Mazenkovsky was an important part of Brian Mulroney's government, and Joe Clark obviously was. I don't think he caused the Reform Party to happen, but I think that the fact that the Reform Party happened was the start of a process of a widening of the gap between that Alberta political culture

and the national conservative idea that Susan talked about, which is what I also think he helped create, but which I think has dissipated somewhat now. Can I just mention, in terms of that list that Susan gave of the sort of reaching out that he did, you know, across the aisle on certain things, the other example of that is what he did at the UN by appointing Stephen Lewis, the former Ontario NDP leader, right, to become Canada's ambassador to the UN,

which is no small post and was incredibly important through the 1980s. And Stephen Lewis has written about some of the meetings he sat in on the South Africa question where he watched Mulroney and the sort of common bond the two of them had on trying to achieve something on South Africa and how those two worked together. You know, Susan talked about the, you know, the Rat Pack and the Liberals, the young guns.

She named three of them. John Nunziata, I think, was the fourth. Oh, right, yes. And they were, you know, they were a powerhouse in the House of Commons, and they caused all kinds of problems for the Conservative government. But I still think the polarization of today is much different than the polarization of those days.

I mean, they were great debaters, the Rat Pack, and they were trying to find the soft underbelly of the Conservative Party. But today's polarization is much more bitter, much more destructive that goes on by not just political parties, but in the differences within the country, then the issues in those days, which I tend to think were more about issues where you offered a constructive opposition to what was being put forward,

that it wasn't the kind of hate polarization that exists today. And I'm just wondering what, you know, today's leaders can gain from what happened in those days and was led in some manner by Mulroney, but also by, you know, John Turner to a degree of the Liberal Party and some of the differences that were exhibited in those days. Are there lessons from the Mulroney era or are we just too far gone? It's just too different now to be looking back.

Such a hard question, Peter, because I really don't want that to be lost. I think what really, you know, what Mulroney knew is get on the phone to somebody, you know, and meet somebody where they live. And the best politicians I've seen are the ones who do that. I think what there's a lot of damage done during the years, and I saw it happen in the last decade or so. Let's not blame Stephen Harper, but I kind of might have been. Where they weren't allowed to socialize with liberals. Actually, Edith went out saying, you cannot go too high, which was then the big place. And there were some ministers who didn't listen to that advice, like a John Baird or a Jason Kenney. But there was a fear of God that was put into the conservatives over the last decade.

Do not traffic or truck with liberals. And I think that, you know, I try to live by this myself. I want to tell a funny journalism story too, actually. I live by this myself and I think it's good discipline for, I never write anything about anybody that I wouldn't say to their face. It's just, I think it's, I think there's a lot of people right now writing things on social media or in commentary and opinion that they wouldn't be able to say to somebody's face. And I think that's the lesson I would like to see, you know, remember that these people you might meet them on the street after.

Can I tell a couple of funny stories about Bob Fyfe? I should say, Fyfe and Brian Mulroney, I think now they're fine. But Bob Fyfe practices a kind of journalism that Brian Mulroney, I think, dubbed gotcha journalism. And Bob Fyfe drove him insane. Fyfe and Nomitz in the early years kept doing the stories that called for ministers to resign. There was this wave of resignations back when they were a team. And Fyfe was as annoying to Brian Mulroney as he is to Justin Trudeau. He just didn't stop.

And Fife would not be displeased that I'm saying this. I was at a funeral, actually, about a year or so ago. One of Mulroney's former press secretaries said that one day, this isn't the curse of politics, but I'm going to swear here. She was called into the office and Brian Mulroney said to her, call Bob Fife and tell him to fuck right off. He said, well, I don't think I can do that. And he saw at the end of the day, he said, you didn't call him and say that. She said, no, I didn't. So there was a very tense time during Charlottetown. Charlottetown was getting down to the wire, and Mulroney was hosting premiers, one at a time, up at Harrington Lake. So all the reporters were staked out, sitting.

It was a pleasant summer day. It wasn't hardship. Sitting out at the gate to Harrington Lake, waiting for these premiers to come out one by one. And at one point, Bob Bray was in there, and he was in there for quite a while. Bob Ray was then Premier of Ontario. And we saw this jeep coming down the hill toward us. Most of the premiers had walked out. And Mulroney is behind the wheel with Bob Ray at his side.

I love this image and Mulroney leans out the window and yells at all of us, stand back and give me a clear shot at Fife. That's a great story. Listen, hold on a sec. I got to take a final break here and we've got, we do have to get to flaws, failures, and Airbus in the final couple of minutes. But let me take this quick break, and then we'll be right back.

And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge with Bruce Anderson and Susan Delacorte as we talk about Brian Mulrooney on this special edition of Good Talk for this Friday. Everybody has flaws. And Brian Mulrooney was not shy of flaws himself on a number of things. He spoke out, trusted the media too much on the bus in the 83, 84 days before he became prime minister, hadn't set the rules clearly.

And Neil MacDonald, who was a young reporter with the Ottawa Citizen, wrote some blistering stuff about the real Brian Mulroney and what he was saying in the back of the bus about... We have to say it. Know who we're like an old who we are. Bryce Mackenzie, a Liberal cabinet minister who'd accepted a patronage appointment. It was ambassador to Ireland, I think it was.

And who could have blamed him? Who wouldn't want to be ambassador to Ireland? But nevertheless, Mulroney found out then that if you're going to talk to the media, you better ensure that all the rules about those discussions are followed. Anyway, there were much bigger things to come in terms of flaws and errors of judgment. He never forgave me for my interview with Karlheinz Schreiber to tell me exactly how thick was that water cache that you gave Mulroney for his help on, what was it, pizza ovens or something that he claimed it was all about? That was the Airbus affair, which hung around his neck for a good number of years and for some people still does.

But Mulroney flaws, when you look at them, Bruce, what were they? Well, I think that was the most obvious error in judgment. I, you know, over the years have moved from seeing it as a kind of a sensational story of a personal failure and judgment, a lapse in judgment to a really small footnote for me. I understand that other people will think about it differently. But to me, it didn't really have a bearing on the overall impact that he had on public policy or his life in politics. And obviously, that's because I knew him and I had personal experiences with him, the bulk of which were so positive in terms of my sense of what he was trying to do and why he was trying to do it and what he was motivated by. So, you know, as I can with, with pretty much everybody I know, I can overlook some, some misjudgments. You know, I think he, he did have that, the other flaws, I don't know

if they're flaws. I mean, I kind of feel like they're the opposite side of the coin to somebody who's got a gift of the gab, who's witty, who wants to say things that motivate people, that don't sound like talking points, that break through the clutter. He was good at that. It also meant he said things like, there's no who are like an altar. He loved the conversation and saying those things that probably made him feel like he was on a bit of a tightrope sometimes and uh and you know and in the in the years after office i felt like um he reflected back on all of that and said it is all a soup and and most of it i'm happy with that's the sense that I have of him. And maybe I'll – because I don't know how much time we have, Peter, but I'll finish this part with a little personal story.

He had that one gift that we've seen since with people like Bill Clinton, physical proximity. He could lean in. He could put an arm on your shoulder and put a hand in your hand. And if it was a room with a lot of other people, everybody would notice that this conversation was happening. He drew the attention of a room and I had this happen with him twice. The first was when he was hoping that I would help his party prepare for the next election. And so I went to a meeting where there were a lot of people from the party and there was some sort of receiving line. Anyway, he was making his way through the line and he leaned in when he got to me and he made a point

of spending two or three minutes. I don't even remember what we talked about, but for him, the point was showing everybody else that we were having this conversation. And as I left, someone told me, well, that was really important what he did. He wanted everybody to embrace you as somebody who was kind of new to supporting the party. Fast forward 10 or 15 years. I hear he's speaking at a big convention in Ottawa that I was also speaking at. And I wasn't able to make it to the beginning of his speech. It was a big room with about 800 people, 1,000 people maybe, big podium at the beginning. I get there about 10 minutes into his speech,

and I kind of slide my way into the last row because I don't want to disrupt his flow or anything like that. He finishes his speech, and he's coming down the main aisle and everybody wants to shake his hands and whisper words to him and do selfies and everything else. And he does all of that. But then he gets to me and he kind of he wants to make sure that he pulls me out, puts his arms around me. And he says, it's so good to see you again, Bruce. He says, you missed the first half. It was the best half. How did he see me sneaking into that room 10 minutes into his speech? But he was that guy.

Susan, Bruce accomplished the feat that he does every week. He gobbled up most of the time we had left. But give me a closing thought on the flaws. I will, and I'll take us right back to the beginning. So Airbus, I was, without boring the audience, I was more part of that story than I wanted to be. I was subpoenaed as a witness in it and it got ugly. It got really tough. And there was one day Bob Fife pulled me aside and said, there's a really horrible rumor going on about you in this. Like the Mulroney side is putting out

dirt and they've got, there's ambush crews at your house. It was by the way, my birthday. I couldn't go home. And so again, if we had longer, maybe with wine and stuff, I tell you how I found out later that Brian Mulroney stopped that,

that it was when Brian Mulroney found out that those were the tactics being used against me, not his, I'm not, he wasn't my biggest fan, but when he found out that was going on, he stepped in to end it. And I never forgot that. That's a, that's an amazing story. But it underlines, I guess, what we were talking about. You know, as journalists, you're not fans of anybody in particular. You're trying to give everybody an equal shake in terms of the coverage you give. But as time moves on and the figures we're talking about move out of politics, you tend to strike up a different

kind of relationship with them. Like, you know, I've talked to Mulroney, you know, quite a few times since he left office and usually because I'm looking for help and guidance on trying to understand a story or understand something that perhaps that he did. And he's always been available. He's always made himself available. And above and beyond at times as well. You know, my son, who is a political science student at U of T,

until he graduated a couple of years ago, wrote a paper on free trade. And somehow it ended up in front of Brian Mulroney. Of course. What did he do? He wrote, he wrote Will, my son, this letter, a long, a long letter going through different points of it. And there was no, he didn't need to do this. This is like, you know, 15 years after he got out of politics, he didn't need to another fan in terms of my son or try to impress me in some long distance

way he did it because he actually believed he wanted to enter that discussion on free trade with my son a student right you know so for good for him and he's not alone in that we've seen examples of that with others who've left the scene but they do take this different kind of relationship on with the people and in some cases with the media. It's almost certain that we're not going to see, at least in our lifetimes, somebody like Brian Mulroney on the political stage in Canada. You know, I could be surprised. Hopefully I will be.

But at the moment, it doesn't seem that way. It's just not. It's a different era in politics. Good or bad, it's different. I thank you both for your thoughts on this. I know there are going to be a lot of pieces that are written over the next couple of days and people will be reading them. I know my newsletter tomorrow, The Buzz, I'm going to have some more reflections

and thoughts from others about Brian Mulroney. And the next few days, I'm sure there's going to be a state funeral and you're going to hear lots more about the 18th Prime Minister of Canada. And I hope this has given you some things to think about in terms of

his legacy and his importance on the stage. You can catch this if you're listening on SiriusXM or on the podcast. You can also catch it on, you know, F-bombs included on YouTube. Thank you for that, Susan. I'm sorry. And thank you for joining us. It's been great.

Susan, hopefully will join us again next week because Chantelle's got one more week to go on her Iceland hike. That'd be great. Susan, hopefully will join us again next week as Chantelle's got one more week to go on her Iceland hike. That'd be great. Bruce, as always, thank you for your contribution to this. I know we've all have our reflections on this guy. We've all had

our different moments covering and discussing and helping analyze on it with Brian Mulroney over the years. I know in my case, I first met him when he was running for the conservative leadership in the early 1980s. So we've seen a lot. The first time? Yeah.

Well, that was 76. I've only got 12 seconds left. So unfortunately. If any of his friends or family are watching this, my deep condolences, I think all of them from all the same and a big family. And he was so close to his family and so admired them and was so proud of them. All right. That's it for this week. We'll talk to you again on Good Talk in seven days.