By Geoff Norquay

March 8, 2024

Working closely with a Prime Minister is a rare and privileged opportunity. I had that honour from 1984 to 1988, during Brian Mulroney’s first term in government. For most of those four years, I briefed him for Question Period, was his senior social policy advisor and wrote many of his speeches with him, including a couple of throne speeches. PMO was a lot simpler in those days.

As Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney was a transformational leader. He had the vision and courage to tackle major reforms – to the Canadian economy, to our presence and role on the world stage, and to our very conception of Canada as a country. He believed fundamentally that political capital was meant to be spent, not hoarded. He had a willingness to take the kind of bold risks that made other leaders shrink, and he ensured this country received value every time.

Brian Mulroney’s reforms began with the Progressive Conservative Party, which had but one MP from Quebec when he assumed the leadership in 1983. He patiently taught the party that recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness within Canada was an added value to the country, and he built bridges to every region and newcomer communities.

He and his government inherited a country that was ripe for change. In 1984, Canada still had a massive inferiority complex and a set of self-defeating domestic policies: distrustful of foreign investment, fearful of the United States, and with a federal government whose response to the world energy crisis of the 1970s was to confiscate Alberta’s oil wealth.

Brian Mulroney turned all of this upside down. He took the biggest risk of his career in challenging the United States to negotiate the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which led to its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). These initiatives moved Canada to a safer place under the American trade umbrella and laid the foundation for the prosperity that Canada continues to enjoy today.

To get the deal, Mulroney assembled a team of Canada’s best and brightest: Allan Gotlieb, our Ambassador to Washington, Derek Burney from External Affairs and Simon Reisman, the former Deputy Minister of Finance who earlier had negotiated the Auto Pact with the US. Despite all this firepower, the deal almost didn’t happen. With a few hours to go until the deadline for the negotiations to be completed and for the deal to be sent to Congress, the Americans balked at Canada’s request for a dispute settlement mechanism, and we wouldn’t sign the deal without it.

Mulroney called James Baker, the US Treasury Secretary who was leading the American team, and told him he was about call President Ronald Reagan to ask him a question. Baker asked what the question was. Mulroney said, “I’m going to say, ‘Now Ron, how is it that the Americans can do a nuclear-reduction deal with their worst enemy, the Soviet Union, and they can’t do a free trade agreement with their best friend, the Canadians?’” With three hours to spare, Baker told Burney, “All right, you can have your goddamn dispute settlement mechanism. Now can we send the report to Congress?”

On the domestic front, the Mulroney government transformed the Foreign Investment Review Agency into Investment Canada, ended the National Energy Program, privatized more than 20 crown corporations, and enabled Newfoundland and Labrador to enjoy the benefits of the Hibernia offshore energy development. Most importantly, it ended the job-killing manufacturers sales tax and replaced it with the goods and services tax (GST).

Politically, the GST cost him and the party mightily, but it was better for the economy, it stabilized federal revenues and it’s still here today. These signature decisions – free trade and the GST – are just two of the many policies that his successors never undid. There’s a reason for that; they were right for the country, and they produced lasting benefits for the people he served.

Brian Mulroney was a generation ahead of his time in understanding the importance of climate issues and acting on them. The Acid Rain Accord he negotiated on behalf of Canada with President George H. W. Bush in 1991 was the forerunner and model for many of today’s international treaties on climate change. His Green Plan and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layers resulted in his being named Canada’s Greenest Prime Minister in 2006.

On the international stage, he single-handedly defined Canada as a robust and independent actor, promoting Canadian values on human rights and freedoms. Against significant odds, he led the international fight to hold South Africa to account for its apartheid regime and personally championed the liberation of Nelson Mandela. His government was instrumental in the creation of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

These signature decisions – free trade and the GST – are just two of the many policies that his successors never undid. There’s a reason for that.

In a 2015 speech to the Albany Club to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir John A. Macdonald, Brian Mulroney quoted the American historian James MacGregor Burns’ description of the difference between “transactional” and “transforming” leadership. Burns wrote that “it is the transforming leader who raises the level of human conduct of both leader and led… who responds to fundamental hopes and expectations and who may transcend and even seek to reconstruct the political system rather than simply operate within it.”

I believe Brian Mulroney’s successes as a transformational leader came to him because he was so personally transactional, and in the best sense of the word. For him, all politics was personal. As Anthony Wilson-Smith put it so beautifully in his recent Policy tribute, he had “a transcendent talent for friendship.” When combined with his skills at negotiation and consensus-building, he applied these talents to everything he did, whether saving the Free Trade Agreement literally at the eleventh hour or cajoling Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher into joining him in calling out South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Was he successful in everything he did? Of course not. Some policy mountains were too high to scale, and some national issues so complex that they eluded even his impressive powers of persuasion. He regretted his failures, but not his attempts to succeed against all odds in building a stronger Canada. As he told the graduating class at McGill University in 2017, “Life is an unending sequence of challenges from which no one emerges unscathed. Defeat is not something to fear, but surrender is something to reject.”

Brian Mulroney’s time on the national stage – the 1980s and the 1990s – was a different time from today. The partisan and policy battles were as visceral as they are now, but there was a fundamental respect across the aisle in the House of Commons. He forged friendships across party lines with leaders and MPs of other parties. It was a time when senior staffers from leaders’ offices regularly got together after work and got to know each other. As Mr. Mulroney’s generosity of spirit shone through, he appointed former NDP leader Stephen Lewis as Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and former NDP leader Ed Broadbent to head the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. He twice offered ambassadorships to John Turner, the former Liberal leader.

Mulroney earned the loyalty and affection of his thousands of friends through personal contacts and reaching out. From his earliest days on the national scene, he orchestrated his own advice system with scores of calls every day all over the country. When his staff briefed him, we were constantly amazed about how much he knew about how his government was doing, which policies were being applauded, and which ones were in trouble.

He was equally generous with his friendship for all of us who worked with him so many years ago. Once you were on his team, you were there for life, and he kept in touch. A health challenge, a major accomplishment, a death in the family: all would prompt a call from him to commiserate, to buck you up, celebrate a victory, and always to gossip and share reminiscences.

He was larger than life, an inspirational leader, incredibly kind and generous, and I will miss him very much.

Geoff Norquay is a principal with Earnscliffe Strategies in Ottawa. He was a senior social policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office from 1984 to 1988 and director of communications to Stephen Harper when he was leader of the Official Opposition.