At his Montreal residence on August 6, the former prime minister and winner of the Policy bilateral PM-President Rankings, sat with his friend and biographer, Policy Editor L. Ian MacDonald, for his first in-person interview since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s their wide-ranging conversation on Canada-US relations and the importance of the personal engagement of the PM and the president. 

Policy: Mr. Mulroney, thank you for doing this. You always used to say that the two most important files on a prime minister’s desk were federal-provincial relations/national unity, and Canada-US relations, especially between the prime minister and the president.

Brian Mulroney: Yes, absolutely. National unity and Canada-US relations. And the important thing about this is that the responsibility cannot be delegated. And if the country’s intact and safe, then the prime minister has to focus a large part of his interest and activities on Canada-US. And he has to do that personally. 

Policy: You’ve also said, “The door to the Oval Office opens all the other doors,” in Washington and around the world.

Brian Mulroney: The reason for that is that, if it is known around the world—and they know everything, your fellow heads of government or state—if it is widely known that you are on friendly terms with the president of the United States, and you have ready access to the Oval Office, this opens many doors elsewhere around the world. And the reverse is also true. If it is known that you have a very poor relationship with the sitting president, there’s less inclination to help, and there’s less inclination to listen to you and to Canada’s opinions at the United Nations and NATO and so on. So, it’s a very important role that has to be fulfilled by the president and prime minister.

Policy: And your co-winners of our Policy ranking, Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. Mr. Reagan received you as leader of the opposition in June of 1984 at the White House. Not unprecedented in the sense that President Kennedy received Mr. Pearson at the White House at his Nobel Laureates gala in 1962. Which caused some controversy back home among Mr. Diefenbaker’s Conservatives, then at the start of an election campaign that reduced them to a minority government. It’s still pretty unusual for a sitting president to receive a Canadian opposition leader.

Brian Mulroney: Yes, it certainly doesn’t happen every day, and in this case, and in most cases, it’s a meet-and-greet. The president is a very busy man, he deals with leaders of government, and with heads of state. I went in and we sat down and started to talk and it lasted 40 minutes. And then he said, “I’m going to have a press conference with you. Come on Brian, let’s go outside.” So we went into the Rose Garden, and he said things like, “Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have another Irishman, with the two of us running North America.” So that irritated the hell out of the Liberals.

Policy: And this was on the eve of the convention that chose John Turner as their leader in June of ’84.

Brian Mulroney: Exactly, and there was an anti-American drive at the time on the Liberal side. So, I was on the other side of this, and I was received with open arms.

Policy: And then in Quebec City, at the Shamrock Summit in March 1985, you managed to get Mr. Reagan to appoint two envoys on acid rain, Bill Davis, the former Ontario premier from our side, and Drew Lewis, the former transportation secretary on their side, and this was an issue that Reagan hadn’t been very strong on until then. That was a major breakthrough, wasn’t it?

Brian Mulroney: Yes, and you may remember that when Reagan first arrived in Ottawa in 1981, there was a demonstration outside Parliament, 50,000 people.

Policy: “Stop acid rain!” was the mantra.

Brian Mulroney: Yes, and it was the most important environmental issue, not only in Canada and the United States, but for many other countries at the time, because the environment was just coming to the fore, and I knew it would be a tough slog to get opinions changed in the United States. Quebec City was a unique opportunity for me to begin trying to persuade President Reagan of the necessity of action on acid rain and the environment. And that was an important moment—with Bill Davis and the respect in which he was held in Canada, and Drew Lewis was a powerful guy in the Reagan administration, friendly with the president and so on. And they produced a report that became the basis of further negotiation to produce ultimately, under George Herbert Walker Bush, the Acid Rain Accord.

Policy: And then on the Sunday evening, on St. Patrick’s Day, you and President Reagan and your wives, Mila and Nancy, famously walked on stage at Le Grand Théâtre de Québec and here is the photo of you holding hands with the contralto Maureen Forrester, who’s leading the group singing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, and you were later criticized by some members of the intelligentsia for “demeaning the office” was one description. 

And I think your response was “If a couple of Irishmen can’t sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling…

Brian Mulroney: …on St. Patrick’s Day, in Quebec City, where the Irish arrived in Canada, they’re nuts. And they were predicting my demise because of this, but as I told my cabinet and caucus, “I think they have this a little wrong. I’m going to play this television clip right across the country in the next election, and I’m telling you right now, we’re going to win the election with a majority.” 

Policy: In April 1987, on President Reagan’s state visit to Canada, at the state dinner at Rideau Hall, he proposed a toast in which he said he said he looked forward to the day when people could toast such an occasion with fine California wines. And your response to that with your free trade negotiating team, was that wine was in and beer was out. 

Brian Mulroney: That’s right. He had great interest in that, and in the entertainment industry. When you think of it, he was a product of both, so, yes, those became items during the negotiations.

Policy: And you got him to give you a cultural exemption for Canadian cultural industries, and this was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Brian Mulroney: Exactly. And those points bring forward an extremely important dimension of leadership in this area in particular and that is the establishment of not only of a very proper and correct relationship with the president, but if you can, a very friendly one. He’ll go the extra mile for you in the crunch. And I’m aware of a number of situations where he overruled his cabinet and his government to accommodate Canada’s needs.

Policy: And then the next day, prior to his address to Parliament, you had a working lunch, the two of you, and I think James Baker and Derek Burney, sitting alone at the table in the dining room window at 24 Sussex, and you got him to agree to acid rain and Canada’s sovereignty claims on the Northwest Passage that weren’t in the text that he had in his pocket.

Brian Mulroney: After we had our meeting, he asked if he could use the living room, and he went in there by himself with his advisers and his cabinet members, and I had been pounding on this pretty hard. And he’s quoted by his national security advisor at the time, Frank Carlucci, in a recorded statement later at the University of Virginia, he came in and sat down and said, “We must do something right now, for Brian.” And he sat down and he had a copy of his speech—we were not there—and Carlucci comes out after the meeting and he says to Derek Burney, “Derek, what is your position on acid rain, free trade and Arctic sovereignty?” And Derek said, “Why do you ask?” And he said, “Because they’re our positions now.” And that was a major breakthrough. 

Policy: Leading up to that, the first President Bush, when he was still vice president, visited you for lunch at 24 Sussex in January 1987, and he came out and met the press with you, and said, “I got an earful on acid rain.”

Brian Mulroney: What happened there was that the acid rain dialogue and the free trade talks were not going anywhere, and I made a statement in the House about how unhappy I was, and unhappy about the way this was being handled, and I made it very, very clear to the American side. As a result, President Reagan told then-Vice President Bush and James Baker to come up to Ottawa to see me for meetings and lunch. They were there the next day, and in anticipation of this, I instructed my staff to put together a video of question period in the House of Commons. We were in the “freedom room” upstairs at 24 Sussex, and I said, “Now George and Jim, I want you to sit down and watch the movies with me. On came the Rat Pack and the leading Liberals attacking America, attacking free trade, mocking Reagan, and most of all denouncing me for being a toady, and a poodle for Ronald Reagan and the Americans, in the most vicious and personal terms. I won’t mention their names, that was then and now is now, but Reagan and Bush, used to the bi-partisanship in Washington at the time, had never seen anything like this. Baker said, “Can I take this back with me?” And Bush called me the next day to say, “We went in to the Oval Office, and we put it in and showed it to Reagan and he was astonished by this misconduct.” And I said to them, “This is what I’m subjected to every day and my counter to this is yes, but the Free Trade Agreement will ultimately be worth the abuse.” They related that to Reagan, Reagan told Bush “That might be true, the Free Trade Agreement is going to be, I think, great as well. But nobody should be subjected to this kind of abuse, personal abuse.” 

Policy: And then in your speech to the US Congress, your joint address in April of 1988, on acid rain and you said how Canada had already taken measures to reduce acid rain in the seven provinces east of Saskatchewan by 50 percent, and you said to the US Congress: “We ask nothing more than this from you.” How important was the Congress in getting that done eventually?

Brian Mulroney: Very important. And on trade, the holdup at the last minute was the Congress, because the argument of the Congressional leaders was that this might dilute the authority of the Congress in international trade. Here they’re signing a bilateral with us that had not been negotiated by, or approved at the time, by the Congress and that’s what happened the famous night in October of 1987 when Baker took them on, but he was friendly with them. So, he explained why this was not a dilution of Congressional authority in the area of international trade. 

Policy: And just to fast-forward again a bit in the negotiations that led to the Clean Air Act, as the Americans called it in 1991, 30 years ago exactly. President Bush told his team “I want this done for Brian.”

Brian Mulroney: Yes, that’s in his memoirs. Because there was resistance from people like John Sununu, who was his chief of staff. And the reason was that they feared that this environmental action would stall economic growth in the Midwest, and that’s why I insisted to our people that we must come up with a clean hands policy. We would be able to say, “What are you talking about? We’ve already done this and we are going to meet our goal of reducing emissions by 50 percent.” We had a deal with the seven provinces and so on. That worked out very well, but the whole thing could have been a nightmare because it was pretty close.

Policy: And then in multilateral terms, an important area where you differed both with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, on ending apartheid and freeing Nelson Mandela. I’m thinking of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Nassau in 1985, your speech to the United Nations after that in September 1985, and the Commonwealth CHOGM in Vancouver in 1987 where you said to Thatcher, “Margaret, you are on the wrong side of history.”

Brian Mulroney: Yes, Margaret and Reagan were opponents of apartheid, there’s no doubt about that but they disagreed with the proposals that we had put forward to the Commonwealth, which essentially was sanctions, which would affect them economically and shame them, the South Africans, into a greater degree of flexibility. Margaret’s argument and that of President Reagan was simply that sanctions hurt the poorest people in society. This would be devastating for the Blacks in South Africa and my argument against that was, there were going to be consequences obviously, but if there is no action, if there is a refusal to put on sanctions, the apartheid regime will continue in South Africa—legal slavery. That was the argument that carried the day and it led to some difficulties with both President Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. But ultimately, I think we wore them down. When Mandela came out of jail, he told me in our first conversation that, if we wished, he would make his first speech to a free parliament in a free country in Canada. His first speech as a free man and as he said in his speech in the House of Commons, I think that was an indication of what he thought of the players and the policies that were advanced.

Policy: And on the multilateral stage in 1989 and 1990, we see under President Bush and you as Canadian prime minister the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new world order including the reunification of Germany, for which Chancellor Helmut Kohl later paid tribute to you in the Bundestag. Your sense of all of that?

Brian Mulroney: Well, it was a tumultuous era. There were two superpowers at the time, and we weren’t one of them, so if you’re going to have influence you’ve got to use it through a leader of our side, namely, yes, the United States. That required the access to influence the entire debate. I remember being at Kennebunkport when President Bush said, “Let’s divide it up and let’s make some calls right now.” This was in respect to the First Gulf War. We sat in the same room, him on one side and me on the other, and made calls to it must have been 30 or 40 leaders around the world, heads of state and government, talking them through this.  

Policy: And you told him that he had to get a resolution from the UN Security Council authorizing this action.

Brian Mulroney: What happened was, in the summer of 1990 after the invasion by Saddam Hussein, President Bush called me and asked me to come to a private dinner in Washington so we flew down, and we had dinner in the residence in the White House and Bush handed me the raw data from CIA on what had happened the day before in Kuwait and we talked about the possibility, and that’s what it was at the time, of a massive response by the Allies and I said: “George, let me give you our position. Canada will be there 100 percent with you, with all the Allies, provided that you bring a resolution to the Security Council and it passes, otherwise we’re not in.” I was co-chair of the United Nations Summit on Children, in that time frame, and there were 70 heads of state there and we took advantage of my co-chairmanship to meet with most of them, relevant ones, and Bush and I, and others were pressing for that resolution because Baker had called me up and said: “Do you think this is a litmus test of our relationship?” I said: “We support you very strongly, Jim, but we’ve got to have that resolution of the United Nations, it is central to our foreign policy and our existence on the international stage.” So, Baker and Bush took it upon themselves and a resolution was presented and accepted and that’s why we did what we did.

Policy: And then much later on in your eulogies for President Reagan in 2004 at his state funeral and again for President Bush in 2018, you were the first and only foreign leader ever to be asked to speak at the state funeral of an American president, one American president, let alone two. How did you take that as an honour?

Brian Mulroney: Well, the first one according to Nancy, the President had left instructions that he would like me to say a few words, so when she called me and told me that, of course, I accepted immediately. With regard to President Bush, he called me and said: “Brian, I’m going to have a state funeral of course and I’m being pressed by the government to firm things up and I am asked who I wish to eulogize me and I want you to do it, along with George and so on.” I said: “George, I don’t even want to talk about this. You’re in good shape.” And he said: “Brian, I don’t want to be put in a position where other people are making these decisions for me. I’d be honoured if you accepted.” I said of course, and that’s how that happened. I took it as a great tribute to Canada that for the first time in history a Canadian prime minister was invited twice to speak at a state funeral in the National Cathedral in Washington.

Policy: And that kind of brings us to the question of Canada-US relations, and all your successors and predecessors. Where are we in the post-Trump era, both in terms of the bilateral and multilateral role that we play alongside the Americans? A lot of our Policy contributors—former Ambassadors and Clerks of the Privy Council—their sense is that this is a time to take a step back and reassess the role between Canada and the United States, that it no longer can be taken for granted that we are best friends and closest neighbours and that now we have our own strategic interests to look after.

Brian Mulroney: I agree with that but I wouldn’t take it too far. What are we going to do if we no longer have the privileged access to the Oval Office that we had? To get big things done, you have to have the acceptance and the leadership of the President of the United States. If you sat in the Oval Office or in a cabinet meeting, joint meetings of cabinet and saw the alacrity with which President Reagan’s cabinet ministers acted when he said: “I want to do this for Canada.” That was it. Had he been tepid in his statement of affection or respect for Canada, they’d have gotten that, too. And they knew, and I’ve written about it. Look at the last night of the trade negotiations in 1987 when Jim Baker called me and told me that everything was done but he couldn’t get the independent dispute settlement mechanism. I said: “Jim, you know full well this is a deal-breaker for me. Canada’s not going to go into a relationship of free trade with a country 10 times our size unless we have an independent manner of resolving our disputes and we’re not going to go before the American courts, we are going to get killed. You are telling me we can’t do it, fine, I’m going to call President Reagan at Camp David right now and I’m going to ask him the following question. ‘How is it, Ron, that you can do a nuclear arms reduction deal with your worst enemy, the Soviet Union, but you can’t do a free trade agreement with your best friend, the Canadians?’” And Baker said: “Prime Minister, can you give me 20 minutes?” Within minutes, he was in the Canadian negotiating room in the Treasury Department and he had a piece of paper handwritten and he threw it on the table and he said: “There’s your goddamn independent dispute settlement mechanism, now can we get this up to Congress before the fast track authority expires at midnight?”

Policy: What is your sense of President Joe Biden, both as a bilateral interlocutor and on the world stage? 

Brian Mulroney: I like the President. I’ve known him for 35 years and he was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Policy: You dealt with him on the Free Trade Agreement, I think.

Brian Mulroney: Dealt with him on that and many other things. It’s also the Irish thing. We’ve always gotten along very well. I think, however, I fear that much, this is not the same Joe Biden I knew 30 years ago. I think that his thought process and policy process was at the beginning taken over in large measure by the left wing of the Democratic party. The Americans are now, with Prime Minister Trudeau, who has a good relationship with Biden, they are talking a good game but the Biden administration’s actions have been fairly hostile with Canada so far in a number of important areas, including energy and pipelines.

Policy: What about that—the vetoing of the Keystone XL Pipeline by Biden and the threats against Enbridge Line 5 by the Governor of Michigan?

Brian Mulroney: Very hostile, and obviously the administration is playing to the progressive wing—people who want to defund the police and who want to do this and do that. We’re off to a good start in terms of the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister, but there’s been no substance to it so far and that we have to change.

Policy: I wondered what your thoughts were of President Biden on the world stage and the issue of China.

Brian Mulroney: That’s the biggest foreign policy challenge for everybody. I think one of the solutions to it might be the policy that we adopted and followed under President Reagan. When he walked into a meeting in Iceland or in Washington with Gorbachev, Gorbachev knew without asking any questions that Reagan had a blank cheque from everybody and that was made very clear from what Reagan said. And Gorbachev wasn’t entirely happy about it, obviously. And the Cold War ended without a shot being fired. I would think that the foreign policy experts would want to examine this in the light of China. If you send somebody from Canada to China, you don’t get the time of day. It’s true of everybody else, but if Joe Biden went to China, and they knew he was speaking on behalf of all Western democracies, he could say: “Here’s what we are going to expect from you, here’s what we are going to do in return and this is going to be followed, otherwise there are going to be serious repercussions for you and your people and by the way, before I leave, those two Canadians that you illegally arrested and threw in jail for almost three years now, release them before we do any more talking.” We have a privileged and close geographic relationship and history of friendship with the United States that give us a major opportunity to press our case in a number of areas that affect Canada in a very serious way. 

Policy: And just on that, after the end of the Cold War and on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union, you disagreed with President Bush, and Canada moved forward in recognizing the independence of Ukraine in December of 1991, days before the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

Brian Mulroney: Canada became the first industrialized country to recognize Ukraine. Both Bush, for reasons I understood, and Gorbachev for his, were really imploring Canada as an industrialized G7 member not to recognize the independence of Ukraine. I told both of them, “I’m sorry, we have a large Ukrainian population in Canada and they’ve been frustrated in their search for freedom for a long, long time and Canada’s not going to delay this.”

Policy: Looking at the other PMs and presidents over the last hundred years and our ranking of them. We have Mackenzie King and Franklin Roosevelt as the second duo, largely because of the role Mackenzie King played in the Second World War making Canada the strong partner, of both the UK and the US and his role in hosting the Quebec City summits of 1943 and 1944. And then there were Jean Chrétien and Bill Clinton who were regarded as very successful in the 1990s, a prosperous time. Louis St-Laurent. Your thoughts on them.

Brian Mulroney: We have to be guided by history and history has to be guided by the question: “What did they do when they were Prime Minister? What big ticket items did they resolve? And what did they leave Canada with?” Obviously, I understand the important role that Mackenzie King played not only in that area but the troops that he sent and the valour and bravery of Canadians—major contributions to the Second World War that were certainly appreciated and as a result of which he had access to the two leaders of the Allied effort, Churchill and Roosevelt. One of my favourites is Louis St-Laurent.

Policy: Who was one of your law professors at Laval.

Brian Mulroney: Yes. He was also highly underappreciated. His decisions and his achievements were of substantial consequence to Canada, and of course to the world.

Policy: The creation of NATO and NORAD. The St. Lawrence Seaway, where St-Laurent told Harry Truman that we would build it ourselves, and then Congress finally approved it in 1952, and construction began under Eisenhower in 1954.

Brian Mulroney: A great deal can be accomplished when you are on good terms with your interlocutor in the United States and he was.

Policy: Then we have Mr. Pearson, who got the Auto Pact with Lyndon Johnson and LBJ couldn’t have been the easiest guy to deal with.

Brian Mulroney: No, he certainly was not.

Policy: Just wanted to end with a couple of your personal thoughts, people want to know how you are feeling after your health scare last Christmas with your abdominal aneurysm, which you said yourself, had it not been for Mila taking you to the hospital, you wouldn’t be here.

Brian Mulroney: Yes, she got me there in record time. The surgeons told me that if we don’t have you on the operating table in an hour in Good Samaritan Hospital in Palm Beach, there is no guarantee where you will be tomorrow morning. I feel much better. I’m doing much better. I get some good exercise. I exercise in the pool every day. I’ve got a trainer three times a week and I’ve lost a significant amount of weight, so I might be having a comeback.

Policy: And how do you feel, as a former prime minister about Canada’s future?

Brian Mulroney: I’m very optimistic about Canada’s future. I’ve laid out some thoughts, we’ve got to increase our population dramatically, I think we’ve got to absolutely ban all the interference from trade barriers. We’ve got to resolve, before anything else, the challenge of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. And the answer to that is found in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples we named in 1990, the Erasmus-Dussault report. It’s all there, laid out. There’s no reason for the government of Canada to stall any longer and we’ve got to deal with the systemic racism in some areas of Canadian life, including this appalling anti-Semitism that we find in our society. It is a disgrace what we see in the anti-Semitic circles.

Policy: As well as Islamophobia.

Brian Mulroney: Yes, of course. We need some dramatic, strong leadership. We need visionary leadership. I used to say that Canada must be governed not for easy headlines in 10 days but for a better Canada, a stronger Canada, in 10 years. So, you’ve got to look ahead and anything you try to do is going to be unpopular. Well, get used to it, because without that unpopularity, which comes from meeting the challenge, you don’t go anywhere.

Policy: What was it that Paul Desmarais used to say to you about legacy?

Brian Mulroney: When I came out after a controversial nine years in office, Paul took me to lunch and he was quite an authority, very knowledgeable on British, French, American and Canadian history, he was a genuine historian, and he said to me: “You know Brian, I think that in history you’re going to be doing very well after all this, but right now you’re in the cauldron and you’re going to be attacked all the time. My advice is to you is this: Let the garden grow and see what it looks like in 30 or 40 or 50 years. Let the garden grow.” That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed out of partisan politics, unless I was dragged into it. But you know, attacking of the opponents, hell I’m very friendly with people who attacked me 35 years ago. Life goes on. If you are locked in attitudes that you held 50 years ago, you haven’t evolved very much.

Policy: In the 1988 free trade election, probably the most consequential campaign of our lifetime, I remember your last speech in Baie-Comeau, where you said a signature line: “My father dreamed of a better life for his family. I dream of a better life for my country.”

Brian Mulroney: That’s right. The 1988 election was seminal in the history of Canada and it was a challenging election, but we did win a majority and if you look at what has happened since, we got the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, the Acid Rain Accord, all of these big-ticket items happened subsequent to the 1988 election, so it was a very important election.

Policy: So, letting the garden grow.

Brian Mulroney: Precisely. I reflected on our lunch many times because Paul was so right: “Just let the garden grow.”