With the death of former prime minister Brian Mulroney today, former NDP leader Ed Broadbent Jan. 11, and Flora MacDonald in 2015, at 89, Joe Clark, 84, Kim Campbell, 76, and Jean Chrétien, 90, master of the so-called “Shawinigan handshake,” are pretty much the last standing of a generation of federal politicians from the Liberal, NDP and Progressive Conservative parties, who served this country with distinction and honour. All but MacDonald and Broadbent served as prime minister, although he was made a member for the King’s Privy Council for Canada in 1982, a lifetime appointment rarely conferred on a politician who never served as prime minister or otherwise as a Minister of the Crown.
Mulroney was 84, while Broadbent was 87. John Turner died at the age of 91 in 2020.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remembered Mulroney as someone who “had the courage to do big things.”
“He was committed to this country – loved it with all his heart – and served it for many many years and many different ways,” Trudeau told reporters on Thursday night. “He was an extraordinary statesman and he will be deeply deeply missed.”
Truth be told, I was no great fan of Mulroney when he served as prime minister from 1984 to 1993. I didn’t vote for him and his signature policies of free trade and the GST found no favour with me in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I’m not really very fond of Liberals, for the most part, either, generally casting my federal votes for the NDP.
But that said, I suspect we are unlikely to see in Canadian federal public service the likes of Clark, MacDonald, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, the first woman to ever serve as prime minister, albeit briefly, and Broadbent again. And that’s a loss for Canada, a country capable in its very best moments of such magnificence, serving as a shining beacon to the world.
As Barack Obama observed in the United States 17 years ago, Martin Luther King and others were his “North Star” – setting a standard of “bold leadership and prophetic eloquence.” During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said he would never have gotten as far were it not for the civil rights movement: “I stand on the shoulders of giants,” he said in a speech in Selma, Alabama.
Where are these giants in the United States or Canada today?
When Broadbent died last month, Mulroney told CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Broadbent was a “giant in the Canadian political scene.”
“He would have been prime minister if he had been leading any other party,” he told host David Cochrane.
As one of his chief political opponents in the 1980s, Mulroney said Broadbent was “extremely pleasant” but also a “tough and strong debater.”
“I consider him a great parliamentarian and a major contributor to Canadian progress during the decade and a half we were together,” he said.
Mulroney was born to working class Irish-Canadian parents in the forestry town of Baie-Comeau in 1939. His father was a paper mill electrician in this hardscrabble outpost in Quebec’s northeast.
Mulroney grew up with a bicultural world view in an isolated community split between French and English speakers — an upbringing that would prove to be politically useful later.
Mulroney became interested in Conservative politics through a fateful friendship with Lowell Murray, a future senator and cabinet minister in his government. Murray convinced his charismatic classmate to join the Progressive Conservative campus club at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
Mulroney’s death represents the near end of the inevitable passing from our midst of a generation of Canadian politicians from an era in all parties when they could disagree with each other with civility, and us with them, as voters, without being disagreeable and when not every utterance was calculated for its value as ideological blood sport.
MacDonald won her first federal election in October 1972 as a Progressive Conservative for the Ontario riding of Kingston and the Islands, the riding represented by Sir John A. Macdonald a century before, and the only woman among the 107 Tories elected and one of only three women in the House of Commons during the Liberal minority government of Pierre Trudeau. She held the seat until her defeat by Liberal Peter Milliken in November 1988.
While the Canadian political system does little to encourage or reward voters who depart from partisan voting along party lines to support candidates seeking office as MPs federally or MLAs, MPPs or MNAs provincially, I’ve often thought, as heretical as it sounds even to me, that had I lived in Kingston and the Islands when Flora MacDonald was MP, say in the 1979, 1980 or 1984 federal general elections, I’d have quite likely been marking my “x” beside a PC candidate for the first time.
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