Brian Mulroney's Legacy what will it be ?

[wulfie68]

Mulroneys Legacy should reflect the state he left both his party and the country in. The real Conservatives all but ceased to exist federally after 1993 and the nation just about split apart as the Bloq, a separatist party, became the official opposition.

It's hard to say what the economy would have been like without NAFTA, what we do know is that many jobs have migrated out of Canada since its' introduction and the divide between the rich and middle class and poor has rapidly widened as in the US. There were many who predicted the end of Canada as a nation in the late 1980s and that forcast almost became fact with the sovereignty fight in the mid 1990s.

In all I'd say that Mulroney has a very poor legacy and his receiving hundreds of thousands in cash in brown paper bags from a man he claimed in court to only know slightly only adds to the impression of a selfish and arrogant leader.

Trudeau also had a great deal of arrogance, but he directed it towards strengthening a distinct Canadian indentity, not tearing one down as Mulroney seemed bent on.

Mulroney was a good PM for the US and a poor one for Canada

OK you need to do some homework my friend. The Parti Quebecois first rose to prominence in Quebec when TRUDEAU was PM. The first Quebec referendum on seperation happened when TRUDEAU was PM. TRUDEAU also fathered seperatist sentiment and fostered alienation in other parts of Western Canada (by virtue of the NEP, his stances on aggricultural subsidies, etc and his entire agenda of centralization of all gov't services, which in turn meant more decision making in his power base and less in the hinterlands). He was a typical Liberal PM: he pandered to his Ontarian and Quebec base and to hell with everyone else. Saying he was a great PM is dubious at best.

I'm not saying Mulroney was a paragon of virtue either but I do give him some benefit of the doubt in that he started off behind, because of the mess Trudeau left him, both financially and in terms of the damage done to the fabric of the federation. Personally I thought he obsessed too much over the clusterf*** that was our constitution, with his constant wrangling and negotiating for Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accords. I was always of the opinion that he should have spent more time on the immediate needs of the country (which IMO were cutting social spending and biting more into the deficit ).

I also found the Globe and Mail graphic that Tonington linked very interesting when it expressed our national deficits in terms as a % of our GDP. Under Trudeau it started to climb and kept climbing, to its peak which occured after Mulroney replaced Trudeau (and Turner ) but before Mulroney was able to bring in a budget. That graphic casts a fair amount of doubt on Chretien's claimed reputation as Deficit Slayer when see it was already coming down (proportionally with our economic growth, courtesy of policies like and including the FTA and NAFTA, if not in absolute dollars numbers) before Chretien ever took office.

That doesn't forgive the arrogance and possible corruption (if the Schreiber thing bears true) but it does lead one to ask what have the Liberals really done for this country in the last 40 years? Mulroney has a mixed bag but when you look at what he accomplished compared with Trudeau and Chretien, ol' Lyin' Brian looks pretty good.

 

[Cobalt_Kid]

I never said Trudeau was a great leader, I said he had a great deal of arrogance, there's a big difference. I still remember him giving reporters the finger through the train window as he was on his way to vacation in BC. There were a lot of us who took that personally in BC.

What I did say was he was more focused on Canadian identity than Mulroney, sometimes going to less than productive lengths to do so. Mulroney on the other hand seemed to want us to be more like America(or even part of it).

And PQ power in Quebec is a lot different than the Bloq being in official opposition in Ottawa during much of the 1990s. It cast a shadow over everything that went on federally. And while the Liberals do have their faults, they do seem to end up as the party of national unity more often than not, although Bordens conservatives did a good job of holding the nation together through some of the political crises of WW I.

Lets not forget the economic and politcal turmoil that North America and much of the world was in during the 1960s and 70s. A PM like Mulroney might have seen Canadian forces bogged down in the quagmire of Vietnam and the economic upheavals of the 1970s were hardly Trudeaus fault. Mulroney had it relatively easy compared to the double-digit interest rate days of the late 1970s. And he still managed massive deficits.

I still think Trudeau was a better Canadian leader than Mulroney and Chretien gets the nod because he did manage to hold the country together even if he did grease the road to unity with an abundance of sleaze. I'm half American, but I don't ever want to see Canada lose its' identity and become part of a greater USA and that's where I think Mulroney really wanted to take us.