Life of Brian

It may not be a hit like 'A Bug's Life' but man is this guy ever bugged.

Shorter Brian Mulroney: Conservative good, Liberal bad; The right 'principled and moral', the left 'loony, silly and ignorant'; I did the best I could. When I failed, I failed because others betrayed, backstabbed and attacked me; Pierre Trudeau was Satan incarnate so how could anyone sane actually think he was 'better, prettier, and more popular than ME!

Oh, and some every second commercial spot for 'Canadian Idol' I don't watch Teh Idol so could someone remind me of the name of that kid who hosts the show? I don't even watch network TV that much let alone CTV.

And can we now finally admit that CTV actually stands for Conservative TeleVision?

There you have it. No need to feel as if you missed something if you didn't watch former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney speak his mind and settle scores real and imagined last night. No need to bother buying his brand spanking new memoirs (1,100 pages? That's a lot of ME!), a tome which was conveniently launched today. But for all your sakes - I'm here for you, wallowing in the muck so you don't have to - I spent two hours of my life I'll never get back. That baritone drone that some oddly seem to find comforting, charismatic and commanding only serves to remind me of a foghorn. Waaaaah, Waaaaah, ME!, Waaaaah, Waaaaah ME! I nearly fell asleep.

Everyone Loves Raymond - I'll have to accept that popularity anecdotally since I don't know Raymond and never watched his his show, but Teh Brian seems awfully aggrieved and deeply personally wounded that not everybody loves or loved him.

The actual contents? No surprises. If you read the 'explosive' excerpts in the couple days leading up to the broadcast you know about the attacks on both friend and foe. This Brian guy is kind of petty and vindictive for an 'elder statesman'.  

There are many reasons why Brian Mulroney left office as the most reviled prime minister in Canadian history. In part, it was a matter of his personality: the neediness, the blarney, the preening grandiloquence.

All was as expected: the neediness, the blarney, the preening grandiloquence, the pettiness and the vindictiveness.  No, no surprises because while Brian is know as the "Boy from Baie-Comeau"  I also know a thing or two about Baie-Comeau and La Côte-Nord.

While I was born and largely raised in Montréal, La Côte-Nord is the ancestral homeland. It's still populated with literally 100's of relatives. If you are a Landry, Cormier, Boudreau, Chiasson/Giasson or Vigneault, all solid common Acadian surnames, from that area of Quebec chances are pretty much 100% we're related.  It's a remote, desolate, isolated and wild part of the province. Many towns are still not serviced or accessible by road. The highway came to Havre St-Pierre sometime in the late 1970's, to Natashquan in 1997. Even Baie-Comeau, less remote and much further up the St. Lawrence Coast, didn't have a fully paved highway into the the town until 1963. When my dad was born Sept-Iles was a sleepy little fishing village sandwiched between a couple of Innu reservations. So small that my dad's birthplace is officially listed as one of the reserves. There really wasn't much of a town then.

I know those towns. I have relatives in most of them. Baie-Comeau is no exception. We used to make the trip from Montreal to Sept-Iles most Christmases and holidays. My great-grandmother, dad's grandma, still lived up there in the same house both my grandmother and father were raised. She passed away in 1969 at the age of 90-something. I remember her well, Newfoundland Irish and tougher than a $2 steak. My dad still aunts, uncles and cousins there, and some in Baie-Comeau as well. Some fêtes would be be B-C at Uncle E. and Aunt S.'s instead of Sept-Iles as a bit of a compromise, since Sept-Iles was another 4 hours of so up the road. I spent some childhood times in those places, and further up, too. I had a couple opportunities to travel by ship, once as a child and once as an adult, with Dad from Sept-Iles to the ancestral ground in Natashquan. He thought understanding roots would be valuable. He worked those waters as a young adult on the old Clarke Steamship Company coastal traders that provided cargo and ferry service to all those communities. I won't link a map but if you have Google Earth take a look at the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River from Baie-Comeau up to North and East all the way to the Labrador border. Pretty stark.

So, there was my interest. Brian going back to Baie-Comeau for the first time since about 1990 or so, spreading his usual blarney. Many of my relatives, including my Dad, knew that young Brian Mulroney.

You'll have to understand that my opinion of old Foghorn Voice was forever clouded, even long before he became PM, by those personal family opinions of him as a young labour lawyer and consummate backroom politician. And guess what, their appraisal then wasn't much different than the appraisal now. For every person in Baie-Comeau who will speak glowingly of him, and there were a few on that broadcast last night, there are others who will mutter the opposite under their breath.

The neediness, the politicking, the blarney, the preening, the need to impress 'les bosses' and those wealthier and more socially connected,  the overarching ambition, the insecurities, the sucking up to American industrialists, always seeking approval. Brian Mulroney was always all of those things, and I learned all of those things long before he was ever elected Progressive Conservative leader or as PM.

Won't deny it. My family dislikes him very much. Some outright hate the man as one of the biggest phonies ever foisted on the Canadian public. That's where I come from, and nothing I saw or heard last night could make me change my mind. It's his attempt at salvaging his legacy by revising history. It was two hours of Mularkey's World. (and don't get me started on Nancy Reagan-wannabe Mila. Damn, she's smarmy.)

Once he ascended to party leadership the dislike was greater. You see, we were Trudeau federalists. Quebecois federalists. Strict enough about it that rule #1 was 'don't play footsie with the separatistes' I don't know to what extent the rest of Canada understands that Mulroney took Quebec, not once but twice, not because he was 'le petit-gars de Baie-Comeau'. It was because he had the provincial PQ machine working for him federally in those two elections that led to back-to-back PC majority governments, the first time in a century. That's an open secret in Quebec (and can you see the same with Harper playing footsie with the ADQ right now. Soft federalists? Soft separatistes? Hard to know), but I don't think that is really well known elsewhere. That made his disingenous charge of Lucien Bouchard's 'betrayal' a bit more difficult to swallow. You mean Brian knew this guy since college days 'like a brother' and had no idea he was sympathetic to the souveraigntist cause? Or that his local Quebec organizing teams were largely made up of PQ members? That makes Mulroney either incompetent or stupid, take your pick.

Back to Andrew Coyne for a second.

But much the biggest factor in turning the public so vehemently against him was the constitutional trauma, or traumas, that came to dominate the later years of his government. Neither the defects of his personality nor the unpopularity of his economic policies, after all, had prevented him from winning back to back majorities, the first Conservative leader to do so since Sir John A. Macdonald. It was his decision to plunge the country into not one but two rounds of constitutional brinksmanship that permanently alienated the people, and ultimately led to the demise of the Conservative party.

Quebec nationalists might have invented the "knife at the throat" strategy of extorting concessions from the rest of Canada. But it was Mr. Mulroney himself who held the knife through the long years of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles. It was the prime minister of Canada who threatened his own country with death, publicly and repeatedly, if it did not acquiesce in his constitutional vision. That is the part the public could not forgive him for.

snip..

Mr. Mulroney had promised the Conservatives he would "deliver" Quebec, the electoral prize that had eluded the party since Sir John's day. If a little constitutional sweetener helped seal the deal, what harm was there in that?

As it turned out, a world of harm. The primary effect of Mr. Mulroney's constitutional gambit was to spread the belief among Quebecers, until then the private grudge of the nationalists, that a great wrong had been done them in 1982. As the sense of grievance escalated, so did the remedies required. The Quebec Liberal party, as an example, had originally proposed that the recognition of Quebec's "distinct society" be confined to the preamble of the Constitution, where it would have no interpretive weight. Under pressure from the separatist opposition, that became insufficient. Now the clause would have to be in the body of the constitution. Anything less would be an insult.

There's the whole Mulroney-Trudeau 'war' in a nutshell. An inner Quebec argument/debate already decades old that consumed the entire country. Yes, Trudeau is a flawed man, and a flawed leader just as Mulroney, but Trudeau, as leader, would never concede an inch to separatistes. Mulroney used them to get elected. Teh Brian's famously quoted as saying he was 'rolling the dice' with the Meech lake Accord. May I suggest that current and future PMs do not shoot craps with our country?

As for the personal attacks by Mulroney on Trudeau these past two days? I won't draw any more attention to them other than to say that the comments were worthy of being spoken only by someone who is a classless pig. But that's Brian, polarizing the Canadian public when it's totally unnecessary, for no other reason than petty vindictiveness and insecurity, and more to the point unbecoming of an elder statesman and past Prime Minister.

Don't get me wrong. Mulroney has some great achievements - the Acid Rain pact with the United States, and his lead role in fighting against South African apartheid among them. He's not entirely to be reviled, just mostly. Dan Leger, writing in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald has a roundup very close to my own assessment.  

So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at the vitriolic tone in parts of Brian Mulroney’s massive Memoirs, being released today. It’s true to form for this poorly understood politico.

I can’t claim to know the man well, but I covered his political career on and off for many years. During that time, I caught glimpses of the warm, funny and generous Mulroney so admired by his circle of pals. I also saw the bare-knuckled street fighter who battled his way to 24 Sussex Drive.

Mulroney rubs many people the wrong way, yet seems always to be seeking approval. He wants to be liked, even though he claimed to love being the tough guy taking heat for unpopular but necessary measures, like the GST.

Most people don’t see Mulroney the family man and idealistic politician. They remember the Gucci shoes and kissing up to Ronald Reagan.

They don’t see the would-be nation-builder who made a historic overture to Quebec. Most remember a divisive figure whose Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords almost shattered the country.

Like so many politicians who have experienced both triumph and defeat, Mulroney rarely takes the fall for his failures. Treachery, disloyalty and enemies are always more to blame.

snip.. 

Trudeau didn’t care what people thought of him, and didn’t have to. He was rich. He had interests outside politics. He didn’t have a clue about how the economy worked, perhaps because he never had to work in it.

Mulroney, by contrast, always had to strive and overachieve. He didn’t grow up among the idle rich. He struggled to get through university, first at working-class St. Francis Xavier, then briefly at Dalhousie, then at Laval law school.

Where the young Trudeau composed political tracts and hobnobbed with wealthy intellectuals, the youthful Mulroney organized riding meetings and trooped off to Tory conventions. Trudeau travelled in a tiny circle of trusted confidants. Mulroney networked his way to the top.

Trudeau revelled in irony and his speeches were miracles of cold rationality. Mulroney’s best orations were tub-thumpers and rallying cries, full of over-the-top rhetoric and exaggeration, but often funny and emotional.

Trudeau succeeded without the slightest effort. Mulroney was always the guy trying a little too hard to be cool.

And we shouldn't be surprised by any of that as well. Despite the apocryphal central 'myth' of his Baie-Comeau boyhood, he was always that way.