Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Brian Mulroney speaks to delegates at an informal gathering in a hotel suite in Ottawa, ON Feb. 18, 1976.
Special Coverage: Death of former PM Brian MulroneyWatch streaming coverage from CBC News Network on the passing of Canada's 18th prime minister.Brian Mulroney — who, as Canada's 18th prime minister, steered the country through a tumultuous period in national and world affairs but left office deeply unpopular — has died. He was 84.
Mulroney was a gifted public speaker and a skilled politician. As prime minister, he brokered a free trade deal with the U.S. and pushed for constitutional reforms to secure Quebec's signature on Canada's supreme law — an effort that ultimately failed. 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, N.S.
With the Liberals faltering in the polls, Mulroney led the PCs to a majority victory in the 1984 campaign — one of the largest election landslides in Canadian history. While Pierre Elliott Trudeau had been replaced by John Turner as Liberal leader by the time the 1984 campaign began, the election was widely seen as a referendum on Trudeau's sometimes turbulent time in office.
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan walk past a line of Royal Canadian Mounted Police March 17, 1985 at the Quebec City airport. U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, seated in the centre, with her Mexican and Canadian counterparts, as well as all three countries' leaders, as they sign the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992.
Mulroney's first landslide majority win — the PCs captured 211 of 282 seats in the Commons in the 1984 vote — gave him the leeway to make fundamental reforms to the Canadian state. Under Mulroney's leadership, dozens of Crown corporations were sold to private interests, including Air Canada. He also scrapped Trudeau's much-maligned National Energy Program, a decision welcomed by many westerners.
In 1981-82, the separatist Quebec government led by René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois refused to sign Trudeau's repatriated Constitution Act, fearing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would centralize power in Ottawa and dilute provincial influence. Lucien Bouchard was persuaded by his good friend at the time, then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, to run for office in 1988. Mulroney's once-faithful cabinet minister quit the Progressive Conservative government over the failure of the Meech Lake Accord to found the Bloc Quebecois.
Another Mulroney-led attempt at constitutional reform, the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, was later defeated in a national referendum.Amid the constitutional fracas and after the introduction of the deeply unpopular Goods and Services Tax , Mulroney's popularity declined dramatically. He posted record-low approval ratings at the end of his second term.
South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela raises his arms as he is acknowledged by the Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and other members of Parliament in Ottawa, June 18, 1990.
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