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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS - Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila Mulroney in 1984.Canadians loved him: In 1984, they handed the youthful charmer a blank cheque and the largest majority mandate in history so he could change the country.
But in 2008, Mulroney faced an embarrassing public grilling before a public inquiry charged with looking into his relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian businessman with ties to the Airbus file who eventually ended up in a German jail for tax evasion. The town mill was American-owned. Mulroney was raised on the notion that American investment meant jobs for his father and the other families in Baie-Comeau. He would go on to ease restrictions on American investment in Canada.
The 17-year-old student from Quebec and the 61-year-old Prairie populist would go on to form an unusual friendship that the young Mulroney would flaunt before his amazed chums by gathering them in a room and reaching the Chief on the telephone. In 1972, the year he became a partner in the firm, he met a bikini-clad Mila Pivnicki by the pool at the Mount Royal Tennis Club. She was 14 years his junior. Eventually, she would become his wife, his most trusted adviser and among the Conservative party’s most effective campaigners. The couple would have four children.
Conrad Black, a friend for decades, wrote of Mulroney: “His knowledge of how to get ahead was geometrically greater than any notion he had of what to do when he reached his destination.” Publicly, Mulroney pledged loyalty to Clark. Privately, his friends in the party worked feverishly to undermine him and force a leadership review.
Mulroney won the convention primarily on his promise to open the door to the Tories in Quebec. That door had been bolted shut to Conservatives with one exception since Louis Riel was hanged a century earlier. The bilingual Mulroney did what the unilingual Diefenbaker could not: On Nov. 21, 1988, he won a second majority mandate after a hard-fought election on free trade with the United States.His honeymoon with the Canadian public actually lasted less than a year after his 1984 win.
He electrified voters during the 1984 election debate with his attack on John Turner and the Liberal party’s history of patronage. But he wasted little time after his election in giving his old friends Senate seats and other plum posts. “It’s terrific until the elephant twitches, and if it ever rolls over, you’re a dead man,” Mulroney said.
The whole country was surprised when their meeting produced the Meech Lake accord. The package included recognition of Quebec as a distinct society and gave all provinces a greater say in the appointment of senators and justices of the Supreme Court of Canada. Lucien Bouchard, his best friend for almost 30 years and the man Mulroney brought into politics and his cabinet, turned his back on the prime minister and his party over the changes.
Two years later, he would achieve consensus on an even broader constitutional deal — the Charlottetown agreement. Quebec would still be recognized as a distinct society, but natives won the right to govern themselves. The Senate was to be revamped so that each province would be represented equally by elected senators.Free trade fundamentally restructured the country’s economic relationship with the United States and forced Canadian business to make painful adjustments.