None for the Ages

Born in 1939 in a small northeastern Quebec resource town, Mulroney grew up in a Catholic family led by a patriarch who worked extra jobs to fund his six children’s educations. He came of age in an environment where street smarts were paramount, went off to school in New Brunswick at age fourteen, then entered St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia at sixteen, becoming a champion debater and getting heavily involved in student politics.

In stark contrast to Trudeau’s, Mulroney’s early life seems to have been largely unmarked by philosophical inquiry. His reasons for joining the Progressive Conservative Party, after being petitioned by a student group, were reactive rather than thoughtful: “I had little interest in politics at the time,” he writes, “but I was flattered to be asked, and attracted not so much by the PC ideology — although I found it compatible with my own views — but by the challenges that membership would represent.”

The same tendencies marked his tenure as prime minister. His description of himself ensconced before a television at 24 Sussex as he watched images of the Ethiopian famine is untainted by pretense. “I was shocked by what I saw coming through my television,” he recounts. “A calamity was unfolding before our very eyes, children were dying in a ravaged country and nothing was happening to stop it.” Soon after Mulroney saw the reports, Joe Clark was on his way to Africa, the first foreign minister from the West to land in Ethiopia. This was the first part of the Mulroney formula: encounter a political problem, be affected by it, and then respond, fast. Then, once finished, argue loudly and at length that you’ve done the right thing — even when you haven’t.

Mulroney’s bullheaded ambition led him to confront everything from constitutional reform to acid rain, apartheid, free trade, and the creation of the gst. In doing so, he allowed Canada to confront a difficult moment in history. Newman captures the interplay beautifully:

He came to power at a time when Canadians were searching for emotional anchorage in an increasingly alien, fast-paced, technological world gone global . . . Mulroney’s political agenda was set by the winds — or, more precisely, by the hurricanes — of change. He might have been expected to escape those social and economic upheavals by hunkering down and doing as little as possible. Instead, he behaved like an obsessive beekeeper, patrolling the buzzing apiary that Canada had become, punching holes into every hive he could find.

What makes Mulroney such a fascinating figure is that his approach seemed to arise not just from a desire to govern well, but from deep inner drives that carried with them a tragic flaw — the same flaw that led him to speak so incautiously and at such length with a journalist’s tape recorder running. Again, Newman grasps this: “Lacking internal validation,” he writes, Mulroney “spent a lifetime in search of himself.” Canada, he need not have added, was along for the ride. Mulroney was Irish Catholic, to be sure, but nevertheless Duddy Kravitz, prime minister.

In being that character, however — in having the audacity to rain blows upon beehives — Mulroney may have prepared the country for the even more alien challenges that lay ahead. “Instead of pretending that the twentieth century belonged to Canada,” Newman writes, “he made sure that Canada would belong to the twenty-first.” It is he who haunts us still.

Which brings us, accelerating past the Campbell nanogovernment and the deficit busting and Trudeauist social politicking of the Chrétien and Martin years, to our current moment and our current prime minister.

Lost amid the standard-issue conservatism we’ve experienced in the past few years is Stephen Harper’s former role as a tub-thumping, inspirational figure in the early years of the Reform Party. William Johnson, in his 2005 book, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, expends considerable effort arguing that Harper and Trudeau were in this sense parallel spirits. “Each was drawn to politics by a sense of mission,” he writes. “If Quebec had not threatened Canada’s existence after 1960, Pierre Trudeau would never have become prime minister. If Alberta had not been treated with flagrant injustice from 1973 to the present, if Canada had not been threatened with disaster by spendthrift politicians and Quebec nationalists, Stephen Harper would never have become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.”

Harper’s appeal in the years since Reform’s rise has laid in the traditional comfort of conservatism: cut taxes, fight wars, manage well, and cover genitals, and all will be fine. That Johnson describes the prime minister’s philosophy as having Hegelian underpinnings seems somewhat at odds with his persona as a pure political animal, genus Conservativis. At the time of Reform’s rise, Johnson writes, Harper “saw the last two centuries in the Western world as a constant tension between freedom and constraint, with freedom as the creative, liberating, and dynamic factor; political constraint was inhibiting, stultifying . . . In the contemporary world, the tension was on the one hand between statism and big government, and the enhancement of the private sector on the other.”

The Harper government’s strict control of information coming from the pmo, and its move to allow a form of censorship of the film industry, indicate a certain devolution in this view — one playing to the perception that he possesses, in Newman’s derisive phrase, “the finest medieval mind of the Commons.” Some of Harper’s other policies further suggest a resistance to the day (never mind the historical cause of liberty): economically ineffectual cuts to the gst as we face recession; global warming roadblocks rather than green initiatives as we stare down ecological disaster; acquiescence on Guantánamo as we try to neuter extremism at home and abroad.

A Macdonald, Trudeau, or Mulroney he may not be, but Harper is poised to at least hold the line in the next election. And what does this say about us? That we’re revising our aspirations as a nation? That we’re hunkering down against the upheavals of our time? Perhaps, in the end, that we’re simply lacking for options. This is one of the harsher truths of history: it doesn’t throw forth the right leader on demand, nor even one who tempts us to believe otherwise. For every Churchill, there is a Bush Jr.; for every Obama, a Clinton or McCain; and for every Trudeau, a Stanfield who might have won but for a few fumbles. “What is the expression which the age demands? ” Cohen asked. “The age,” he concluded, “demands no expression whatever.”