Mulroney was right

We were had.

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s memoirs are making a splash, particularly the sections panning the almost deified late Pierre Trudeau.

Mulroney sees Trudeau’s work in poleaxing the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords to bring Quebec into the constitution.

Oddly enough, the situation was all but ended in recent years by blue Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, who merely acknowledged “asymmetrical federalism.”

Mulroney and Martin were right.

What I can’t get over is people blaming Mulroney for being angry with Trudeau. They blame him for attacking the dead. Trudeau’s foibles are far from dead.

If what happened in Montreal in December 2006 - and what had brought it about - hadn’t transpired, possibly Mulroney could be seen at fault.

The Liberal Party, with so much to atone for, sprang right back to its ways. A fourth-place leadership candidate – surprise, the one most identified with the Trudeau-Chrétien brand – came out on top.

Off the tracks in 1968, the party fumbled through the 1970s under Trudeau’s gadfly leadership. Expensive and wasteful social and economic experiments, anti-Americanism, anti-British snits marked the next 16 years. The bureaucracy was bloated, the country centralized and the military reduced and bureaucratized and politicized. The half-completed Charter of Rights and Freedoms remains without its responsibilities aspect.

As for war service, I can’t believe people think so little of Second World War veterans to take jibes at Mulroney for pointing out Trudeau’s moral failure on that issue. Trudeau just didn’t oppose conscription. It was much deeper.

Some say Mulroney should have brought the issue forth when Trudeau was alive. The matter did come up, raised in Parliament by former Bomber Command crewman then Tory deputy prime minister Eric Neilsen. A small splash in the Ottawa media.

Liberals tried to reform themselves with John Turner and again with Paul Martin. Certain elements wouldn’t let go.

Meanwhile, Mulroney’s legacy remains intact. What rejection of Meech and Charlottetown failed to do in realistic federalism, Martin and Harper’s realism - for all intents and purposes - brought about.

Canada is again taking a bold place in the world, as Mulroney had with the Commonwealth – particularly on South Africa. We’re not afraid to look the Americans in the eye.

Ironically, the prime minister who really made few enemies and could well be seen as the most popular of the latter half of the 20th Century was the victim of both Trudeau and Mulroney. Former Kings-Hants MP Joe Clark picked himself up after his government’s 1980 defeat and his party’s rejection of his leadership and rebuilt himself into a top-notch servant of the country, trusted by just about all. Except, perhaps, radical conservatives.