The Secret Mulroney Tapes

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Brian Mulroney’s refusal to provide certain materials persuaded Peter
Newman to publish the tapes of his interviews with Mulroney rather than
write a monograph, and, except in his concluding paragraphs, Newman
portrays Mulroney as a failure. Twelve of Mulroney’s cabinet ministers
resigned in disgrace, and the rejections of Meech Lake and the
Charlottetown Accord made a bad situation worse. Legislation to create a
national daycare system died on the Order Paper with the dissolution of
Parliament for the 1988 election. In 1991, when the Cold War ended,
Mulroney could not even persuade his friend the first President Bush to
support a disarmament conference. Newman argues convincingly that free
trade created unemployment and threatened Canadian survival. Mulroney
transformed his friend Lucien Bouchard from obscurity into a household
name. Patronage was rampant, and the debt grew. Through Mulroney’s
taxation policies, the rich became richer, the poor poorer. Newman
credits Mulroney with winning Canadian membership in the G–7 in 1986,
but this had happened a decade earlier, under Trudeau.

Newman reveals Mulroney as profane, vulgar, greedy, vain, and
unscrupulous. Mulroney demonstrates contempt for most of his colleagues
and for Trudeau, to whom Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs give greater
prominence than Mulroney admits. He condemns Trudeau for “excluding”
Quebec from the 1982 constitutional accord but ignores the fact that
Quebec then had a separatist government. Mulroney notes that President
Reagan, whom he admired, invaded Grenada without consulting Trudeau but
does not hint that the invasion was of dubious legality. Mulroney was so
fond of perks that when he was in Moscow in 1989, he waited 10 minutes
for a limousine rather than walk 200 metres to a ceremony promoting
“exercise and physical fitness.” His methods for removing Joe Clark
from the Conservative leadership “would have made the IRA proud.”
Without any explanation, Mulroney claimed responsibility as one of the
three world leaders most responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Five days after declaring he would lead his party through a fourth
election, Mulroney resigned.

The book includes Newman’s commentary (often humorous), excerpts from
taped conversations of Mulroney’s friends and foes, and quotations
from Mulroney.