I always felt that Mulroney was unfairly demonized compared to other PM's. Obviously he wasn't perfect, nobody is, especially politicians, but he was a lot more genuine than what we have these days. He did a lot of good during his time as PM, to me that massively overshadowed his deficiencies. His international work on Apartheid, the ozone layer and acid rain were actual accomplishments not just political BS with no substance or unfulfilled promises.
Many people today only know Mulroney or Trudeau Sr. by what they have been told by their parents/family or what they see in historical media. I'm not ancient but I'm old enough to remember the late 70's, early 80's. Mulroney inherited an absolute disaster from Pierre Trudeau, massive debt & deficit, out of control spending, stagflation, out of control interest rates and a divided country where regions hated each other. If you think I'm being dramatic imagine interest rates being 20+%. People were literally walking away from their homes. The economy was an absolute disaster and Quebec wanted to separate.
Mulroney put into place the tools to fix the economy (mainly GST & Free trade), tried restrain spending and grow the country out of crisis rather than slash social spending. By the time he was done the government was running a operational surplus but was still running huge deficits mainly because of interest payments on the debt. Ironically he was turfed from government and replaced by the Liberals who won government on campaign promises to scrap the GST and Free Trade and to boost spending. Once they got in they completely reversed course, kept all of Mulroney's fiscal policies and massively slashed social spending. On the Quebec front Mulroney tried twice to bring Quebec into the constitution but was unsuccessful, if you look deep into that Chretien was a key player in sabotaging those efforts.
Today Mulroney is seen as a villain and Chretien is seen as a hero. This is bizarre to me because the same people who love Chretien now say that only the Liberals can protect social spending and that the Conservatives will make massive cuts to Health Care, Education, etc. As far as corruption goes Chretien was a decent PM on fiscal and foreign policy but he took corruption to a new level and divided the country even further (though that might look tame compared to what we have now). Mulroney certainly had some scandals too as does every long term majority government, he deserved to get turfed in the end, the Conservative party paid a huge price losing almost every seat.
In the end Mulroney was a good PM who guided this country through very challenging times and left the country better off then when he took power. I'll leave it to others as to whether history has repeated and whoever takes over from the current Trudeau will face many of the same problems that his father left in his wake.
RIP Brian, many Canadians think you were a good PM and a better man.
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