‘On the right side of history’

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This article was published 05/06/2018 (2836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A former prime minister and a retired news anchor entertained 420 tuxedoed and gown-clad guests at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Monday night.

Peter Mansbridge’s Q&A with Brian Mulroney largely focused on why the former PC PM made it his government’s top priority in foreign affairs to help end apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela. Mulroney was first minister from 1984 to 1993.

“It wasn’t always perfect,” Mulroney said flatly of his time in government, eliciting some laughs from the crowd.

But “Canada was prepared to terminate its relationship with South Africa” unless those aforementioned missions were accomplished, Mulroney said.

Mulroney’s anti-apartheid activism began just months after he was elected prime minister in 1984 and the crusade wasn’t popular among his allies in British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

Mulroney told the audience about early talks he had with Thatcher, who was vehemently against Mandela’s release.

“What you don’t understand is that Mandela is a communist and a terrorist and that’s why he’s in there,” Mulroney recalled Thatcher saying. “And I said, ‘Margaret, how do you know that? Have you talked to him lately?’” (The response took the British PM aback since it was a move she hadn’t even considered, Mulroney said.)

Mulroney pressed on regardless of blowback from his political allies.

“I’m going to place my country, Canada, on the right side of history,” he recalled saying.

The Canadian government used its influence to pressure other countries in the G-7, at the United Nations, the Commonwealth, La Francophonie and the Organization of American States to decry apartheid and advocate for Mandela’s freedom.

The pressure included imposing sanctions on South Africa, blocking everything from flights to the country, to soccer matches between international teams.

Mandela spent 27 years of a proposed life sentence in prison for conspiring against the state. He famously said during his trial: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Just four months after his release from prison — due to pressures at home and abroad on the South African government to concede his release — Mandela visited Canada and thanked Mulroney for his efforts.

“Canada is an important presence in much of what we have achieved, and in what we are building,” Mandela told a joint committee of Parliament in 1998.

“Since our democratic elections, our relationship with Canada has entered a new and vibrant phase, one that is growing from strength to strength. In drawing up our new democratic constitution we drew deeply on Canadian experience.”

Mandela died on December 5, 2013. He was 95.

Mulroney left politics in 1993, turning over his office to the first (and only) female prime minister in Canada’s history, Kim Campbell. He hasn’t shied away from the public spotlight however, continuing to work in law and act as chair of the board for media mega-company Quebecor Inc.

While at the museum, Mulroney toured the new Mandela: Struggle for Freedom exhibit, which was the impetus for him being in town.

“It’s exceptional… a monument for Winnipeg,” Mulroney said.

The exhibit chronicles the fight to end discrimination in South Africa taken up by the former political prisoner and later president of that country. It officially opens later this week.

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu