Brian Mulroney and the gift of hope

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2024 (579 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My voter identification card was stuck to an avocado-green fridge behind a thick magnet that also held milk coupons from Healthy Mother, Healthy Baby and information about a Lamaze class.

I cranked open a tin of chicken soup, famished after a full day of school where I scrambled to finish Grade 11 at the adult basic education centre before my due date, and began spooning it into my mouth. It was election day, Nov. 21, 1988, and after dinner I would head out to cast a ballot for the very first time.

Like most people, I held a variety of disbeliefs about life back then. Mine were these: my vote mattered; society was in a continuous state of improvement; and if I kept trudging along, the road ahead would lead somewhere better.

Apart from these disbeliefs, I didn’t have much else going for me. I was going through a period in life when pretty much anyone who saw me would have assumed I was doomed. I was 18, seven months pregnant, single and on welfare, untethered to the world in any meaningful way.

Desperate for some tethering during that long, pregnant autumn of 1988, my ear hooked onto words spoken by a charismatic Brian Mulroney. I don’t remember exactly what the leader of the Progressive Conservative party said — underscoring a truism that people rarely remember the things you say but will always remember how you made them feel — and watching him from my black-and-white television set inside the 400-square-foot basement suite I rented with the $300 allotted by welfare, I felt hopeful.

Campaign 2000 and its pledge to end child poverty by the year 2000 hadn’t officially begun yet, but I was already primed for belief in nebulous pledges and platitudes about leaving no child left unfed. As many others across the country were casting ballots for or against the North American Free Trade Agreement, I entered the voting booth to end child poverty. Specifically, my own — and that of my unborn baby. I believed that if that well-spoken man I’d seen on television had my back with a commitment to building a better future, then maybe I had a shot after all.

History now tells us that the Mulroney government didn’t end child poverty. In fact, you could look back and point at any number of disappointments and broken promises by him, and subsequently, all politicians and governments thereafter, and blame them for their failures and false beliefs. Despite treaties and pledges, child poverty didn’t end by the year 2000, and by all measure, it’s steadily gotten worse. Yet no one told me that back then. I moved onward with a pocketful of belief, some bus tokens, and a few milk coupons.

Hope is a power that can drive us forward, pulling us out of bed and making us carry on despite even the worst of circumstances. Numerous studies tell us about the immeasurable and life-changing attributes of optimism, and that when we believe things can get better, they often do.

That’s not to say governments don’t have to step up and do more to end child poverty. They absolutely do. Yet as I clutched that voter card and made my way inside the election booth in 1988, I felt confident in Brian Mulroney, a polarizing figure in Canadian politics who, some would say, even made things worse for people like me. Yet he offered something rarely given anymore in these grouchy days of political decay and pessimism: hope.

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Hope that, in the end, I wielded like a scythe in harvesting a better tomorrow, until many tomorrows later, I landed in middle-class suburbia with enough money to feed, clothe, and send my kids to university and launch my own political career. Unsurprisingly, it was also under a progressive conservative banner.

I imagine I still would’ve succeeded even if it weren’t for that balmy hope peddled back then. Deep down, while casting a ballot for Mulroney, I knew he wouldn’t end my poverty, just as I knew no government would. I was voting as much for myself as anyone else. Turns out, Mulroney’s win in 1988 became my win, too.

Optimism — once a triumphant part of the Canadian spirit — seems lagging these days as we’re bombarded with bleak messages of our country being broken and our leaders being corrupt. Somewhere along the line some of us have forgotten that hope can become a powerful antidote. As tributes pour in for Brian Mulroney who died on Feb. 29, a rare day for a rare leader, I’m grateful for the reminder of how he offered something so rare and much needed to my younger self all those years ago.

Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after serving 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays.

rochelle@rochellesquires.ca