Brian Mulroney: a real mensch

Opinion

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This article was published 02/03/2024 (590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“When my brother died, Brian Mulroney was the first political leader to call, as he was when I was elected premier in 1990, when I was defeated, and at so many other moments.” — Bob Rae, Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations.

Bob Rae was no fan of conservatism. As a young NDP MP, he regularly roasted then-prime minister Brian Mulroney.

But in 1987, Bob’s brother David had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Bob donated bone marrow to his young sibling, in a desperate attempt to save his life, but David died two years later. He was only 32.

Many of us have had those “screw cancer” moments, when we have watched a loved one succumb. Bob Rae is a member of the club. Nobody forgets who offers the first condolences when you join.

The first to call a grieving Bob Rae was Brian Mulroney. On that day, Mulroney wasn’t Rae’s partisan political opponent. He was a Canadian elder and statesman.

On that day he wasn’t the just the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney. He was what Bob Rae’s Jewish in-laws called a “mensch.” The Brian Mulroney most Canadians never saw, was on the phone all the time, connecting with real people.

One of my very best friends texted me Thursday when the bad news broke that Mulroney had died. We got together for dinner that evening. He offered many personal memories of the former prime minister. But the one that clearly had a permanent place in his mind was the day his dad suffered a heart attack. The first person to call was Brian Mulroney.

One of the people in public life I have soft spot for is someone I will always think of as a brilliant young man from Newfoundland.

Long before he became a Liberal cabinet minister, he was a host of CTV’s Canada AM. Seamus O’Reagen had me on regularly. Several years after being in the national media chair, he was in a different chair, a member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal caucus.

Seamus was dealing with some personal issues that might have destroyed others. But he conquered them with fierce determination and the help of those who reached out to him. One of them was Brian Mulroney.

“At a dark point in my life, he called. I’ll never forget it. His compassion is something I could never repay. There are thousands of people who can say the same today, thousands who are remembering his quiet kindness, his loyalty, his steel.”

Stephen Harper never had a close personal relationship with Brian Mulroney. So his message stuck to the political record. “Prime Minister Mulroney stood for freedom and democracy on the world stage, in his principled opposition to apartheid in South Africa, his enduring support for Israel, and his advocacy of independence for Ukraine and the other European nations long under the yoke of Soviet communism.”

I voted for Mulroney both times he was on offer. I voted for him, while living in St. James in 1984 — Fort Garry in ‘88. He was the last Conservative prime minister I voted for where the word “grudgingly” didn’t describe my feelings at the ballot box.

He wasn’t a raging conservative with a chip on the shoulder, heavier than the Rock of Gibraltar. His presence never darkened a room. He lit it up like a Christmas tree.

While he made many excellent speeches in Canada, it was one he delivered in the U.S. that I will never forget. It was the eulogy Nancy Reagan asked Mulroney to deliver for her late husband 20 years ago.

The two greatest speeches on U.S. soil by foreign statesmen were one delivered by Winston Churchill in 1941 to a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the other was Brian Mulroney’s eulogy at the Washington Cathedral at the State Funeral for Ronald Reagan.

“Some in the West, during the early 1980s, believed communism and democracy were equally valid and viable. This was the school of moral equivalence. In contrast, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet communism as a menace to be confronted in the genuine belief that its squalid underpinnings would fall swiftly to the gathering winds of freedom provided, as he said, that NATO and the industrialized democracies stood firm and united. They did. And we know now who was right.”

I don’t know who all the speakers will be at Brian Mulroney’s funeral.

Ronald Reagan won’t be available. But if he were, I have maximum confidence that he would say that liberty and democracy worldwide had no better friend than Martin Brian Mulroney.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com