Brian Mulroney's long bet on history paid off

On the day he announced his intention to resign as prime minister after nearly nine years in office, Brian Mulroney appealed to the verdict of future generations.

"It will now be up to history to place a definitive judgment on our efforts and our legacy," he said.

Thirty years later, in one of his last public speeches, Mulroney passed his own verdict on his political history — a judgment that Justin Trudeau, another beleaguered prime minister now nearly nine years in office, quoted in the House of Commons last week to mark Mulroney's passing:

"I have learned over the years that history is unconcerned with the trivia and the trash of rumours and gossip floating around Parliament Hill," Mulroney said. "History is only concerned with the big ticket items that have shaped the future of Canada."

In 1993, Mulroney was perhaps compelled to appeal to distant opinion — because the opinions of the moment were so often unforgiving. But Mulroney, who was called on to eulogize two American presidents, surely came to know as well as anyone what history remembers and why, particularly at moments such as these.

By the time he resigned, his government had endured its share of controversies (tunagate, guccigate, various other scandals barely remembered now). Two of his attempts at constitutional reform had ended in failure — the latter was defeated in a national referendum. The economy had gone into recession for two years, his landmark trade deal was viewed with skepticism by many and he had implemented a highly unpopular new tax, the GST.

On the day he announced his intention to step aside, Mulroney's office released a 34-page list of his government's accomplishments. The nation was not in a mood to read it.

"Mulroney really had no option but to resign," Angus Reid, the pollster, wrote at the time. "Over the last year he has set new polling records for almost every measure of public disapproval and resentment."

Reid said the Progressive Conservatives now had one primary task — "to lock the ghost of Brian Mulroney away in a closet and throw away the key."

In that moment, Reid's analysis may have been astute. But the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was still shattered in the election that followed, winning just two seats — less than a decade after Mulroney led the party to 211 seats and 50 per cent of the popular vote in the 1984 election. Into the breach came the populist Reform Party and the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

In a survey of historians published in 2016, Mulroney was ranked eighth among Canada's 23 prime ministers. The survey was conducted just a handful of years after the Oliphant commission and the detailed scoring suggests the questions about Mulroney's personal conduct were still hanging heavy on his legacy — on "personal integrity," historians rated Mulroney even lower than John A. Macdonald.

If anything, that seems disrespectful to John A., who deserves to be remembered as the author of the first and greatest scandal in Canadian political history. (Among the prime ministers who served at least four years, Alexander Mackenzie, our largely forgotten second prime minister, was tied for the highest score on personal integrity — which perhaps suggests that a reputation for personal integrity only counts for so much.)

But Mulroney's highest mark was received in the category of "leaving a significant policy legacy." And it's on that score that most observers and contemporaries have been remembering him over the past three weeks.

"He was prime minister and he would make it count," Jean Charest, a cabinet minister under Mulroney, told his former boss's state funeral on Saturday, recalling Mulroney's arrival in high office.