Are Canadians unfairly judging Brian Mulroney?

When Canadians judge Brian Mulroney as Prime Minister, many of them look at his dealings with Schrieber and forget about what he actually did as Prime Minister and how his policies have in the long run actually benefited Canada.

1. The GST - The reason why his government was so despised from 1991-1993, the GST was meant to replaced the MST, which put Canadian manufacturers in a disadvantage, and shift the cost over to the consumers who actually buy the goods. It was to be used as a source of revenue to help eliminate the budget deficit, and recent GST cuts by Steve Harper and his far right neocon team have almost put us back into deficit.

2. Meech and Charlottetown accord- though they failed, these accords were made to put Quebec in the Canadian confederation and help strengthen the nations ties. In the case of Charlottetown, it helped avoid a referendum (or rather postpone until 1995) which would've saw a Yes victory for sure based on the polls of 1992.

3. Free Trade and NAFTA: the trade deals with other North American nations have created, not cut, jobs (American and Mexican companies expanding into Canada) and helped Canadian companies become more competitive by expanding into other North American markets. Our economy has been recession-free ever since NAFTA was implemented in 1993, and has been growing strong.

4. Brian Mulroney has been named recently the greenest PM and introduced legislation to reduce acide rain in 1991.

5. Mulroney played a major role in stopping apartheid in South Africa, by working with other commonwealth leaders and imposing sanctions on South Africa.

6., His government continually funded equal opportunity programs for different types of disadvantaged people, ranging from the disabled, to women, to the sick.

Most certainly, not shabby for a Prime Minsiter whom 90% of Canadians want hanged for no apparent reason other than that he was accused (nothing is proven) of taking money from Schrieber.

Schrieber? Who gives a shit about Shcrieber?
Mulroney was the most disrupting, anti-democratic apologist this country ever had as a PM, right down to his Basil Fawlty exit from politics

er, koizumi are you forgetting something -namely your table manners. Mulroney ran huge deficits and scared the pants off of people. the debt is still there. it's true it was Trudeau's deficit but Mulroney was hired to do something and he didn't.

FTA and the gutting of Canada's manufacturing base as well as exporting over 30,000 high skilled jobs and the loss of thousands of Canadian business from Laura Secord, the Bay, Eatons and Gulf, Irish eyes are smiling summit, selling out the military from subs to Helos, GST that he ran an election promising he would not bring it in and then it's the first thing he did when sworn in, Air India sweeping the largest air disaster under the rug that ends up with mass murders running free, zero inflation policy that stalled our economy while the rest of the world laughed at us, record deficits and the cod collapse. I could go on for days but in his defence he did do a decent stand with acid rain. For that he did do the right thing at least.

Mulroney would have fucked us over to the US if he could have..he was the worst absolute worst PM this country ever had.. he was so far up Ron Reagan's ass he could have looked out his mouth,.. much the same as Harper and Bush now... our worst economic years was his second run at office..

Lets not forget a few of the reasons why he had the worst deficits on record. With unemployment way up and fighting a recession people were screaming for jobs. He responded but in the worst way. He provided alot of low paying jobs with no lasting impact, jobs like grass cutting and driveway shovelling. Multiple low paying jobs had little impact even though he was trying.

Economics dictate that if you must create jobs using tax payer money then they must provide lasting effects such as building infrastructure or developing industry.

He didn't. He raised spending when he should have cut it.

Dig deep enough and you can find positives/negatives on every PM. Mulroney was one of the worst in recent memory. He helped alienate the West and thereby the creation of the Reform Party. His GST, which was supposed to be revenue neutral, became one of the biggest tax collection tools in the federal budget. Even worse, he shifted the tax from corporations to individuals. He screwed over the CF by selling vital equipment and getting lots of people to accept early retirement. I could go on and on...

Of course, not all was bad. he tried to get Quebec back into the fold with the ech Lake and Charlottetown accords. The CF made him look good at Oka and in the Gulf.

In Brian's case, the negatives far outwiegh the positives.

Mulroney was OK. His biggest flaw was that he had a bad tendency to get spooked by the CBC/Globe and retreat from implementing policies that would have rolled back the worst of Trudeau's Utopia. He never learned the lesson from Margaret Thatcher that the proles were going to hate him anyway so he might as well have gone a lot farther than he did just to get them to hate him more. He ended up worrying far more about what was p.c. than he did about what was PC. I'd rate him a failure unfortunately only because I regard him as not having the tenacity to wield power more effectively and decisively. With 212 seats from his first election he should have just told all the liberal and lefty detractors to fuck off and forged ahead. But he didn't and it's all history now.

Whatever his flaws were he was still about a million times better as PM than that fuck-faced little crook from Shawinigan ever was.