I was holding off on this until all the hagiographies were done. While he died on Leap Day, the ass-kissing class of people that control our media wanted almost a full month of praising this fucking piece of shit asshole, and the state funeral wasn't until March 23.
It's fucking mindboggling. All this bullshit about the great 18th Prime Minister of Canada and how wonderful he was and whatnot. Dude was garbage. He managed to hoodwink people through his first term in office well enough to get a second majority - but holy shit did he fail with it. So fucking hard. Arguably the single worst prime minister in Canada's entire history.
He was leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, so I think it's fair to judge his performance based on the fortunes of the party he lead. The conservative party in Canada has gone through multiple names and iterations over time, and the PCs came to be known as such in 1942. And Mulroney managed to kill the brand dead. The conservative party is now the Conservative Party of Canada - the Progressive Conservatives are gone.
In 1988, Mulroney managed to lead the PCs to a majority government with 43% of the vote. 169 seats, which would shrink to 156 as the 1993 election drew closer. This was a drop from the 1984 election which was a backlash to the complacent too-long-in-power Liberals. And really - that's all it was. The "natural governing party of Canada" had overstayed their welcome (having held government for something like two decades before the election) and Mulroney was just in the right place at the right time to be made Prime Minister. And then he managed to stay relatively popular for one term - then fucked up everything so badly that it's hard to actually understand the damage he did.
158 seats going into the 1993 election. How did they do? They elected Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne. Two seats. Two. You could count them on your thumbs.
The collapse of the conservatives allowed the establishment of not one - but two new political parties. Mulroney's complete alienation of the Canadian electorate created a vacuum into which Preston Manning's Reform Party stepped in - picking up 52 seats. Also, Mulroney's hubristic delusions of being the saviour of Canada's constitution and resolving the Quebec issue was so badly played that a Quebec sovereigntist party, the Bloc Quebecois, became the official opposition with 54 seats. I just want to reiterate this - Mulroney's second term as PM was so bad that Canadians fucking elected a secessionist party to be the official opposition. Just fucking nuts.
It was lasting damage too. The PCs stayed at 2 seats in the 1997 election. They would flounder for a bit, trying to hold on to their heritage as Canada's actual conservative party, but the Alberta rednecks had cemented themselves as the viable conservative party. Peter MacKay signed the death warrant when he reneged on his promise not to merge the party with the social conservatives from out west and that was the end of it.
Mulroney himself though? Did not stick around to face the music. Even with a majority, he still had to call an election in 1993 - so he bailed, announcing his resignation in February and handing the party over to Kim Campbell in June. The election was in September - so she had three months to convince the country that the party was different - and basically nobody knew who the hell she was.
So he fucked shit up worse than any Canadian politician ever. He lucked into a majority resulting from a once in a lifetime backlash to the Liberals and then managed to turn that into such hatred and vehemence of the opposition party that it actually collapsed out of existence.
He sucked shit. And this is all without mentioning his terrible policies or the fucking manilla envelopes stuffed full of thousand dollar bills. The guy was a corrupt traitor and Canada actually recognized it and killed his entire political party for it - and yet people have been singing his praises for weeks. And that's the story of our 18th Prime Minister. Just a garbage person who managed to get away with everything.
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