Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney

Description

Brian Mulroney captured the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives and became the first prime minister in thirty-five years - and the first Conservative since Sir John A. Macdonald - to win consecutive majorities. His victory was the largest in Canadian political history, yet his party was almost wiped out in the election following his resignation. In "Transforming the Nation", leading Canadian politicians and scholars reflect on the major policy debates of the period and offer new and surprising interpretations of Brian Mulroney. Mulroney had a tremendous impact on Canada, charting a new direction for the country through his decisions on a variety of public-policy issues - free trade with the United States, social-security reform, foreign policy, and Canada's North. The Mulroney government represented a dramatic break with Canada's past. Mulroney received severe criticism for many of his new initiatives and left office with the lowest approval rating of any Canadian prime minister. However, much of the legislation he put in place was both embraced and expanded by the Liberals who succeeded him. "Transforming the Nation" is a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex world of Canadian public policy during the Mulroney era.

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A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, and the Public Trust

Description

In his bestselling "Presumed Guilty" Kaplan chronicled the corruption charges surrounding the 1988 USD1.8 billion purchase by Air Canada of passenger airplanes from European giant Airbus Industries, concluding that Mulroney had been the victim of a campaign of unfounded allegation and reckless inuendo. In "A Secret Trial" Kaplan reveals how he was misled and deceived by both Mulroney and Cameron. Mulroney was paid USD300,000 in cash not long after leaving office in circumstances he believed were best kept quiet, subsequently misled Canadians when he testified under oath about his relationship with German middle man Karlheinz Schrieber and then tried to suppress the story in the media. Cameron so wanted to destroy the former PM that she broke one of journalism's most sacred commandments and in 1995 became a confidential informant for the RCMP. Kaplan finally sets the record straight about the Airbus affair and reveals the culture of court secrecy that Mulroney and Cameron manipulated for their own use. Kaplan's thrilling page-turner is bookended by incisive commentaries by Jack Granatstein and Norman Spector. They delve into the major themes of "A Secret Trial" - a cautionary tale starring two of Canada's most prominent public figures - and offer tantalizing perspectives on one the most controversial events in recent Canadian history.

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Yankee Doodle Dandy: Brian Mulroney and the American Agenda

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Brian Mulroney: The Boy from Baie-Comeau

Description

Before the GST and before Free Trade, Brian Mulroney was a small-town boy who announced at age nineteen that he would one day be Prime Minister. This is his story.

Growing up in the remote company town of Baie-Comeau, Mulroney was immersed in Québécois culture, in a close-knit community with an enduring social order and spirit of self-help. A hardworking electrician's son, he wanted to be "the guy who makes things happen." Mulroney pursued that goal through a meteoric career as a labour lawyer, an unswerving partisan for the Conservative cause in Quebec, the president of a major corporation. In 1984, equipped with a deep understanding of Quebec, a small-town sense of social compassion, and skill as a negotiator and businessman, he was ready to take on the nation.

Informed by interviews with Mulroney, his aides and enemies, Brian Mulroney: The Boy from Baie Comeau is a remarkable portrait of the political ascent of one of Canada's most controversial Prime Ministers.

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Memoirs

Description

Politics was always Brian Mulroney’s real love. As an undergraduate in Nova Scotia he amazed his friends by getting Prime Minister Diefenbaker on the phone, and he rose fast in the Tory ranks in Quebec as a young Montreal lawyer. He tried for the leadership of the party in 1976, losing to Joe Clark, then returned to win a rematch in 1983. The next year, he ran the most successful election campaign in Canadian history, winning 211 seats, and taking office in September 1984.

His first term in office was a stormy one, marked by the launch of the Meech Lake Accord and the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. In 1988, however, he was re-elected after a rollercoaster campaign, and his second term in office was just as controversial, featuring the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords — still a source of bitter regret for him, as opportunities missed.

This book falls into two main sections: first, his rise out of a working-class family in Baie-Comeau. Second, his immersion into the world of Ottawa politics, in opposition and then in power.

The years in power are dealt with in fascinating detail, and we receive his candid accounts of backstage dealings with Trudeau, Clark, and other Canadian leaders and on the international scene with Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterrand, Kohl, Gorbachev, Mandela, Clinton, and many more. This big book has a huge cast of major players.

Brian Mulroney is determined to make this the best prime minister’s memoirs this country has ever seen, and a full-time researcher has been helping him for three years. This account of his career is colourful and forthright, and a number of opponents will be sorry that they caught his attention.

The manuscript is full of personal touches and reflects the fact that he wrote it by hand, reading it aloud for rhythm and impact. Studded with entries from his private journal, this book — by a son, brother, husband, and father — is deeply personal, and includes some surprisingly frank admissions.

The book establishes the scale of his achievements, and reveals him as a man of great charm. Memoirs will allow that little-known Brian Mulroney to engage directly with the reader. This book is full of surprises, as we fall under the spell of a great storyteller.


From the Hardcover edition.

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The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister

Description

The Secret Mulroney Tapes is an outrageous and intimate portrait of a Canadian prime minister, as told in his own words. There has never been a political book like this, and there will almost certainly never be another.

Peter C. Newman, the author of books about John Diefenbaker, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, as well as 2004’s number-one bestselling memoir, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power, has done it again. He has written twenty-two books that have sold two million copies, and earned him the title of Canada’s “most cussed and discussed” political commentator. Here, his no-holds-barred profile of Canada’s most controversial – and most reviled – prime minister breaks new ground.

Compiled from years of candid, taped conversations with Mulroney and the people closest to him while he was in power, the sometimes uproarious and often disturbing interviews – 7,400 pages of transcripts totalling 1.8 million words – have been sealed until now. Stunningly indiscreet and savagely frank, Mulroney is the first prime minister to be so nakedly outspoken. Yet he is also revealed as a witty Irish charmer, ready with a quick line to raise a laugh, no matter how impudent or profane, a man as warm in private as he was defensive in the public eye.

Mulroney names the names and spills the beans about what really goes on in Ottawa, which he describes as a “sick” city that runs on “goddamned incest”: “They’re all married to one another. They’re shacked up with one another. Their wives are on the payroll of the CBC. It’s just awful.” Lucien Bouchard, his one-time soulmate, he calls “bitter and profane” and “extraordinarily vain.” He writes off his constitutional foe, former Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells, as an “unprincipled son of a bitch.” His disgust for the press is as monumental as his sense of being misunderstood, and in his eyes the Ottawa press corps are “a phony bunch of bastards” who don’t give him credit even when the world applauds him for being “one of the three men who played the most important role in the collapse of the Berlin Wall.”

Out of The Secret Mulroney Tapes emerges a startling picture of the politician whose reign shocked and appalled and yet also revolutionized this country. No other prime minister in Canadian history aroused a stronger emotional response than Brian Mulroney. This book provides Canadians with a unique insight into the bold politician who changed their country like no other.

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