Speculation about the timing of the next general election is intensifying.Tom Mulcair suggests that Justin Trudeau may decide to call an election before a public inquiry on foreign interference raises any inconvenient questions. He suggests Trudeau may even prefer to resign and leave a successor to mop up the mess, much as Paul Martin did to his peril after Chrétien’s resignation in 2003 leaving Martin to own the sponsorship scandal which was then well documented by the Gomery Commission.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/tom-mulcair-will-justin-trudeau-decide-to-stick-around-1.6438819

But, arguably, the better predictor of the electoral fate of the Liberal Party of Canada today lies in lessons from Brian Mulroney’s actions leading up to the 1993 election.

Brian Mulroney resigned a few months after his defeat in the Charlottetown Accord referendum in October 1992. His successor, Kim Campbell, had to deal with the widespread public distaste for a prime minister who dragged the country through five years of divisive constitutional debate from 1987 to 1992.

The Progressive Conservative Party vainly hoped that Mulroney’s “the people have spoken” acceptance of the referendum result, his resignation in February 1993, and the selection of the Party’s first female leader would erase Mulroney’s toxic legacy before the election.

However, the Canadian people passed severe judgment, leaving the Progressive Conservative Party with only two Members of Parliament, and the Bloc Québécois as official opposition in the House of Commons with 54 out of 75 Quebec seats.

The Charlottetown Accord, and the Meech Lake Accord before it, had been hatched in private negotiations between Mulroney and the 10 premiers and presented as effectively fait accompli. Essentially, Mulroney cultivated Quebec premier Robert Bourassa by accepting the bogus argument that the province of Quebec had been left out of the constitutional arrangements that came about with the patriation of the Constitution via the Canada Act, 1982.

Mulroney took the five demands of the Quebec premier for more constitutional powers, generalized them to be available to all premiers, and used his executive powers to sidestep the inconvenience of consulting the Canadian people for whom he and the others held power in trust.

In the Meech Lake Accord, Mulroney undermined both the coherence of our federal structure and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Worse, he then amped up the stakes and intimidated us to fall in line, by telling opponents that we were anti-Quebec if we opposed the Accord.

Starting in spring 1987, grassroots Canadians organized across the country, across party lines, and outside the political parties to vigorously oppose the Meech Lake Accord and carefully explain at all times that we were not anti-Quebec. Ultimately, the Accord was defeated in June 1990 by the actions of the lone Indigenous member of the Manitoba legislature and the principled premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Mulroney still thought he could push through a version of the Meech Lake Accord by adding new elements to correct ‘poor misinformed’ Canadians. So, “Meech-plus” became the Charlottetown Accord and a referendum was held on October 27, 1992. During the referendum period, citizens coordinated a widespread, organized revolt against the lack of transparency and accountability that still plagues political conduct in Canada, both within governments and amongst different levels of government.

The Charlottetown Referendum was arguably among the two or three most successful citizen mobilizations in Canadian history. The democratic device of a consultative referendum worked. There was an exceptionally large voter turnout – 71.8 percent – and the Canada-wide No vote against the Accord was 54.3 percent.

[For a summary of the unprecedented citizen action and revolt over the Meech and Charlottetown Accords, see Chapter 2 of Canada’s Faux Democracy https://deborahcoyne.ca/canadas-faux-democracy/. Full disclosure: I was a key organizer of the Canadian Coalition on the Constitution formed in 1987, and then a co-leader of the Canada for All Canadians No Committee during the 1992 referendum. I also worked for Clyde Wells, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador – see more at www.deborahcoyne.ca].

In the absence of the social media we have today, it took until 2005 for Mulroney’s disgraceful public comments on my personal life and those of others to be disclosed in detail by the publication of The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. These offensive comments were passed off as merely “indiscreet” by the many Mulroney apologists in past and current governing establishments. Mulroney would, of course, have merited serious condemnation today. But, like so many of us at the time, I had no time or energy to do anything but follow the advice, “When they go low, we go high.”
(see https://deborahcoyne.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Excerpts_from_The_Secret_Mulroney_Tapes_Unguarded_Confessions_of_a-_Prime-Minister-_Chs_5_14_conclusion_-Peter_C_Newman_2005_Random_House_Canada.pdf)

Then, it took another few years to air more of Mulroney’s toxic legacy that had shocked Canadian voters by 1993. In the mid-1990s, Mulroney sued the federal government for defamation over a request from the RCMP to Swiss authorities for information relating to allegations that he had been involved in a kickback scheme with German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber related to Air Canada’s purchase of Airbus jets. Mulroney told Department of Justice lawyers that his relationship with Schreiber was social, not a business one. The former prime minister received $2.1 million from the federal government in an out-of-court settlement.

Later, in a December 2007 appearance before a House of Commons ethics committee, Mulroney apologized for his “serious error in judgment” in accepting some $225,000 in $1,000 bills from Schreiber in payment for their business and financial dealings. At the same time, Mulroney was defiant about “totally false allegations” he had been involved in any Airbus kickback scheme.

Today, Justin Trudeau is a similar position to that of Mulroney in early 1993 – viewed as seriously and serially ethically-challenged, and running what is increasingly revealed to be an unprincipled government lacking transparency and accountability. And as a prime minister elected from Quebec, he has cultivated his personal base in Quebec with divisive actions that alienate Canadians outside Quebec.

In this connection, a straight line can be drawn from Brian Mulroney initiating five years of destabilizing constitutional debate to appease a Quebec premier and sovereigntists, to Justin Trudeau appeasing another Quebec premier and sovereigntists with his shamefully uncritical acceptance of the provisions in Quebec’s Bill 96 amending the Canadian constitution unilaterally, Quebec’s Bill 21 restricting religious freedom, and the pre-emptive use of the reprehensible notwithstanding clause, only to find sovereigntists stronger than ever at the end, and Canadians angered and disillusioned.

We need to focus on concrete steps to restore and strengthen the foundations of our democratic institutions and practices to protect against actions by top-down, unaccountable political operators and their enablers who benefit from the politics of gratuitous division. And we must consider new institutions to facilitate crucial consensus across all levels of government – federal, provincial, municipal, Indigenous – to better tackle our enormous collective challenges. For a roadmap, see: Canada’s Faux Democracy: What are we going to do about it? https://deborahcoyne.ca/canadas-faux-democracy/