Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney (review)

When Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney lands on anyone’s desk, the temptation to flip to the index to search for Scheriber, Karl-Heinz is too much to resist. And sure enough, there are two references to the early days of that strange and sordid drama that just will not go away. Admittedly, recent twists in the saga have passed this book by, and on this count it is already dated. But, guilty pleasures aside, the Mulroney years deserve serious historical attention. Christina Newman and Stephen Clarkson once wrote of Pierre Trudeau that ‘he haunts us still,’ but in many ways the legacy of Brian Mulroney haunts us more. The Mulroney years taught Canadians to embrace free trade, Mulroney’s governments plunged us into a series of constitutional crises and contributed to Canada’s ballooning national debts and deficits, whose spectres themselves loomed over political life in the lean 1990s. Now fifteen years from Mulroney’s resignation, Raymond Blake of the University of Regina has assembled the first serious attempt at a historical assessment of nearly ten years of federal politics and the ‘transformation’ of the country.

Transforming the Nation is then an assemblage. It is a collection of eighteen articles by twenty-three contributors, including historians like Michael Behiels and P.E. Bryden, political scientists like Nelson Michaud, and politicians and activists like Bob Rae, John Crosbie, and Elizabeth May. The range of contributors allows the book to focus on a wide spectrum of Mulroney’s policies–his foreign policy, his environmental and cultural policies, and of course Free Trade and the gst. It would have been easy to assemble a one-sided assessment of the initiatives of 1984–93, but these authors demonstrate that there are many ways of wrestling with the Mulroney legacy. The contributions reflect a range of opinion about Mulroney’s accomplishments, foibles, weaknesses, and strengths. Indeed, Bob Rae’s reflections on the complexity of Brian Mulroney the man draw attention to the idea that no one is one-dimensional. Mulroney, like any national leader, was full of contradictions. Thus, although one or two contributors repeatedly claim to know what Mulroney thought, one wonders if anyone really can.

If there is a drawback to the selection of topics in this collection, it is that the focus on policy and executive federalism crowds out other ways of thinking about the Mulroney years. These articles give us the story of talking heads talking to talking heads. There is no real analysis of the popular reactions to Mulroney, little recognition of the everyday effects of decisions taken behind the closed doors of meeting rooms. There is no social or cultural history of the Mulroney legacy. Certainly Michael Behiels hints at the importance of popular realignments in the unravelling of the Meech Lake Accord, but this kind of political history is absent from the book.

Perhaps this focus is itself a reflection of the limitations of writing histories of very recent times. Very recent history is difficult to write well, and the almost complete lack of unpublished primary source evidence in this collection demonstrates the limitations of studying the recent past. Certainly the use of Wikipedia as a reference in some articles will put off some scholars. Reflecting the range of the contributors’ backgrounds, many of these papers lack the depth of historical analysis that many readers of the Canadian Historical Review would find satisfying. But this book is a first brush with the period, written more as a collection of brief memoirs than as history. And in this sense, this is a collection perhaps more suited to use in an undergraduate political science or contemporary issues class than in a history class. Nevertheless, no Canadian historian can discount the importance of the Mulroney years to the development of contemporary Canada. Blake’s collection gives us a good place to start the historical assessment of this period and it makes...