Chris Selley covered the recent Caroline Mulroney event featuring her father Brian:
Watching 79-year-old Brian Mulroney campaign for his daughter on Tuesday, I’d be hard-pressed to argue age matters at all.
The public-facing aspects of this leadership campaign have often been stilted, joyless and jittery, with Doug Ford carefully keeping his powder dry and Mulroney trying to build confidence without screwing up. Only Christine Elliott has often sounded passionate, confident and halfway credible all at once.
Mulroney père, on the other hand, waltzed into a packed banquet hall in Vaughan at noon on Tuesday like a conquering hero, to a standing ovation, and settled in behind the lectern like it was a favourite sweater and a mug of hot cocoa. When he was done, but for the greyer beards, the camera-wielding mob that escorted him out of the room might as well have had Justin Trudeau at its centre.
Mulroney regaled us with a smorgasbord of chucklesome anecdotes, bons mots and name-dropping. He cheerfully batted away several entreaties that he return to politics. He said he mooted the idea to Mila during Jean Chrétien’s infamous “I don’t know if I am in West, South, North or East Jerusalem” press conference in 2000.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” she supposedly replied, “and I know your new wife is really going to love the experience.” Much mirth!
Mulroney pooh-poohed the need for legislative experience in an aspiring premier — perhaps the biggest knock against his daughter — arguing he had none when he won the Tory leadership in 1983 and rampaged to a majority government, and suggesting he “want(s) no part of” the sort of experience that Kathleen Wynne and Co. have in spades.
“I knew Ontario when it was the driver of Confederation, the engine of Canada’s economy, a glorious leader in this country,” he prated, crediting the “strong, consistent and brilliant” leadership of Tory premiers John Robarts, Bill Davis and Mike Harris for “the large measure” of its success. “And now Ontario has been reduced to accepting equalization payments from Newfoundland and Labrador.”
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Demonstrably, in Canada, you do not need a huge, room-filling personality to govern effectively. But if you haul out Brian Mulroney to campaign for you, you’re going to invite comparisons. And if you’re going to claim that the current government has literally laid waste to the province, a guy like Mulroney is liable to highlight just how modest the Conservatives’ proposals are to rebuild it all from scratch.
