Canada is ‘very smooth’ on trade? Donald Trump doesn’t know the half of it

Thirty years ago, in Canada’s free-trade election, Brian Mulroney used his wiles to get the U.S. — and opposition Liberals — right where he wanted them, Jim Coyle writes.

Conservative Leader Brian Mulroney faces off with Liberal rival John Turner during a debate from the 1988 federal election campaign. Mulroney manoeuvred the Liberals into a position of opposing a free-trade deal and having little to offer in its stead. (FRED CHARTRAND / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

Drama over free trade. Dark mutterings about economic calamities to come. An impeccably groomed politician named Mulroney out working the campaign trail.

Canadians could be forgiven for thinking, just for a moment, that 30 years had never passed.

U.S. President Donald Trump took time out from his myriad problems, domestic and distant, to kick a little sand north of the border this week.

Unhappy with the North American Free Trade Agreement currently being renegotiated, Trump told a gathering of state governors that Canada has “a belief that it’s wonderful.

“It is, for them. Not wonderful for us,” he said.

“Canada,” Trump groused, presumably with our stylish, nicely haired prime minister in mind, “is very smooth.”

Smooth?

POTUS doesn’t know the half of it.

The true smooth operator in this country’s pursuit of free trade with the United States was former prime minister Brian Mulroney, father of Caroline, currently running for the leadership of Ontario’s hilariously fractious Progressive Conservative party.

Mulroney’s free-trade story even stands as evidence that former Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown — the very man his daughter is seeking to succeed — is hardly the first pol given to drastic changes of mind.

In 1983, running for the federal PC leadership, Brian Mulroney opposed “unfettered free trade” with the U.S.

Even as he famously crooned “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with President Ronald Reagan at the so-called Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in 1985, his cabinet assumed he still felt that way.

Not so.

Three developments had occurred. A protectionist swing in the U.S. The move by Europe to a common trading bloc. And a report by the Macdonald Royal Commission recommending Canada take a “leap of faith” into a free-trade agreement with the U.S.

And leap Mulroney did, smoothly of course.

When talks got boggy, Mulroney threatened to withdraw Canada’s chief negotiator Simon Reisman. This got Reagan’s attention when little in Canadian affairs usually interested him.

“The only time he really engaged our prime minister on an issue relating to free trade was when he registered his concern about Canadian restrictions on the distribution of Hollywood movies in Canada,” Mulroney’s former pointman Derek Burney would later write in his memoir Getting it Done.

As negotiations continued, Reagan dispatched his vice-president, George H.W. Bush, and Treasury Secretary James Baker to Ottawa to meet Mulroney and take stock of his domestic challenges.

Later, Reagan wrote in his diary: “I hope that we can work out some things in the area of trade that will benefit (Mulroney). Right now, pol(itical) opponents are trying to portray him as an American puppet.”

This sort of thing delighted Mulroney.

“If you don’t have access to the Oval Office,” he crowed at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the free-trade agreement, “you are dead on bilateral relationships.”

If Trump thinks Canadians are smooth, consider this. In 1987, Mulroney put together a private group of veteran Tories from across Canada that included William Davis, Peter Lougheed, Frank Moores, Bob Coates.

He’d call them for their views, and from time to time they’d meet for dinner in Ottawa. At one dinner at the Château Laurier, Mulroney asked how to handle the Free Trade Agreement politically.

Lougheed made a point “that I immediately sensed was of capital importance,” Mulroney would write in his memoirs.

As the former Alberta premier saw it, most analysts expected Mulroney to pass the requisite legislation enacting the free-trade agreement and run on it as a fait accompli.

“But I disagree,” Lougheed told Mulroney. “I think we should pass it through the House (of Commons) but not the Senate, thereby keeping open the question of ultimate passage.

“This enables us to run on the promise of free trade and the tremendous benefits it will bring Canadians, without having locked them into a done deal.

“That way, we leave the negative, destructive role to the Liberals, who will attack a promising future, vow to kill it, while putting nothing hopeful or visionary in the window.”

Well, no sooner were the words out of Lougheed’s mouth, Mulroney recalled, than “I knew this was the strategy we were going to follow.”

Enter Liberal Leader John Turner.

He would eventually instruct Liberal senators, after the free-trade bill passed through the Commons, to throw a rumpus in the upper chamber to hold up the legislation.

Come the federal campaign of 1988, one of the epic electoral contests in Canadian history, Turner mounted an admirable effort, besting Mulroney in the key televised debates and insisting free trade would jeopardize Canada’s social programs, surrender energy policy to the U.S., abandon farms and enable Canadian banks to be swallowed up.

“I happen to believe that you’ve sold us out!” Turner thundered.

“You do not have a monopoly on patriotism!” Mulroney retorted.

It was grand political combat by two old warriors, standing toe to toe.

Turner’s Liberals got a bump in the post-debate polls. Mulroney even confided to his wife, Mila, and Derek Burney a week later that he didn’t “exclude the possibility of losing.”

But he didn’t.

And smooth?

As the former PM himself recalled it, he was smoother than Canadian Olympic ice-dancing stars Virtue and Moir, smoother than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, smoother than Tinker to Evers to Chance.

“One misstep on my part and the whole campaign — and my prime ministership — could have been lost,” he wrote.

Along, of course, with the free-trade agreement.

In the end, Mulroney won another majority government, and Turner’s “fight of my life” against free trade proved his last great appearance on the national stage.

The deal got done. Mexico ultimately entered the fraternity to make it the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Smooth?

Donald Trump ought to see Brian and Mila Mulroney work a room.

Read more about: Brian Mulroney, Quebec, Donald Trump