Brian Mulroney was a charming guy. He remembered your name, the name of your spouse, and even your kids. When my daughter and I ran into him one winter day as he exited 1 Place Ville-Marie, the crucifix-shaped towers that house Montreal’s corporate élite, he was friendly and good with the child. He enquired after my then husband, who later told the story of getting a sympathetic phone call from Mulroney after a less-than-stellar review of a book he had co-written.

Mulroney seemed genuine. There is no denying his retail political skills. Mulroney had the human touch.

But the empathy on display for individuals did not extend to ordinary Canadians, or working class people, or those struggling to keep their head above water. His “Canada is open for business” and “jobs for the boys” approach to the state of the Canadian nation were less charming. He liked people. But he really liked rich people — to paraphrase a friend of mine, Mulroney never met a rich person he didn’t like.

“Economically speaking, we’re all living in Brian Mulroney’s Canada,” reads the headline in the weekend’s Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, amongst the fluffy paeans of praise for Mulroney as Canada’s most “consequential” prime minister.

It occurred to me that not only is it true that he defined the economy we all live in now, Mulroney played a big role in creating the Canada that is “broken,” according to his current Conservative successor Pierre Poilievre.

A lot of airbrushing has gone on in the years since Mulroney stepped down in 1993, leaving his party in total disarray, going from 211 seats to 2, and dogged by the strong taint of scandal.

Mulroney died on February 29 at the age of 84 in Palm Beach, Florida, where he was a neighbour and friend of Donald Trump.

Brian Mulroney was born in 1939 in Baie-Comeau, on the north shore of the St Lawrence river, 250 miles north of Québec City. He was the third of six children and the oldest boy. His parents’ first child, a son, died within hours of his birth. His father was an electrician at a paper mill, anxious that his children escape that life. Mulroney went to law school, fell in with the young conservatives on campus, and became friends with former Senator Lowell Murray, master of the political backrooms, and by all accounts another charmer.

The town mill was American-owned. Mulroney was raised on the notion that American investment was only a good thing.

Hired as a labor lawyer by Montreal’s largest law firm, he later became the president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada, a subsidiary of Cleveland-based Hanna Mining (now owned by Rio Tinto). In 1972, he met a bikini-clad Mila Pivnicki by the pool at the Mount Royal Tennis Club. She was 14 years his junior. She would become his wife at age 19. He was 34. Both were active in the Westmount Progressive Conservatives.

He is survived by his wife, Mila, and four children: Caroline, Ben, Mark and Nicolas.

Although his roots were working class, he showed little to no regard for the plight and material conditions of working people in his career as a politician, rising to the highest heights of the ruling class.

Somewhere along the way up Mulroney shook off his working class origins, and any loyalty he felt toward people like his father, going from mining company president, in 1977, to head of the then-Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 1983.

Although his roots were working class, he showed little to no regard for the plight and material conditions of working people in his career as a politician, rising to the highest heights of the ruling class.

The “broken” Canada about which Poilievre is whipping up frustration includes a deep and seemingly insoluble housing crisis and dramatically increasing food prices.

Housing advocates point to the Mulroney government’s dissolution of the federal government’s housing programs as a big part of the cause of the crisis. Consumer groups point to lack of competition in the grocery market.

Before Mulroney, Canada provided subsidized housing for workers, including returning veterans after the Second World War. In the 1970s and early 80s, as pressure mounted for Ottawa to intervene during a series of recessions, federal programs financed non-profit and co-op housing, using the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to back stop mortgages. In the 1980s and 90s Mulroney and Jean Chretien’s Liberals reduced spending on housing, cutting federal co-operative programs, and creating a 30-year deficit in non-market housing.

The global food system, sustained by free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, added to consolidation. Today, a lack of competition among grocery chains is failing consumers.

Mulroney died the same day as the announcement of the Liberal/NDP plan to make contraception more easily accessible for the nine million Canadian women of childbearing age. The announcement was a key part of the pharmacare plan in the Cooperation and Supply Agreement between the two parties.

Liberal Health Minister Mark Holland gave a pithy synopsis of why women need better access to contraception at the launch of pharmacare coverage resulting from the Liberal/NDP agreement.

One of the reasons proponents of public health care have been fighting for pharmacare, including the coverage of contraception, directly stems from Mulroney’s pro-business policies as prime minister.

“He extended monopoly drug patent protection to 20 years, abolished compulsory licensing for brand-name drugs, and fixed introductory prices for new drugs at artificially high levels. As a result of these Mulroney policies, Canada now pays 30 per cent more for prescription drugs than the OECD average,” Mike McBane, national coordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition, told the Hill Times in 2011.

The three of them launched a full frontal attack on the post-war consensus and the welfare state, and together made it their mission to eliminate any collective power that workers had to improve their lives through public programs.

These inflated costs include the price of the pill and other contraceptive devices. In a 2015 study researchers estimated that one in three Canadian women will have an abortion in her lifetime in part because of the high cost of contraception.

As a newly minted university student I watched as the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney tried to ban abortion. MPs in his government wanted to put abortion doctors in jail.

Many of us were relieved in January 1988 when the Supreme Court of Canada threw out the abortion law on the grounds it “denied women security of the person.” That decision by the SCOC created a legal void that pro-choice people were happy with, making abortion just a medical procedure like any other.

That decision was the result of years of struggle and organizing by women and their allies across Canada, including Dr Henry Morgenthaler, who said publicly that he was shocked as a young doctor in Montréal by the numbers of women who requested terminations.

Many of the men in the Mulroney cabinet found the legal void unacceptable. They started drafting a new law to control women’s access to abortion. This galvanized many of us into activism.

Pro-choice demonstrations took place across the country. I attended several on Parliament Hill. In fact, it cemented my feminist politics. I was incredulous that access to abortion could simply be taken away again, after a short lived victory, after so many years of struggle.

My father’s sister Joyce Rosenthal was one of many supporters of a woman’s right to choose. At an NDP convention where abortion was being hotly debated on the floor, Joyce told the story of her harrowing back street abortion in Toronto in the 1950s. Joyce already had two children and her youngest had hemophilia. She wanted to focus on the children she already had. People have forgotten that before the abortion law was struck down, the number of backstreet abortions per year in Canada, between 1955 and 1969, was estimated to be as high as 120,000, and was probably higher.

Every day, Canadian women died or were injured because of botched interventions. Legalizing abortion saves women’s lives.

Judy Rebick, who has been one of Canada’s leading pro-choice activists for decades, writes in Rabble this week:

“I was president of the National Action Committee (NAC) on the Status of Women when Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister. I like to think we were his nemesis. We fought him on free trade, abortion, constitutional change, and Indigenous rights among other issues.”

The National Action Committee on the Status of Women saw its federal funding cut by Mulroney, then by Liberal PM Chretien, and was done in by Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

In a little known piece of historical irony the proposed abortion law went down in defeat after Pat Carney, a Conservative appointee to the Senate, voted against it.

Thankfully, subsequent Conservative governments have been reluctant to re-introduce legislation limiting abortion access — though there have been more than 40 private members bills introduced by anti abortion Conservative MPs since.

For anyone curious about the political phenomenon that was Brian Mulroney, his character and foibles, this revealing 1978 piece by Nova Scotia journalist and professor Stephen Kimber makes interesting reading. Mulroney was very angry at losing the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives to Joe Clark in 1976. Over the many hours Mulroney spent with the young Kimber, Mulroney reveals himself as a combination of vanity and insecurity, ambition and intelligence.

The “Red Tories” of the Progressive Conservative Party of that time: Joe Clark, Flora MacDonald and Lowell Murray all distanced themselves from Mulroney in later years.

As a newly minted university student I watched as the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney tried to ban abortion. MPs in his government wanted to put abortion doctors in jail.

In 1984, he became prime minister, defeating Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals in a landslide, taking 211 of the 282 seats in the House of Commons. He was re-elected with a smaller majority of 169 in 1988. He built a coalition of Quebec nationalists and western conservatives and tried to unify the country while recognizing Quebec’s status as a “distinct society.” He negotiated the Meech lake and the Charlottetown accords — both failed.

He stepped down when he realized the voters were fed up with Tory sleaze, patronage and arrogance, with the lowest polling approval rating ever of a Canadian PM, just before his party was reduced to two seats. That is right, from 282 to 2 seats. It was a total wipe out.

Voters were furious and fed up. The list was long: the GST, the Gulf War, scandal after scandal involving members of his government, some leading to criminal charges, 10 cabinet ministers resigning, slashing social programs, and job losses caused by free trade, leading to a stampede of voters to the Liberals in a landslide.

By pushing forward on free trade, right wing leaders transferred power and authority away from governments to the market. Transnational corporations that had outgrown their domestic origins wanted to bust unions and make more money by moving production to other countries with non-unionized low wage workers.

The seeds for this were sown at the 1985 Shamrock Summit, when Mulroney hosted U.S. president Ronald Reagan, both of Irish extraction, with whom he famously sang the folk song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

It smacked of smarmy self congratulatory entitlement at the time and doesn’t age well. He later did an encore performance of the song for Donald Trump in 2017.

Mulroney was a fellow traveler of the U.K.’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, and the “teflon president” Ronald Reagan. The three of them launched a full frontal attack on the post-war consensus and the welfare state, and together made it their mission to eliminate any collective power that workers had to improve their lives through public programs.

Mulroney became an unrelenting privatizer and de-regulator. He oversaw the sell-off of two dozen of the 61 publicly-owned corporations, including the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), Air Canada, Petro-Canada, the federal government’s stake in the Canada Development Corporation, Eldorado Nuclear Limited, aircraft manufacturers Canadair and De Havilland (where my father worked), Teleglobe Canada, Canadian National Railway, and the publicly-owned pharmaceutical company Connaught Laboratories, inventors and producers of vaccines against diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, polio, and meningitis.

The sharp axe of neoliberal privatization was heard over and over during those years, pitilessly felling the infrastructure of Crown Corporations and eliminating thousands of unionized jobs.

He introduced the goods and services tax to replace the manufacturers’ sales tax. In order to do so he expanded the number of Senators using a little-known provision in the Constitution, stacking the upper chamber with eight extra members who voted the way he wanted them to.

But his most “consequential” policy was the Free Trade Agreement. Historically Conservative Prime Ministers have opposed free trade, and Mulroney strongly opposed free trade initially. He came around to being its staunchest defender with other neo-conservative politicians around the world.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, manufacturing accounted for almost 20 per cent of Canadian GDP. It now accounts for only 10 per cent. Salaries and benefits for CEOs and the wealthy soar while workers’ wages stagnate. Young Canadians are increasingly frustrated by a precarious low paying labour market.

Like other conservative leaders, Mulroney wanted to make a grab for working people’s pensions. In 1985, when Mulroney tried to partially de-index Old Age Security from inflation, he was confronted by the feisty 63-year-old Solange Denis, who famously told the PM:

“You lied to us. I was made to vote for you and then it’s ‘Goodbye Charlie Brown.’”

Mulroney temporarily caved to the wrath of pensioners. But when his government brought down its 1989 budget it put Solange Denis’ position aside and cut Old Age Security, Unemployment Insurance, and federal transfers to the provinces for health care and education.

The most stark example of this downward harmonization of Canadian social policy with that of the US is Mulroney’s slashing of the Unemployment Insurance system. Tory and Liberal governments imitated lower standards prevailing in the U.S. In 1989, 87 per cent of the unemployed in Canada qualified for UI benefits (as compared to 52 per cent in the U.S.). By 2001 only 39 per cent of jobless Canadians qualified for coverage.

This pattern of cuts to social spending continued throughout the mandate of the Tory government, and was accelerated by the Liberals after they took office in 1993 — especially in their 1995 budget that included $29 billion in spending cuts over the next three years.

These deep cuts hurt more women than men because women more frequently work part time, because they enter and leave the workforce more often due to child-care and family responsibilities.

Like Stephen Harper, and other PMs and MPs, Mulroney became a person of wealth and influence, and further consolidated that position after leaving office: senior partner in the Montreal office of British-American global business law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, where we met him that winter day, member of the boards of Archer Daniels Midland, Barrick Gold Corp., where he sat on the board with Canada’s fourth wealthiest man, billionaire Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation.

Barrick, it’s worth noting, is a highly contested corporation for its destructive role in countries throughout the Global South. Likewise, Blackstone, and Quebecor Inc., companies known for brutal labour management relations and a right-wing editorial line, among others.

His sanitized authorized 1000 page biography makes no mention of the most disgraceful chapter of his career.

What was missing in the memoir can be found in the work of Stevie Cameron, Linda McQuaig, William Kaplan, John Sawatasky, Harvey Cashore and Linden MacIntyre of the fifth estate, among others. And in the searing play entitled Death and Taxes – the corrupting of Canada, by playwright Guy Sprung, performed by Infinithéâtre in 2005 in Montreal.

Perhaps the fear of poverty, which colored his working class childhood, is what drove him to accept $225,000 or more in hotel rooms from Karlheinz Schreiber, a lobbyist for Air Bus.

Brian Mulroney leaves a much less equitable, angrier and meaner Canada, a legacy not aligned with the hopes and dreams of working class Canadians like the people he grew up with in Baie-Comeau. Those Irish eyes are smiling as wealthy Canadians increase their fortunes and most Canadians go to their low paying precarious jobs while struggling to find a place to live and a way to pay for their groceries.