Canada’s 18th prime minister Brian Mulroney dies at 84

A former Canadian prime minister has died.

Brian Mulroney passed away today, peacefully and surrounded by family, his daughter Caroline Mulroney said on social media.

He was 84 years old.

Mulroney served as Canada’s 18th prime minister between 1984-93.

His landslide victory in the 1984 federal election came the year after he became leader of the Progressive Conservative party.

The party won nearly 75% of seats in the 1984 election, the second-largest percentage of seats in Canadian history, and followed that up with another majority government in 1988.

Mulroney’s tenure as prime minister was centred around the introduction of several economic reforms, including:

• The Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement
• Creating the goods and services tax (GST) to replace the manufacturers’ sales tax
• The privatization of 23 of 61 Crown corporations, including Air Canada and Petro-Canada

A large part of his legacy was also the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, which both proposed a change to the constitution to recognize Quebec as a distinct society.

Those failed attempts, along with the unpopularity of the GST, growing Western alienation and the early 1990s recession led to a massive decline in Mulroney’s popularity.

Eventually, he resigned and handed over power to his cabinet minister Kim Campbell, Canada’s only female prime minister, in June 1993.

Campbell only led the country for just over four months before the November 1993 election saw the Progressive Conservatives essentially collapse entirely.

The party was reduced from a majority government of 156 seats down to just two, as Jean Chrétien and the Liberal party took control with an overwhelming majority.

While Mulroney has a complicated legacy, his deputy prime minister, Don Mazankowski, once said his greatest accomplishment will be seen as “dragging Canada kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”