When governments got things done: Mulroney, Chrétien and a lost age of capacity

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We are in mourning at present for Brian Mulroney, a flawed man with a remarkable record. By “remarkable record” I mean mostly two things: free trade and the GST. But if you do two big things in your time in office, you have been a success as a prime minister. Most don’t manage one.

Generally speaking the big things tend to be things they never intended to do. History has a way of throwing challenges at prime ministers they neither expected nor planned for; often they only became prime minister because they promised not to do anything about them.

Mr. Mulroney ran for leader of the Conservatives on an explicit pledge never to have anything to do with free trade. Jean Chrétien, another flawed man with a remarkable record, succeeded him on an explicit pledge to renegotiate free trade, and to abolish the GST. He did neither. All he did was beat the deficit and put separatism on ice.

The best that could be said of either man was that they were great improvisers. They adapted to changing circumstances. Neither came to power with much of an agenda. Nor was either unduly burdened by principle, politically or ethically. Their core ideology was mostly that people like them – them, in particular – should be governing the country.

Yet history will record each of these cautious glad-handers as among the most consequential prime ministers in our history. The era in which they governed, 1984 to 2003, might be called the Age of Capacity, a time when governments took on big problems and fixed them.

That these generally amounted to undoing the mistakes of past governments is neither here nor there. Most of the worst problems we face are the legacy of past attempts to make things better. What is the primary issue in housing, for example, but reversing decades of restrictive zoning laws?

Calculating pragmatists that they were, neither prime minister would have done any of the great things for which they are lauded had he had the least excuse not to. But by the time each took office, there was no alternative.

It was not until a protectionist U.S. Congress threatened our access to the American market that a constituency could be found for free trade. Neither would the Mulroney government have embarked on reform of the manufacturers’ sales tax (the genesis of the GST) had it not been on the verge of collapse. Even so, to have tackled either, let alone both, took enormous political daring and skill.

Mr. Mulroney’s record was not one of unalloyed triumph. He was too timid in his most important assignment – rescuing the nation’s finances, after the ruinous reign of Pierre Trudeau. On Meech Lake, on the other hand, he was too bold: a non-solution to a non-problem (support for separation had fallen to record lows in Quebec) that made things measurably worse.

For his part, though he wisely did nothing to reverse Mr. Mulroney’s great achievements on free trade and the GST, Mr. Chrétien succeeded brilliantly where Mr. Mulroney had failed, balancing the budget in four years and effectively disarming the threat of unilateral secession – though not until he, too, had no alternative, with the country careering toward bankruptcy, self-destruction, or both.

The Age of Capacity stands in marked contrast to the Age of Incapacity that has followed, under prime ministers Stephen Harper and Trudeau the Younger.

The Harper government cannot be credited even with failure, so little did it attempt. The Trudeau government, by contrast, has attempted a great deal. But rather than solve old problems, it has mostly created new ones, crashing uninvited into areas of provincial responsibility – daycare, dental care, pharmacare – while neglecting core federal responsibilities like managing the economy or protecting the country.

I think this helps explain the funk we are in. What is noteworthy about many of our biggest problems today is that none of our political leaders offers any real solutions to any of them, nor is there much expectation that they will. Housing, health care, productivity – if anything these are likely to grow worse, not better, in the years to come.

There hangs in the air, accordingly, a pall of futility. The Age of Capacity was anything but peaceful. It was a time of turmoil and division. On issue after issue – free trade, the deficit, inflation, the unity crisis – Canada rolled up its sleeves and got things done. By contrast, we seem unable today to get much of anything done.

But then, we had to, back then. The crises had reached such a stage that we had no choice. Perhaps that is the real lesson of the Mulroney-Chrétien years. Before things can get better, they will have to get a lot worse.