Brian Mulroney, without a doubt, changed Canada. For better or for worse is up to your interpretation… though towards the end, I think the bumper stickers said it all. (Tax this _||_ Mulroney)
So it is that now a book has been released that shows Mulroney apparently thought much the same about pretty much everyone around him.
Of course, the media focuses on the really nasty stuff, so surely in the hundreds of hours of taped interviews Mulroney had *something* nice to say about someone… but not according to the quotes we are hearing that pertain to his contemporaries.
ON THE NASCENT REFORM PARTY: The Reform Party is anti-everything. There’s really deep-, deep-seated racism there. I still don’t know what to make of Reform. I know that for the moment it’s growing, but these are one-trick ponies. They’re not standing on a whole lot of sound ground — it’s all negative.
ON PIERRE TRUDEAU: He has an unbecoming habit of distorting the truth, and he has a streak of vindictiveness to him. He’s infinitely more partisan than I ever thought possible. He has a streak of malice in him that is most unbecoming.
ON JEAN CHRETIEN, AFTER BREAKING PROMISES TO REPEAL THE GST AND NAFTA: The guy just swallows himself whole on NAFTA, nobody says a word. It’s just been an awful bloody piece of business. Only a mean, dirty bastard would do something like that, or a fucking stupid one. And you know what? He’s both. And he’s sucking in this bunch of assholes in the press gallery in Ottawa.
ON LUCIEN BOUCHARD’S DEFECTION FROM CABINET TO LEAD THE BLOC QUEBECOIS: Things are not usually clear in politics, but this one is clear as hell. Bouchard thought he would take 25 or 30 people to the Bloc Quebecois. I never thought that. Bastard.
ON BOUCHARD, AGAIN: I think there’s no way I could have known about Bouchard. No way. I trusted him too much. You’ve got to understand, I had his goddamned wedding reception in my house. That’s how close he was.
ON OTTAWA: This place is sick. They’re all married to one another. They’re shacked up with one another. Their wives are on the payroll of CBC. It’s just awful, the goddamned incest here.
You can order the book, “The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded confessions of a Prime Minister”, from Chapters.ca.
I’m sure it will be available in other places soon, if it isn’t already.. including Amazon.
It appears that most, if not all, of the comments attributed to Mulroney are in fact true.
I think better of him for it.
I have little doubt they are true… it’s just perhaps a sobering realisation of just how “real” he and others in the political sphere really are in private.
It makes me wonder who in Ottawa truly *is* a nice person, both in person and according to others.