Robert Bourassa had given up the ghost. A state funeral had been organized. My boss Lucien Bouchard was coming back. In his office then perched high up in the Hydro-Québec building, he received a call from André Bérard, president of the National Bank, who was traveling in Asia. Bérard was a key player in the big summit on the economy that we were preparing. Among other things, I heard Mr. Bouchard say to him: “He had an excellent week. » When the call ended, I asked him: “Was that excellent week Bourassa’s?” » Bouchard nodded. “You meant, except for the death?” »
Brian Mulroney is having a great week. There is no shortage of well-deserved praise for his attempts to reintegrate Quebec into the Canadian fold, for his opposition to apartheid, for his won fight against acid rain and for Canadian-American free trade, among other things. .
Having participated, in these pages and on the airwaves, in extolling its many merits, can I allow myself to conclude that its results were generally positive? Which means he wasn’t completely. Have the privatizations of Air Canada and Canadian National really been beneficial? Much is said about his environmental initiatives, but has the green light given to the expansion of oil extraction in the West really done the planet a service?
The main stain that should appear on Brian Mulroney’s liabilities concerns women’s rights. Twice he tried to recriminalize abortion. If he failed, it was in spite of himself.
During the campaign, Mulroney declared himself against “abortion on demand”. He had been elected for four years when the Supreme Court, in the Morgentaler case in January 1988, bluntly affirmed that “forcing a woman, under the threat of a criminal sanction, to carry the fetus to term, unless she fulfills certain criteria independent of his own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with his body and therefore an attack on his personal security.
We have since become accustomed to living with the Court’s decision as the only compass in matters of abortion, but at the time it seemed inconceivable that Parliament would not mark the matter with a law. Mulroney made it a priority and tabled a bill that would ban abortion at the end of pregnancy. The text was defeated by a majority of deputies made up of those who considered the text too restrictive and others, especially conservatives, who found it too permissive. Mulroney returned the following year with a tougher text, banning all abortions unless the attending physician judged that the life or health of the mother was in danger. Offending doctors would be liable to two years in prison.
This time the measure passed the House, with Mulroney and his ministers among 140 MPs voting for it, with 131 voting against it. Only the Senate stage remained, where a majority in favor of the project seemed assured. But Mulroney had, among others, named his former minister Pat Carney, whose pro-choice convictions were well known. Carney remembers receiving “very, very strong pressure” before the vote telling him, at least, to abstain. Alphabetical order required, she was the first representative of the Conservative Party in the Senate to speak. She stood up and voted no. Against all odds, a few other conservative senators followed his example. “Several male senators believed that abortion was an issue concerning women,” she said. They told me they were thinking of abstaining, until they saw me vote no. » Once all the votes have been compiled, the President of the Senate, conservative senator Guy Charbonneau, notes the tie. He has the power to break it. Making the most important gesture of his career, he abstains. The bill recriminalizing abortion will not recover from this.
“After the vote,” Carney says, “I went back to my desk to sip tea and wait to hear my fate. In the days that followed, I was removed from key positions on Senate committees and the subject of malicious rumors. » The transparent sign of the Prime Minister’s bad mood, humiliated by his own senators – and his female senator.
How does Brian Mulroney relate this serious failure in his 1,300-page biography published in 2007? There are only two references to abortion. The first mentions a letter that then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau sent to the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Gerald Carter, assuring him that he would not hesitate to use the notwithstanding provision of the Constitution to prevent the establishment of a right to abortion in Canada. The second simply states that, during his mandate, Mulroney, among other things, “introduced legislation on abortion”.
We understand that the memoirist did not want to draw attention to such a lackluster passage. If he had done so, he could have taught us what the documents of his Council of Ministers would reveal to us in 2013: if we judge his project to be resolutely anti-women, he at least had the merit of having blocked the worst impulses of his Minister of Health, Jake Epp. The latter wanted to send women practicing self-abortion to jail and extend the sentences of abortion doctors to 10 years. Also in his defense: his Minister of the Status of Women, Barbara McDougall, and his Minister of Justice, Kim Campbell, were also, at the time, in favor of the partial ban on abortion.
Mulroney could also have written that having failed, he demonstrated beyond any doubt that it was impossible to restrict the right to abortion in Canada. A historic victory that women owe him.