Brian Mulroney’s university years played a significant role in shaping his career and values. At Laval University, but also at St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He never forgot his two alma maters and the friends he made there, many of whom accompanied him in his rise to power.
I met Brian Mulroney at the Faculty of Law at Laval University in 1961. I was in the first year, he in the second. The Faculty was housed in Old Quebec, rue de l’Université, near the ramparts. It was at the time when he ate OPO (egg sandwiches, not onions!) that Mr. Godbout, the Faculty attendant, sold in the morning before eight o’clock classes. I remember Mulroney being one of his good clients.
I was not one of his many friends. I was not part of his promotion. A unique promotion, including of course his friend Lucien Bouchard, but also future ministers, Pierre de Bané (Ottawa), Clément Richard (Québec), several anglophones who came to study law in French, in the excitement of the Quiet Revolution, including Michael Meighen, grandson of former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen. And many brilliant future lawyers.
Mulroney stood out. Much has been said about his charm, his vitality, his daring. In his early twenties, he had already joined the Progressive Conservative Party. As Lucien Bouchard told Yves Boisvert of The Press, he managed to bring Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to the university. Which of course impressed us.
It is interesting to remember that “Dief”, a long-time civil rights lawyer, had the first Canadian Bill of Rights adopted in 1960. He also attacked apartheid, as Mulroney later did so forcefully. ‘energy.
I have only seen him a few times since then, by chance. But there was also a documentary that I made, then a journalist, shortly after his election in 1984, with Claude Sylvestre, the former director of Focushosted by René Lévesque. Brian, Lucien, Fred, and the others, that’s the title, brought together several of his university friends, who supported him in his political career and whom he never forgot. Lucien Bouchard, of course, Fred Doucet, a friend from Antigonish, Jean Bazin, a close friend who became a senator, Peter White, one time Conrad Black’s comrade in arms, and another great friend, Bernard Roy, a brilliant lawyer who served as his first chief of staff after his election. I forget some, of course.
There was Laval, but also, before that, St. Francis Xavier. Friends, but also teachers, including the presence in Antigonish of the Catholic priest Moses Coady, a progressive close to workers, an apostle of cooperatives, community development and international development, a legend in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.
It was Michel Cormier, then a student in Laval and researcher for our documentary (later to become a remarkable foreign correspondent for Radio-Canada), who told me of the existence of Father Coady. His work certainly had an impact on the son of a Baie-Comeau electrician.
There was also Robert Cliche, one of our professors in Laval, remarkable communicator, fierce critic of the established order, Quebec leader of the New Democratic Party at the end of the 1960s. He left no one indifferent and fascinated many. between us.
I don’t know what Mulroney’s relationship with Cliche was at that time. Member of the Commission of Inquiry into the Exercise of Freedom of Association in the Construction Industry, which Cliche chaired, he became a judge and later worked closely with him. The presence in his life of Father Moses Coady, and undoubtedly also that of Robert Cliche, explains, I believe, that Mulroney was in many respects much more of a “progressive” than a “conservative”.
Brian Mulroney was not perfect. That it is ? Regrettable blurs darken the last period of his life. But that in no way erases his great human qualities. And his remarkable achievements.