Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, has died at the age of 84

Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister, whose statesmanship on what he called “big issues,” from free trade and acid rain in North America to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, gave way to recrimination of financial misconduct and influence peddling after he left office and died Thursday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida, where he had a home. He was 84.

A spokesperson for his daughter Caroline Mulroney said Mr Mulroney had been admitted to hospital after a fall at his home. Ms. Mulroney is a minister in the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario. “He died peacefully, surrounded by family,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Born into a working-class family in northeastern Quebec, Mr. Mulroney transcended his small-town roots to become a prosperous lawyer and businessman before seeking and achieving high office as a Conservative, rising to prime minister in 1984. He won re-election. by a convincing margin in 1988.

His popularity had a lot to do with his personality: with a penchant for impeccably tailored dark blue and double-breasted suits and always immaculately coiffed, Mr. Mulroney was a skilled debater and orator and always ready with a crowd-pleasing joke to add to his speeches to introduce. .

Ingrid Saumart had called him “dynamic, bilingual and seductive” in the Montreal newspaper La Presse. Aides promoted him as Canada’s version of Ronald Reagan.

But haunted by a faltering economy and high unemployment, and saying he had lost enthusiasm for the job, he resigned in 1993 with the worst Canadian polling of the 20th century. He handed power to Kim Campbell, who became Canada’s first female prime minister but lost a disastrous election months later.

Mr. Mulroney was known as the Canadian leader who led the country to the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico, a pact signed in December 1992, and as the author of an overhaul of Canada’s tax regime.

He prided himself on being a confidante of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush; on promoting a thaw between Moscow and Washington in the final days of the Cold War; and by going far further than the United States or Britain in imposing sanctions on white South Africa to press for the release of Nelson Mandela and the dismantling of apartheid.

Despite all that, he had a darker, less visible side. In 2005, a book of edited transcripts of hundreds of hours of taped interviews recorded over many years was published by a veteran journalist, Peter C. Newman, which showed that Mr. Mulroney was what Clifford Krauss was called a ‘wrong journalist’ in The New York Times. mouthy, insecure man with an enemy list stretching from Vancouver to Halifax.

Moreover, he did not acknowledge until many years after his resignation that he had entered into an unpublicized business relationship – and not, he insisted, during his days as prime minister – with Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist at the center of kickback scandals in the US . both his native Germany and his adopted country Canada.

In testimony at an investigation in December 2007, Mr. Mulroney said he accepted cash payments from Mr. Schreiber in $1,000 bills in hotel rooms, describing the transactions as an “error in judgment.” But he said he had done nothing illegal. Both he and Mr. Schreiber described the money as payments for lobbying on behalf of the German company Thyssen, later known as ThyssenKrupp, which hoped to build a light armored vehicle factory in Canada.

(Mr. Mulroney has always denied involvement in a separate scandal related to the Canadian takeover of Airbus aircraft. After the leak in 1995 of an official letter linking him to the affair, he sued the government for defamation and was awarded $2.1 million in 1997.)

Mr Mulroney and Mr Schreiber differed over the amount involved, with the former prime minister saying he had received three payments of $75,000, totaling $225,000, and Mr Schreiber saying he had handed over $300,000.

“My biggest mistake in life,” Mr. Mulroney said in 2007, “was agreeing to meet Karlheinz Schreiber in the first place.” Mr. Schreiber was deported to Germany in 2009 and sentenced to six and a half years in prison in 2013.

When Judge Jeffrey J. Oliphant, who led the investigation, published a four-part report in 2010, he said the meetings between the two men “in my view go a long way toward supporting my position that the financial transactions between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate.”

Mr. Mulroney’s critics interpret the judge’s choice of words as a much broader criticism of his credibility.

The columnist Andrew Coyne wrote in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s in 2010: ‘It’s not that Mulroney did business with Schreiber, or that he went to such great lengths to conceal it. It’s that he lied about it: lied to keep it a secret, certainly, but lied even more aptly after it was no longer a secret – especially in his testimony before the Oliphant inquiry. It is fair to say that the judge does not use such precise words. But point by point his intention is unmistakable. He doesn’t believe what Mulroney told him.”

For his part, Mr Mulroney argued that the affair had not caused irreparable damage to his position. In a long profile This was reported by Macleans magazine in 2013 he had thrown off the opprobrium that clung to his name in conservative circles. He was “fully welcomed back into the corridors of power,” the article said, as he “traveled the world” as a representative of a major international law firm in Montreal. He also held senior positions in private equity, hospitality and other companies.

A full obituary will be published soon.