He sold Canadians and our resources down the river - arrogant, pompous and weak.
A great admirer of Reagan and Thatcher, the three families often vacationed together after they had left office.
Thatcher, Reagan & Mulroney - And Their Snake Oil
In my time we were sold the illusion of globalization. We were conned into believing we could abandon those menial, manufacturing jobs and instead embrace the information age, the "knowledge economy" of the future. We were no longer people of thermoses and lunch pails and steel toed boots. Let the developing world have those chores. We would be a society that extracted great wealth through processing and transmitting information. This would be the line by which we maintained the divide between the new world and the old.
And who sold us this nonsense? A big-haired ideologue, a rank opportunist and a borderline senile B-movie star. Thatcher, Mulroney and Reagan. Why did we believe them? What were we thinking? These three tore down vibrant, resilient societies and created a schism that perpetrated a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich. The rich got oh so much richer by outsourcing all those once expensive manufacturing jobs to poor nations with low wages and lax regulations. In their wake they left us with the promise of a glorious future in the knowledge economy.
Fair is fair. We yielded our manufacturing sector. We even dropped our trousers on trade and tariffs and surrendered our markets to ever less than fair competition. And, having done that, having undone ourselves, we waited for our new legacy, the knowledge economy. In the meantime we flipped burgers and kept busy selling each other those runners from Vietnam.
Today it's obvious that Thatcher, Mulroney and Reagan duped us on that knowledge economy business. That too has been outsourced. Most of us have had to deal with those technical service call centres where "Ashley" greets you with a heavy Mumbai accent. Accounting firms use number crunchers oceans away to process tax returns. My telephone company that earns its profits from me and my fellow Canadians outsources its tele-marketing campaign to South Asians.
Peter Wilby, former editor of The Independent and The New Statesman,
writes in The Guardian, that, across the West, the middle class decline has only begun and tomorrow is not going to be a better day:
Mulroney was a vindictive politician arriving after the Liberals had a long and successful run in power. Finally, Canada’s Progressive Conservatives had acquired a majority government- and not just any majority, the largest ever. Canadians had sent a massage we wanted change and we got it! Mulroney was soon to show that he was not a moderate conservative and maybe even an anti-conservative as he set about to alter the fundamental definition of the country. Being in office was his greatest binge of all, recklessly tampering with both the economy and the constitution.
Even though Canada enjoyed a healthy and mutually beneficial free trade with the US, Mulroney was duped into the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement, later to become NAFTA. In the wink of an eye Canada went from being a branch plant economy to a captive economy and resource slave to the US. NAFTA has really nothing to do with free trade. It is really a constitutional bill of rights for corporate exploitation. It was a huge step forward in formalizing the corporate welfare state and marked the death knell of the social welfare state. While many Canadians saw from the outset the NAFTA was an economic Trojan horse, Americans on their side of the border were only later to have similar concerns.
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/235930947-the-deplorable-legacy-of-brian-mulroney
NAFTA - Mulroney's legacy ....
FOUR REASONS WHY NAFTA IS A BAD DEAL FOR CANADA:
NAFTA undermines democracy. Foreign corporations use Chapter 11 to challenge environmental laws, municipal land-use controls, water protection measures, the activities of Canada Post, and even the decisions of judges and juries. While no Canadian citizen or corporation could bring forward these challenges, NAFTA grants corporations of member countries the right to challenge any federal rule or law that they perceive as a barrier to their ability to make a profit. The result is millions of tax dollars being spent to either fight or settle with these corporations.
NAFTA threatens health care and other public services. The exemption for health care under NAFTA, which has largely kept U.S. for-profit health corporations out of Canada, applies only to a fully publicly funded system. Once privatized, the system must give “national treatment” rights to American private hospital chains. The NAFTA exemption only applies to medicare as it stood in 1989, and doesn’t provide protection for a possible expansion of medicare into new areas like homecare and pharmacare.
NAFTA strips Canada of
control over our energy resources. Canada now produces about 40 per cent more oil than it consumes, but has to rely heavily on imported oil from offshore. Thanks to NAFTA, Canada now exports 70 percent of the oil and 61 per cent of the natural gas we produce each year to the United States. NAFTA prevents us from selling our energy resources to Canadians at rates lower than we sell them in the U.S. And because of NAFTA’s proportional sharing clause, we can’t ever cut back on the amount of energy we produce and sell to the United States, even in times when our country runs short.
NAFTA could put our water up for sale. Canadian water is defined as a “service” and an “investment” under NAFTA. The agreement’s so-called water exemption is inadequate. After British Columbia banned bulk exports of lake and river water, the California-based Sun Belt Corporation launched a Chapter 11 challenge, seeking $10 billion in damages. The case is still outstanding, and has profound implications for the future of Canada’s water.
http://pushedleft.blogspot.ca/2009/11/nafta-and-teh-selling-of-canada-we-got.html
I guess you can tell .......... I can't stand him.
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