'A real ambassador'

Prime minister's talks with U.S. and new sales tax reshaped economy

- STEPHANIE LEVITZ

OTTAWA Brian Mulroney, the prime minister whose trade talks with the United States and introduction of a new sales tax forever reshaped the Canadian economy, has died.

He was 84.

"On behalf of my mother and our family, it is with great sadness we announce the passing of my father, The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Canada's 18th prime minister," his daughter Caroline posted on social media late Thursday afternoon.

"He died peacefully, surrounded by family."

Mulroney became prime minister in 1984 when his Progressive Conservatives won 211 seats in the House of Commons - the largest margin of victory for a political party in Canadian history and a feat that has never been repeated.

A self-professed "failed crooner" who made $50 a pop for singing ballads at his hometown's paper mill, Mulroney's unrelenting ambition won him friends among some of the most powerful leaders of his generation, but also made enemies of countless Canadians who scorned what they saw as his obsession with his own image and that of his legacy.

By the time he resigned in 1993, the consensus he'd built between Western populists and Quebec nationalists had collapsed, and the goods and services tax his government introduced was so wildly unpopular that it led to the near-annihilation of the PC party in the subsequent election, setting in motion a realignment of conservatism in Canada that continues to this day.

The Airbus affair, an alleged kickback scheme connected to the purchase of new aircraft for Canada, would further tarnish his political legacy, and he would spend the decades after he left office working to polish his image, ever confident that history would erase the blemishes.

"One hundred years from now, what will be remembered was that it was done," he told reporters after clinching the Canada-U.S. free trade deal.