I saw strengths and weaknesses up close

Covering the late Brian Mulroney wasn’t as easy as it looked.

- MARTIN REGG COHN

Endowed with powerful B.S. meters, journalists were quick to see through the evident vanity and insecurity of the late, great prime minister. Yet few reporters could look beyond the bombast and blarney to see the vision and foresight hiding in plain sight.

All these decades later, history now looks kindly upon a politician so unpopular in his time. For Mulroney — at his best and worst — was nothing if not aspirational, consequential, paradoxical.

Beholden to big business, he cultivated labour leaders. Ferociously competitive toward his adversaries, he reached out in the aftermath (often with coveted diplomatic appointments). Promoting resource extraction throughout his life, he defended the environment passionately. A Quebecer in search of national unity, his constitutional gambits ultimately proved divisive as they unravelled. A self-styled corruption fighter before politics, he was forever plagued by scandal.

As a young reporter following the prime minister across the country in the late 1980s, I watched him revel in his small town roots in Baie-Comeau, hobnobbing with Bay Street tycoons in private clubs, and glad-handing the hoi polloi. Never quite comfortable in his own skin, he was always at ease with the people he was courting — owners one moment, unionists the next, voters every minute, reporters always.

Mulroney had an almost pathological love-hate relationship with the media. He loved to be loved and could not bear being unloved. Mostly he hated to be ignored. Some of his best friends were jour