When I think about the major problems facing Canada and which prime ministers laid the groundwork, three names come to mind.
Who sold off our nationalized companies, like airlines, leading to worsening service and impossible customer service departments? Who cut funding for passenger rail and relegated it to eternal delays on freight-controlled tracks? Who cut funding to important social services like old age security, employment insurance and housing? Who gave the American-owned “Canadian” oil industry an iron grip over so much of our political system, setting our emissions trajectory toward the moon?
The PMs who led that charge, often called the “neoliberal turn,” a.k.a. Canada’s shift to enshittification, are undoubtedly Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.
So when I saw that a National Film Board (NFB) documentary about Mulroney was showing at TIFF, I knew I had to see it. Along with just about every lefty writer in Canada, I’ve authored my share about the damage that Mulroney did, which subsequent PMs like Justin Trudeau and (of course) Stephen Harper have not reversed.
Finally, I thought, we’ll have an entertaining and insightful look at his legacy. And the timing would be great too, because Canadian media is still whitewashing his legacy (including his late and over-stated opposition to South African apartheid), and his kids are now so prominent in media and politics.
But Matthew Rankin did not make that movie. Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney doesn’t cover any of Mulroney’s hugely consequential time in office. It’s about his journey to get there.
By following the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada leadership hopefuls as they vie for the throne from 1976 to 1984, the film creates a sort of circus act.
News clips, convention footage and home videos are spliced together, spun around, coloured in neon and backed with a high-energy 80s electronic soundtrack. Rankin, who also edited the film, produces a really compelling sensation of being in that era and watching a bunch of middle-aged white guys fumble over themselves while trying to become the next prime minister.
When portraying Mulroney’s speech at the 1976 PC convention, for example, Rankin uses collage and animation to dress him up like a flamboyant count or pimp, ascending into the balloons and rafters as he speaks.
The clips move at a dizzying pace. Rankin inserts endless abrupt cuts and mini-acts with fake title cards for made-up NFB films like Brian Mulroney Presents: Brian Mulroney.
I laughed a lot and learned a few things about the personalities of familiar names like Joe Clark (zero charisma, awful French), John Diefenbaker (the elder statesman) and Liberal leader John Turner (the serial butt-patter). Rankin has said in interviews that he was obsessed with the TV footage from the time and how effective Mulroney was at marketing himself. He certainly succeeds in capturing that.
But at a certain point, I realized that I was learning next to nothing about the ideological and policy difference between Mulroney and, well, basically, anyone.
NDP leader Ed Broadbent is made the butt of some jokes when he starts talking at debates about defending healthcare and then Rankin cuts him off with an edit mid-sentence. An awkward silence is added in for effect, and the film goes on to the next candidate.
The focus is not the substance of what they’re saying but moreso on which leader will be popular enough to win elections, particularly in Quebec, where the Liberals had continually crushed the PCs.
I checked a few other reviews to see how the film was being received and was irritated to see a writer for IndieWire say that, “The conservatives in Ladies and Gentlemen professed the value of public institutions and social programs, environmental protections and cultural diversity, a far cry from the hyper-individualist, zealously intolerance (sic) of the movement today.”
In actuality, during the timeframe the film covers, Mulroney was laying the groundwork for a massive attack on public institutions. He was working with oil execs on a plan to gut regulations and give their companies free reign. And he was about to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth to the rich while blaming the poor. Rankin’s film covers none of this, making only general allusions to the conservatives being the party of the rich.
If the film continued into his nearly decade-long time as PM, we’d see Mulroney and his crew quickly turn into the hyper-individualist zealots so familiar in today’s conservative politics.
In his time, Mulroney racked up countless corruption scandals (look up the Airbus scandal and how his kids’ university tuitions were paid), his popularity at one point was the lowest of any prime minister ever, and he fundamentally changed the character of the country. His government planted the seeds of many of the problems we are dealing with now.
One of the final acts of Ladies and Gentlemen shows Mulroney positioning himself as the anti-corruption candidate, while John Turner has just given out a ton of cushy patronage appointments to friends of the Liberal Party (which very much happened).
Mulroney was about to put patronage into hyperdrive, but you wouldn’t know it from the film.
Fixating on horse-race antics and optics, Rankin avoids a confrontation with Mulroney’s actual legacy (and likely forecloses the possibility of anyone getting grant money to make a film about Mulroney for a long time). This film in effect compounds the ongoing whitewashing of the man, just when we need more people challenging it.
