25 Years Ago Today

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The greatest election victory in Canadian history took place on September 4, 1984, 25 years ago today. In his first national campaign, a year after his election as leader, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada to a landslide, winning 211 out of 282 seats. The party won the support of a majority of all Canadian voters, and elected MPs in every single province and territory, an achievement never attained before or since. The campaign was seen by commentators as a referendum on the generation of Liberal leadership, as a reaction to a singularly ineffective campaign by new Liberal leader John Turner, and a response to Mulroney’s promise of Canadian unity and economic change. The campaign featured one of the most powerful moments in Canadian political debate history in the confrontation between Turner and Mulroney over patronage. Pleading that he had no choice but to approve a wave of eleventh hour patronage appointments by the outgoing Trudeau government, Turner set himself up for attack. Many observers believe that the election turned on Mulroney’s response as he wheeled on Turner with pointed finger and declared angrily, “You had an option, sir. You could have said, ‘I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada’…you could have done better.” A little more than a month after that fateful night Canadians elected what would become the longest serving Conservative administration since that of Sir John A. Macdonald.

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