Brian Mulroney says he should have fired Lucien Bouchard well before his former friend and Quebec lieutenant left cabinet just weeks before the collapse of the Meech Lake constitutional accord.
In an interview before the release of his memoirs next week, Mr. Mulroney tells CTV News that Mr. Bouchard supported Quebec's unilingual sign law despite pledges not to do so.
"I made a mistake and I should have fired him then," Mr. Mulroney said in the interview, which will be broadcast in a special two-hour documentary on Sunday, the day before the autobiography, Brian Mulroney: Memoirs, is released.
Mr. Bouchard left the cabinet in May, 1990, in one of the most controversial political breakups in Canadian history, and went on to form the separatist Bloc Québécois. The accord collapsed in June.
However, several months earlier, the government of Quebec used the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to uphold the French-language sign law in the face of a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada. Mr. Bouchard was criticized at the time for failing to stand up for anglophone Quebeckers.
Mr. Mulroney said he should have let Mr. Bouchard go at that point, before the then-environment minister turned on the government for proposed amendments to Meech Lake. Around the same time, Mr. Bouchard also wrote a letter of encouragement to the Parti Québécois.
"I called him over to 24 Sussex where he reluctantly appeared and I fired him," Mr. Mulroney said. For his part, Mr. Bouchard said at the time that he quit the cabinet.
The former prime minister also said Mr. Bouchard was secretly planning to establish the Bloc before leaving the government.
"He had cooked up the deal with Parizeau weeks before while he was a member of my cabinet. When he was meeting with me, they were meeting secretly with the separatists."
Indeed, former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau would later acknowledge that, weeks before the Bouchard resignation, he had ordered then PQ vice-president Bernard Landry to recruit disaffected Quebec nationalist MPs to form a pro-sovereignty party in Ottawa.
Mr. Mulroney's wife, Mila, also appears in the documentary, saying she was never completely at ease with Mr. Bouchard.
"I couldn't put my finger on it, but … I was just never totally comfortable."
Mr. Mulroney concludes that there will be no rapprochement with his former friend.
"He won't come to my funeral … He can do whatever he wants, but he won't come to my funeral."
The two men were close friends since their time as law students at Laval University, with Mr. Bouchard working as an adviser on Mr. Mulroney's failed 1976 campaign for the Progressive Conservative Party leadership.
Mr. Bouchard had been a strong nationalist, but in 1985 he accepted an invitation from Mr. Mulroney to become Canada's ambassador to France. In 1988, Mr. Bouchard joined the government, supporting the accord.
Mr. Mulroney's remarks toward his former friend and rival follow a harsh attack on another foe, the late Pierre Trudeau. In an interview, Mr. Mulroney questioned the former Liberal prime minister's fitness as a moral leader because he opposed the Second World War. The remarks rankled many Liberals, including Mark Lalonde, a friend of Mr. Trudeau and a former cabinet colleague.
"He seems to be one of those persons who thinks that by trying to pull somebody down you lift yourself up," Mr. Lalonde said. "By now he should know that this doesn't work, and frankly, I thought it was gross."
One political scientist said Thursday that most Canadians have moved on from the Constitutional issues, adding, however, that Mr. Mulroney's criticisms were needless.
"I thought Mulroney was unnecessarily personal when he attacked Trudeau for what happened in World War Two," said Peter Woolstencroft of the University of Waterloo.
But Mr. Woolstencroft added it's fair to go after Mr. Trudeau for failing to get Quebec to sign the Constitution. Among other things, it opened the door for the charismatic Mr. Bouchard to help lead the Yes forces in the 1995 sovereignty referendum, which they lost by a hair's breadth.
The hole in the Constitution could allow for the emergence of another such leader, he said.
Others said Mr. Mulroney's criticisms may be a way to deflect attention from other, more controversial aspects of his career, such as his previous association with German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.
"What better way to create a headline than to go after Trudeau? I think it's a strategy, and I think it's been relatively well executed," said Patrick Gossage, who was Mr. Trudeau's press secretary.
"It could come back and bite him, but it's worked in the short term."
Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Schreiber have been locking horns over cash payments totalling $300,000 that Mr. Schreiber gave to Mr. Mulroney between 1993 and 1994, after Mr. Mulroney left office. Mr. Schreiber has launched a lawsuit against his former associate, alleging that Mr. Mulroney did not do any work for the money.