OTTAWA—The voice coming down the phone line was strong — and free.
Just the day before, Nelson Mandela — the former leader of the African National Congress — had been freed from jail after more than 25 years behind bars.
Now on this February day in 1990, he was conveying to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney his appreciation for Canada’s efforts to turn back South Africa’s anti-apartheid policies.
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“We regard you as one of our great friends because of the solid support we have received from you and Canada over the years,” Mulroney relates Mandela as saying in the phone call.
Mandela would echo that thanks in person mere months after his historic release. Speaking in Ottawa in June 1990, he saluted the “great Canadian people.”
“They have proved themselves not only to be steadfast friends of our struggling people but great defenders of human rights and the idea of democracy itself,” he told Parliament.
But while he was a free man, he had yet to truly enjoy freedom. Mandela warned that the policies of apartheid remained in place and that its opponents were still being killed and maimed.
“We still have a struggle ahead of us . . . we must ensure that the movement toward the final abolition of the apartheid system is not interrupted,” he said.
Still the visit was seen as a crowning moment for Canada, allowing the country to bask in the success of its anti-apartheid efforts.
That effort dates back to 1961 when then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker opposed South Africa’s membership in the Commonwealth.
But it was Mulroney in the 1980s who defied opponents in his caucus, cabinet and the government bureaucracy to challenge white minority rule in South Africa.
In the words of author and academic Linda Freeman, Mulroney was the “protagonist rather than conciliator,” openly challenging British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on her refusal to enact tough sanctions against the African nation.
In his autobiography, Brian Mulroney Memoirs, the former prime minister was blunt about his reasons for taking on South Africa’s racial policies.
“I viewed apartheid with the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis,” Mulroney wrote.
But Freeman cautions that Canada’s record on apartheid is not as cut and dry as “mythology” suggests. Her book, Ambiguous Champion: Canada and South Africa in the Trudeau and Mulroney years, concludes that for much of that period, “this was the era when Canadian governments chose both to trade and condemn.”
“There was this suggestion, which has been morphed into a mythology, that Canada was the leader in the anti-apartheid struggle,” Freeman said in an interview.
“Meanwhile, for a very, very long time the commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle was very token,” she said.
“I think Canada, along with the U.S. and many other Western powers, believed until very late in the day that the white majority rule of the apartheid regime was there to stay so they weren’t prepared to take on Canadian economic or even strategic interests,” said Freeman, a professor of political science at Carleton University.
She says it wasn’t until Mulroney took office in 1984 that Canada truly tackled the white majority regime head-on by implementing sanctions.
Mulroney set the tone within his first year of office. In 1985, he had External Affairs Minister Joe Clark pull together a package of possible sanctions against South Africa. The former prime minister writes that he wasn’t pleased with Clark’s cautious approach but pinned the blame on foot-dragging bureaucrats not keen to rock the boat.
The sanctions were revealed at a July 6, 1985, cabinet meeting in Baie Comeau. In addition to restricting official contacts between the two countries, the steps also included cancelling export aid, scrapping a tax agreement and tightening an arms embargo.
He pushed the issue at high-level international forums such as the Commonwealth and the G7, as it was known back then. But in seeking to rally political leaders to the cause, Mulroney faced two significant hurdles — Britain’s Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Mulroney would tangle with Thatcher repeatedly on the issue, both publicly and behind closed doors, notably at Commonwealth gatherings.
At one point, Thatcher wrote Mulroney to declare that she was “firmly opposed” to additional economic sanctions, calling such an approach “fundamentally mistaken” and “counterproductive.”
“I see no point in creating unemployment in Britain in order to increase black unemployment in South Africa,” she told Mulroney, according to his memoirs.
Thatcher’s refusal to accept further sanctions risked causing a split in the Commonwealth. Going into a Commonwealth meeting in Nassau, the Queen asked Mulroney to work with other leaders to ensure that didn’t happen.
“She and I became quite close during the fight to free Mandela. She was very unhappy, as you know, with the British government’s position, as articulated by Margaret (Thatcher),” Mulroney recalled in an interview with the Star’s Susan Delacourt.
At the meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Nassau in October 1985, Mulroney huddled with the leaders of India, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Australia to craft a compromise that would get Thatcher’s support. They were successful in getting the Nassau Accord, which gave Pretoria six months to respond to economic measures.
From there, Mulroney flew to New York and used his maiden speech at the United Nations to condemn the racist regime in South Africa and warn of stern reprisals unless there was “fundamental change.”
In a speech that drew a lengthy ovation, Mulroney said that apartheid “desecrates international standards of morality and arouses universal revulsion.
“Only one country has established colour as the hallmark of systematic inequality and repression,” Mulroney said.
He urged leaders at the UN to keep up the pressure on South Africa and warned that Canada would invoke total sanctions if it didn’t see change.
“If there is no progress in the dismantling of apartheid, our relations with South Africa may have to be severed completely,” Mulroney told the assembly.
“Our purpose is not to punish or penalize, but to hasten peaceful change,” he said.
“The way of dialogue starts with the repudiation of apartheid. It ends with the full and equal participation of all South Africans in the governing of their country,” Mulroney told the assembly.
But Mulroney would continue to lock horns with Thatcher, including at a mini-summit of six Commonwealth countries in London in the summer of 1986.
“He was bargaining as only Mulroney could. He really called her on it and she was furious with him,” Freeman told the Star.
The extent of those tensions was revealed at a cabinet meeting days later in Ottawa as ministers gathered on Parliament Hill got a debrief of the showdown.
“The meetings . . . almost foundered on the fundamental disagreement over the effectiveness of sanctions,” according to the minutes of the high-level meeting.
“The Commonwealth would have split without the prime minister,” say the minutes, obtained by the Star under Access to Information legislation.
The account of the meeting painted Canada as leading an “international movement” against the South African regime. “The movement is right and it is popular,” the minutes say.
Indeed, as he turned up the pressure on the international stage, Mulroney had another thing going for him — public opinion. Freeman says that protests in South Africa had “galvanized” international opinion, leading to pressure from unions, churches and campuses for action.
Freeman writes that after August 1986, few further concrete measures were taken; by late 1987, the Canadian government’s activist policy on South Africa had “run out of steam.”
By that time, Freeman argues that Mulroney was more consumed by domestic issues — the free trade agreement, the 1988 election and constitutional reform.
“With the exception of Commonwealth meetings, Mulroney lost interest in the issue,” she writes.
She concludes that Canada’s sanction policy started in the summer of 1985, reached a peak the following August and “dwindled” at the end of the decade.
“The doldrums into which Canadian policy fell in the late 1980s began to tarnish the sparkling reputation earned a few years earlier,” Freeman writes.
But true to Mandela’s request, Canada was among the last to remove its sanctions. It wasn’t until September 1993 that then-Prime Minister Kim Campbell lifted all trade, investment and financial sanctions against South Africa.
Today, Freeman calls Canada’s attitude to South Africa “indifferent.”
“Especially as the current Harper government has made it quite clear they’re not interested in Africa. That’s kind of extended to South Africa,” he said.
“There are opportunities of all kinds being lost here, all over the continent but also in South Africa,” she said.