The Karlheinz Schreiber hearings before the House of Commons ethics committee bring back a lot of memories about the nine years Brian Mulroney was in the country’s top job — some of them pleasant, others not.

However the Schreiber affair concludes, it is probably certain the Mulroney legacy is forever tarnished.

Some of the Mulroney legacy should be tarnished. Canadians lost count of the ministerial resignations and criminal charges against sitting Progressive Conservative members of Parliament and former Tory MPs during those years.

However, there are parts of the legacy that will be held up to future governments as important milestones in Canada’s development, such as free trade and the introduction of the GST.

There is also an overlooked part of this legacy that governments — particularly the current one — should look at: the Mulroney government was a master at communicating with taxpayers.

Indeed, it could be argued that the team working for Mulroney was the founder of modern government communications in this country. Up until 1988, there was no firm policy on communications with the taxpayers anywhere in government regulations. As a result, any communications with taxpayers by a federal civil servant was against the rules. Sometimes the government felt like enforcing the rules, sometimes it didn’t. Not surprisingly, civil servants told taxpayers as little as possible about government programs under such murky conditions.

The Mulroney government introduced a federal communications policy that freed civil servants to provide factual information to the media and taxpayers. The policy can still be found on the Treasury Board’s Web site to this day.

The current government may want to look at it before it imposes a blanket gag order on another department, as it recently did with Environment Canada.

But most important, the Mulroney government wasn’t afraid of controversy; and it threw vital topics such as free trade out for rousing national debate.

Free trade with the U.S. had been an issue kicking around since 1911, when voters stridently rejected reciprocity — as free trade was known then — and turfed Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government out of office.

For the rest of the 20th century, Canadian governments were reluctant to touch free trade even though the country frequently suffered through trade deficits.

In fairness, the last Pierre Trudeau Liberal government flirted with free trade but opted to introduce it on the instalment plan by starting negotiations for sectoral trade agreements with the U.S.

But it was the Mulroney government that had enough confidence in its communications ability to weather visceral opposition and successfully put its future on the line in 1988 in Canada’s second single-issue election on free trade.

There were other economic issues most governments were too risk-averse to touch such as replacement of the inefficient and illogical manufacturers’ sales tax or the lack of protection of intellectual property that was retarding research and development in the life sciences sector.

Yet those two trouble zones were central planks of the Mulroney government’s modernization agenda for the Canadian economy. Public opposition to the GST and patent drug legislation was every bit as vociferous as it was to free trade.

But the government was able to explain the need for both in such simple terms that opposition disappeared.

The GST, of course, was a key reason why the succeeding Liberal government was able to get rid of a chronic federal deficit. In the life sciences sector, R&D spending in Canada has grown to $1.2 billion a year from $106 million while drug prices have remained low compared to those in the U.S. thanks to drug patent legislation.

No politician in Canada will likely ever dare countenance unwinding free trade, the GST or even the current patent policy for drugs.

In the years following Mulroney, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien continued the aggressive communications policy of its predecessor and won public consent to the tough measures of the 1995 budget required to finally eliminate the deficit.

The current government and possibly the one that succeeds it could learn a lot about communications from both of those former governments.

Two years ago, TD Bank Financial Group quite rightly pointed out that poor productivity will continue to dog the Canadian economy until a government has the resolve and communications skill to make the issue tangible enough for voters to accept as a problem that must be solved.

@page_break@There are also plenty of other tricky issues that require national soul searching such as climate change, the end of a cheap currency, renewed infrastructure, tax cuts or the war in Afghanistan.

But before the voters are able to address them, Canada needs a government with communications skills and the resolve to maintain an ambitious agenda instead of merely reacting to one crisis after another and cherry picking simpler topics such as anti-crime measures.

Realistically, though, it may be some time before Canadians see another government with the ability to communicate on tough issues that we witnessed between 1984 and 1993. That, of course, makes what we are witnessing today at the House of Commons ethics committee all the more tragic. IE