Brian Mulroney, Canada's 18th prime minister, whose wisdom on what he calls the “big questions,” from free trade and acid rain in North America to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, is facing accusations of financial misconduct and influence after leaving office. died Thursday in a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida, where he resided. He is 84 years old.

A spokesperson for his daughter Caroline Mulroney said Mr. Mulroney was hospitalized after a fall at his home. MS. Mulroney was a minister in the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party government. “He died peacefully, surrounded by his family,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Born into a working-class family in northeastern Quebec, Mr. Mulroney transcended his childhood roots to become a successful lawyer and business executive before running for and rising to high office as a Conservative, becoming prime minister in 1984. He was re-elected by a convincing margin in 1988.

His popularity has a lot to do with his personality: with a penchant for neat, double-collared navy suits and always looking dapper, Mr. Mulroney was a talented orator and orator and was always ready to begin his speech with a joke that pleased everyone.

Ingrid Saumart, in the Montreal newspaper La Presse, describes him as “dynamic, bilingual and attractive”. Aides billed him as Canada's version of Ronald Reagan.

However, haunted by the slowing economy and high unemployment, and saying he was losing enthusiasm for the job, he resigned in 1993 amid the worst Canadian polls of the 20th century. He handed power to Kim Campbell, who became Canada's first female prime minister, but lost a few months later in an ugly election.

Mr. Mulroney is known as Canada's leader in joining the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico, an agreement signed in December 1992, and as the author of a overhaul of Canada's tax system.

He was proud to be a close friend of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush; favored the rapprochement between Moscow and Washington at the end of the Cold War; and went much further than the United States or Britain in imposing sanctions on white-ruled South Africa to press for the release of Nelson Mandela and the abolition of apartheid .

However, it has a darker, less visible side. In 2005, a book containing redacted transcripts of hundreds of hours of recorded interviews over many years was published by veteran journalist Peter C. Newman, showing that Mr. Mulroney was a man who, as Clifford Krauss put it, in the New York Times, was “rude and insecure, with a list of enemies that stretched from Vancouver to Halifax.”

It was only several years after his resignation that he admitted to having established an unpublicized business relationship – not, he said, during his time as prime minister – with Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist at the center corruption scandals. in his native Germany and in Canada as his adopted country.

Testifying at an inquiry in December 2007, Mr. Mulroney said he received cash payments from Mr. Schreiber, in connection with the $1,000 bill for the hotel room, described the transaction as an “error of judgment”. However, he said he had not done anything illegal. He and Mr. Schreiber described the money as payment for lobbying by the German company Thyssen, then known as ThyssenKrupp, which hoped to build an armored vehicle factory in Canada.

(Mr. Mulroney has consistently denied involvement in another scandal related to Canada's acquisition of Airbus planes. After legal letters linking him to the affair were leaked in 1995, he sued the government for defamation and received $2.1 million in 1997.)

Ms. Mulroney and Mr. Schreiber disagreed on the amounts involved, with the former prime minister saying he received three payments totaling $75,000, for a total of $225,000 and Mr. Schreiber saying he had distributed $300,000.

“The biggest mistake of my life, by far,” Mr. Mulroney said in 2007: “I discovered Karlheinz Schreiber very early. » Ms. Schreiber was deported to Germany in 2009 and sentenced to six and a half years in prison in 2013.

When Judge Jeffrey J. Oliphant, who led the investigation, issued a four-volume report in 2010, he said the meetings between the two men “strongly support the notion that financial transactions between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney is inappropriate.

The judge's choice of words was viewed by Mr. Mulroney as a much broader criticism of his credibility.

Columnist Andrew Coyne wrote in Maclean's Canada magazine in 2010: “It's not that Mulroney did business with Schreiber, nor that he was so determined to hide it. But because he lied about it: he lied to keep it a secret, of course, but he lied more shockingly after it was no longer a secret – particularly in his testimony to the Oliphant Inquiry . Of course, the judge did not use such precise terms. Yet, point by point, the meaning is clear. He didn't believe what Mulroney told him.

For Mr. Mulroney himself maintained that the affair did not cause irreparable damage to his reputation. In a lengthy article published in 2013, Macleans magazine reported that he had shed the shame attached to his name in conservative circles. He was “fully welcomed back into the halls of power,” the article said, while as a representative of a major international law firm in Montreal, he “traveled the world.” He has also held leadership positions in private equity, hospitality and other industries.

A full obituary will appear soon.