The 18th Prime Minister made history on this date in 1986, becoming the first-ever Canadian leader to address Japan’s Diet. Brian Mulroney’s address to Japanese legislators came immediately after the G7 Summit was held in Tokyo that year.
He recalled the event in his Memoirs. “Terrorists had tried to disrupt the summit, and I chose to highlight this unfortunate reality of life in the late twentieth century,” Mr. Mulroney wrote. “None of us could have imagined then the horrors of 9/11and the several other attacks destined to come in between. 1986 was also to be the year I overruled both our intelligence services and my own solicitor general, who had advised me not to host the 1987 Commonwealth Summit in Vancouver for fear that Sikh extremists there would make an attempt on the life of India’s Rajiv Gandhi. There is no way a prime minister should ever give in to terrorist threats, even though the tragedy of the Air India bombing had proved that murderous terrorists were on the loose in British Columbia.”
Prime Minister Mulroney pulled no punches when addressing the Diet. “In their indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent, terrorists demonstrate their disdain for common decency; violence and anarchy are their only accomplishments,” he said. “They murder the innocent to terrorize the living.”
The speech remains one of the most powerful speeches ever delivered by a Canadian Prime Minister to a foreign audience.
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Years after his speech to the Diet, Mr. Mulroney was awarded, at a special ceremony at the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa, one of Japan’s highest honours, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. He is shown here that night with Ambassador Ishikawa of Japan./caption
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.
Years after his speech to the Diet, Mr. Mulroney was awarded, at a special ceremony at the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa, one of Japan’s highest honours, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. He is shown here that night with Ambassador Ishikawa of Japan./caption
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.