6 Cabinet Aides Fired in Major Canada Shuffle

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced a major Cabinet reorganization Monday in a move to revitalize his government, which has been shocked by scandal and hindered by political awkwardness.

Mulroney shifted more than half of the 40 members of his Cabinet into different jobs, dismissing six of the ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Erik H. Nielsen, and adding eight new officials to his governing council.

The prime minister led his Progressive Conservative Party into power 22 months ago with the largest majority in the history of the Canadian House of Commons--211 seats against 71 for the combined opposition.

Creative Initiatives

Although Mulroney has presided over some important economic gains and is credited with several creative foreign policy initiatives, his government has fallen steadily and markedly in public opinion polls, owing largely to what analysts call a perception that he is untrustworthy and that many of his ministers are inept.

“After a period of two years in September, it’s time for a change,” Mulroney told reporters after swearing in the new Cabinet in Ottawa.

The most recent polls gave Mulroney and his Tories, as the Progressive Conservatives are popularly known, a public approval rating as low as 31% and no higher than 36%, compared with a 39% approval rating for the Liberal Party and 24% for the moderately socialistic New Democratic Party.

Mulroney aides have said privately for several weeks that the prime minister would reorganize the Cabinet following Parliament’s summer adjournment, which came last week, and then spend the summer working to rebuild grass-roots support around the nation, particularly in Quebec and Ontario, Canada’s two largest provinces.

Political Calamities

The decline of public confidence in Mulroney paralleled a series of political disasters that included resignations of five Cabinet members, including that of powerful Minister of Regional Industrial Expansion Sinclair M. Stevens, who quit earlier this year pending a judicial inquiry into conflict-of-interest allegations.

A defense minister resigned last year after it was disclosed that he had visited a striptease bar near a Canadian military base in West Germany. Another senior Cabinet officer was fired after he approved the sale to the public of canned tuna that was rancid.

Mulroney also has suffered politically by changing policies, shifts that his aides blame on poor advice from some of his Cabinet members. A prominent example was a botched effort to reform Canada’s welfare system to eliminate payments to wealthy citizens. The effort was dropped after an unanticipated public outcry against what was seen as an attack on the universal nature of the aid program.

Nielsen, who was defense minister as well as deputy prime minister before Monday’s shuffle, was strongly criticized in recent weeks for his handling in Parliament of the conflict-of-interest charges against Stevens.

‘Stonewalling Tactics’

One Mulroney supporter in Parliament accused Nielsen of employing “stonewalling tactics” and added: “He made it seem like we had no respect for Parliament or the rules,” something that he called especially unfortunate “because Mulroney wrote the (conflict-of-interest) rules.”

Nielsen was replaced as deputy prime minister by Donald F. Mazankowski, formerly transport minister, and as defense minister by Perrin Beatty, formerly solicitor general.

Another major reason for the Cabinet overhaul was to shore up support for the Tories in Quebec, long a Liberal power center and one that backed Mulroney in the last election.

Although Mulroney has pushed dozens of government projects for French-speaking Quebec, Tory support there has all but disappeared, falling below 25% in the polls.

In an effort to reverse the plunge, he brought four Quebec Tories newly into the Cabinet and gave higher-ranking portfolios to two Quebec ministers in the old Cabinet.

Canadian governments traditionally are balanced to take regional and ethnic interests into account, a concern shown by Mulroney when he promoted David E. Crombie, one of the party’s most respected members, to minister of multiculturalism.

Strict Law Proposal

Another controversial minister, John C. Crosbie, was moved from the Justice Ministry to the little-noticed Transport Ministry. Crosbie, once a major rival of Mulroney for the party leadership, recently caused a furor by proposing so strict an anti-smut law that even traditional anti-pornography groups were offended.

Mulroney retained some incumbents in their jobs, notably former Prime Minister Joe Clark as external affairs minister and Michael H. Wilson as minister of finance.