Politics & Power Quote by Brian Mulroney

Mulroney’s line has the blunt, managerial force of a leader who knows how governments actually move: they don’t “care” about issues, they rank them. “Reposition” is the tell. It’s not a poetic plea to love nature; it’s a directive about bureaucratic gravity - budgets, cabinet time, tradeoffs, and the brutal reality that what isn’t “on top” gets treated as optional, or postponed until it becomes a crisis.

The phrasing also carries a quiet indictment. If the environment needs to be repositioned, it has been displaced - by jobs, inflation, national unity fights, geopolitical fires, the daily churn that rewards short-term wins. Mulroney is acknowledging the political temptation to treat environmental policy as a luxury item: good to mention at summits, easy to dilute in implementation.

Context matters: Mulroney governed at a moment when environmental issues were becoming unavoidably international. Acid rain, ozone depletion, cross-border pollution - these aren’t problems you can solve with a single domestic law and a photo op. The “national and international” pairing signals an early recognition of environmental politics as diplomacy, not just regulation. It’s also a subtle defense of multilateralism: if you want a serious environment agenda, you’re committing to negotiation, standards, and shared constraints.

The intent, then, is powerfully practical: elevate the environment from a department to a doctrine. Put it at the top, and everything else - energy, industry, foreign policy - has to answer to it.