Wealth & Money Quote by Brian Mulroney

Mulroney’s line is a political tightrope act dressed up as inevitability. “This is the price of going forward” frames controversy as a toll booth on the highway of modernity: you can complain, but you can’t pretend there’s an alternate route. It’s classic statesman’s rhetoric, not because it’s lofty, but because it tries to reorganize reality into a single, disciplined narrative of progress.

The list that follows - tax reform, the GST, trade - is doing more work than it seems. It’s a cadence of competence, a proof-of-motion. By stacking policy pillars, Mulroney creates momentum, then leverages that momentum to reposition environmental protection as non-negotiable rather than ornamental. The subtext is defensive: he knows the suspicion that governments treat the environment as the first bargaining chip when growth-minded reforms get expensive. So he preempts the cynicism with a line that sounds like a pledge and functions like a constraint: whatever deals get cut in the name of competitiveness, “this will not be done at the cost of the environment.”

Context matters. In Mulroney’s Canada, free trade debates, fiscal restructuring, and a broader neoliberal turn collided with rising public awareness of acid rain, cross-border pollution, and the idea that economic integration could outrun regulatory guardrails. He’s speaking to two audiences at once: business interests who want certainty that “moving ahead” won’t stall, and an anxious public that needs assurance the country won’t purchase prosperity by liquidating its air and water. The brilliance is in the phrasing: environment isn’t framed as anti-growth. It’s framed as the boundary that makes growth legitimate.