The territory’s Yukon Party and New Democrats have expressed their sorrow about Thursday’s passing of former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

He died in Florida, 20 days before his 85th birthday, after having been hospitalized following a fall.

“On behalf of the Yukon Party, I offer condolences to the family of the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney after his passing,” Yukon Party Leader Currie Dixon said this morning.

“Prime Minister Mulroney was a friend to the Yukon, and his government provided many investments we benefit from today, in particular the Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport.

“He also appointed the airport’s namesake, the Honourable Erik Nielsen, to the highest cabinet position held by a Yukoner in Canadian history. Nielsen served as deputy prime minister and de facto House Leader under Mulroney,” Dixon noted.

“Mulroney’s tenure as prime minister left an indelible mark on our country. He will be remembered by Yukoners and Canadians for generations to come,” Dixon added.

NDP Leader Kate White recalled that Mulroney “led Commonwealth nations in opposing South Africa’s racist policy of apartheid.

“He took meaningful action to ban chemicals that otherwise were ruining the ozone layer. I offer my condolences to his friends and family as they mourn his passing,” White said.

Mulroney’s only official visit to the Yukon occurred in November 1983, when he was still the Progressive Conservative official Opposition leader.

Some 460 people crammed into the Sheffield Hotel (now the Sternwheeler) in downtown Whitehorse to hear Mulroney fete Nielsen’s 25 years in politics.

“He is the first guy I consult in the morning, and the last at night,” Mulroney boomed to his rapt audience that night.

“There is no information to which I’m privy to as leader of the party from which Erik is excluded. He richly deserves the affection and remarks in the kind of tribute being paid to him tonight.”

Over that period, he said, “Erik has done so much for the Yukon; it’s been a quarter-century of remarkable service to the Yukon and to Canada.

“He has been and remains an individual who is tremendously loyal, a genius, consistent, talented, and always, always, always wants to get rid of the Grits.”

Mulroney also offered Yukoners some tart condemnations of then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau – who announced his departure from politics 40 years ago Thursday and who died in September 2000.

Mulroney scornfully quoted from an article Trudeau had written for a Quebec newspaper in 1963: “The political philosophy of the Liberal party is simplicity itself – say anything, think anything, better still, think nothing. But put us in power, for we are best fit to govern.”

At an earlier news conference at the Whitehorse airport during that 1983 visit, Star editor Jim Butler – then the paper’s political reporter – asked Mulroney about his party’s long-held promise to push for the constitutional changes necessary for Yukon provincehood if Yukoners endorsed such an ideal in a referendum.

Butler asked him if such a proposition was practically and financially feasible for a jurisdiction of just 23,000 people – the territory’s population at the time.

“Can you justify making a state out of Vermont or Rhode Island with 550,000 people?” Mulroney responded, with his wife, Mila, standing beside him.

“Countries are not built on logic; they are built on sentiment and affection and a desire to be together, not mathematics and geography.”

After the Conservatives’ landslide election victory on Sept. 4, 1984, Mulroney appointed Nielsen as his second-in-command.

Gradually, the two men drifted apart over differences on policy and patronage practices, and Nielsen suddenly resigned from the cabinet in June 1986. He died in 2008.

Today, Butler remembered local reporters positioning themselves for that airport news conference 41 years ago.

He jokingly told Mulroney that he had unsuccessfully tried to locate the homestead of Mulroney’s father, Ben, during a childhood trip from Montreal to Baie-Comeau, Que., the Mulroneys’ home community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.

The future PM chuckled. He then modestly replied that during his 1960s visit to Baie-Comeau, the future reporter hadn’t looked low enough on one of the town’s hills to find the dwelling.

“To watch time slowly transform quick quips and casual exchanges into encounters with history is a remarkable experience,” Butler said.

“I’ve been reflecting on the amazing privilege of having had the opportunity to have talked issues with two of the most dominant builders of the Progressive Conservative Party movement going back almost 70 years – Brian Mulroney and John Diefenbaker, who Mulroney idolized.

“Obviously, they were tremendously contentious but historically dominant and impactful figures who, above all, loved this country profoundly.”