Lamentably obscured by the federal Liberals’ frenetic, bumbling “management” of the Jody Wilson-Raybould debacle, an economic giant quietly passed away five days ago.

Michael Wilson, long ruthlessly excoriated by those leaning to the left of the political spectrum’s centre, succumbed to cancer at the age of 81. His considerable legacy, meanwhile, will linger for generations to come.

Wilson, younger folks are reminded, became former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s stalwart minister of Finance after their bulldozing election victory in September 1984.

Previous to that, he had served in the cabinet of Joe Clark’s cup-of-coffee regime that straddled 1979 and 1980.

In the fall of 1986, word reached our offices that the Finance minister would be visiting Whitehorse and be available for an interview with yours truly, who had joined the 
Star five years earlier as its political reporter.

Given Wilson’s prominence and the turbulent environment of the Canada-U.S. free trade philosophical slugfest, editor Massey Padgham opted to join our conversation.

Clad in a casual shirt and Tory blue sweater, minister Wilson clumped up the Star’s long flight of stairs on a rainy Saturday morning.

He was a giant of a man – an image not accurately delivered by television cameras. After vise-grip-like handshakes, he seated himself in a modest chair under our collection of Ted Harrison artworks.

Times were simpler in those days – no fears of violence from some depraved wacko pacing the sidewalk; no stern-looking security personnel wearing sunglasses and earpieces; no young aide abruptly thrusting a whirling tape recorder in our faces.

Wilson’s initial inquisitive small talk extracted the revelation of Padgham’s past time in Yellowknife, and my Quebec roots.

That, as I recall, immediately elicited the Ontarian’s enthusiastic praise of the December 1985 electoral resurrection of Liberal premier Robert Bourassa – at the expense of an exhausted, post-René Lévesque, Parti Québécois government.

The three of us began a logical, business-like conversation. We discussed the breathtaking explosion in Yukon transfer payments which, under the watchful influence of MP Erik Nielsen, had taken effect in 1985.

Wilson spoke of the importance of the territories being given enough resources to engage in meaningful economic development in their ambitions for fiscal self-sufficiency and attracting greater numbers of residents.

Choosing niceness over negativity, Wilson uttered no veiled-or-otherwise putdowns of the handling of this money by the Yukon’s first NDP government, then being led by Tony Penikett.

Strictly federal-level reflections were an entirely different matter.

Relentlessly loyal to his political brand, Wilson spared no opportunity to pan his arch political rivals at every opportunity.

We inky wretches were earnestly reminded of the $30-billion-plus budgetary deficit the Conservatives had inherited from the Liberals, and of the utmost urgency to dismantle Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Program.

The Finance minister emphasized the need to pare federal program expenditures and to restore international confidence in the Canadian economy in ways that would simultaneously whittle down the ruinous 20-per-cent-plus interest rates of the early and mid-1980s.

About 25 minutes into our session came the pièce de la résistance: the hot, emotional war of words around free trade.

Respectfully but mischievously hoping to rouse the man of money into dispensing some peppery quotes, I raised a couple of the key points then-Liberal leader John Turner was repeatedly enunciating from coast to coast.

Essentially, the Liberals were arguing that a free trade agreement would create an economic and social Americanada. Our independence, as the Liberals’ subsequent 1988 election campaign ads would suggest, would vanish as easily as an eraser obliterating a pencilled-in line depicting the international border.

The Finance minister grimly set his jaw.

He drew in his tree-trunk-like legs that had been comfortably extended before him. His rational demeanour darkened as he leaned foward in his chair.

“John Turner doesn’t know what he talking about!” thundered he, eyes blazing – if not utterly smouldering – from behind his trademark gold-rimmed glasses.

The bemused Padgham and I were then regaled with a booming, lecture-like, systematic destruction of Turner’s major arguments. The Tories were keenly aware the Opposition leader was finding traction with significant numbers of Canadians.

I had indeed, as the classic saying goes, probed for and struck an extremely raw nerve.

A few moments later, having recited his piece with fine fervour and clear conviction, the minister genially bade us farewell and clumped back down the stairs, satisfactorily headed for his next engagement.

Years later, Wilson would go on to become Canada’s Ambassador to the U.S. He then made important national contributions to the discussion of mental health issues while enduring the interminable grief of his son’s suicide in 1995.

Former political adversaries and average Canadian voters who bitterly, exclusively shackle him to the hated invention of the Goods and Services Tax are grasping a mere splinter of his actions and accomplishments.

Public service sinks to its lowest levels in the form of fibbing, arrogant buffoons of MPs or senators who literally disappear for months at a time, with no explanation to their electors or colleagues, while merrily collecting full salaries and pension benefits.

The craft rises to its highest levels when it’s deftly practised by those of the dedicated mettle and principles of a Michael Wilson.

No one is immune from entrenched critics.

Wilson’s purveyors of dissidence will portray him as a privileged budget-slashing, tax-imposing dynamo, rather than someone whose measures assisted in restoring sanity to the national balance sheet.

Politics aside, Wilson was a man of integrity, decency and dignity who displayed a dogged determination to help forge the kind of Canada he wanted his children to grow up in. Even if it meant another weekend thousands of kilometres away from his family dealing with another regional media outlet.

The Wilson name means little to the millions of Canadians who have been born or have arrived at these shores since his heyday.

In the learned annals of history, it will forever mean a bounty of wisdom, probity and achievement – no matter what degree of right, centre or left political sheen one cares to cast on it.