what cause the death of Brian Mulroney? Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister, whose statesmanship on what he called “great causes,” from free trade and acid rain in North America to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, gave way to accusations of financial misdoing and influence-peddling after he left office, died on Thursday in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 84. A spokesman for his daughter Caroline Mulroney, a cabinet minister in Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government, said Mr. Mulroney died in a hospital after a fall at his home in Palm Beach. “He died peacefully, surrounded by family,” Ms. Mulroney wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Born into a blue-collar family in northeastern Quebec, Mr. Mulroney transcended his small-town roots to become a prosperous lawyer and business executive before seeking and attaining high office as a conservative, rising to prime minister in 1984. He won re-election by a convincing margin in 1988. His popularity had much to do with his persona: With a liking for immaculately tailored dark blue double-breasted suits and always impeccably coifed, Mr. Mulroney was a skilled debater and orator and always ready with a crowd-pleasing joke to preface his speeches.His popularity had much to do with his persona: With a liking for immaculately tailored dark blue double-breasted suits and always impeccably coifed, Mr. Mulroney was a skilled debater and orator and always ready with a crowd-pleasing joke to preface his speeches. Ingrid Saumart, writing in the Montreal newspaper La Presse, once called him “dynamic, bilingual and seductive.” Aides promoted him as the Canadian version of Ronald Reagan. But haunted by a faltering economy and high unemployment, and saying that he had lost enthusiasm for the job, he stepped down in 1993 with the worst Canadian poll ratings of the 20th century. He handed power over to Kim Campbell, who became Canada’s first female prime minister but lost a disastrous election months later. Mr. Mulroney was known as the Canadian leader who led the country into the North American Free Trade Agreement, with the United States and Mexico, a pact signed in December 1992, and as the author of an overhaul of Canada’s tax regime.He prided himself on being a confidant of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; on promoting a thaw between Moscow and Washington in the closing days of the Cold War; and on going much further than either the United States or Britain in imposing sanctions against white-ruled South Africa to press for the release of Nelson Mandela and the dismantling of apartheid. For all that, there was a darker, less visible side to him. In 2005, a book of edited transcripts of hundreds of hours of taped interviews recorded over many years was published by a veteran journalist, Peter C. Newman. The transcripts showed Mr. Mulroney to be, in the words of Clifford Krauss of The New York Times, a “foul-mouthed, insecure man with an enemies list that sprawls from Vancouver to Halifax.age Moreover, Mr. Mulroney acknowledged only many years after his resignation that he had entered into an unpublicized business relationship — not, he insisted, during his days as prime minister — with Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist at the heart of kickback scandals in both his native Germany and his adoptive Canada. ‘My Biggest Mistake’ In testimony at an inquiry in December 2007, Mr. Mulroney said he had taken cash payments from Mr. Schreiber in $1,000 bills in hotel rooms. He described the transactions an “error of judgment,” but he said he had done nothing illegal. Both he and Mr. Schreiber described the money as payments for lobbying on behalf of the German company Thyssen, later known as ThyssenKrupp, which was hoping to build a factory for light armored vehicles in Canada. (Mr. Mulroney always denied being involved in a separate scandal linked to Canada’s acquisition of Airbus airplanes. After the leak in 1995 of an official letter linking him to the affair, he sued the government for defamation and was awarded $2.1 million in 1997.)