If your only objective is to be popular, you're going to be popular but you will be known as the Prime Minister who achieved nothing.

Once you articulate an agenda, you have to follow it.

When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.

My second biggest mistake in life, for which I have no one to blame but myself, is having accepted payments in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber for a mandate he gave me after I left office... My biggest mistake in life, by far, was ever agreeing to be introduced to Karlheinz Schreiber in the first place.

Trudeau's contribution was not to build Canada but to destroy it, and I had to come in and save it.

We decided that the environment was an integral part of our policies and the political thrust of our government. We gave it the priority and we sustained it with the money required to make it happen.

The Conservatives over the years have done a great deal, from Sir John A, to Diefenbaker, and others.