MONTREAL, March 24, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - Former prime minister Brian Mulroney was remembered Saturday as a man who loved his country "with all his heart," as mourners bid farewell to Canada's last Cold War leader.

Canadian ministers, business leaders and friends were among the crowd at the state funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica, where Mulroney's flag-draped coffin arrived accompanied by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the military and his family.

Canadians have been able to pay their respects in recent days to Mulroney, who died last month at age 84, at a lying-in-state in the capital Ottawa, and a lying-in-repose in Montreal.

"He loved this country with all his heart. And he didn't just love Canada in the abstract sense. He loved Canadians," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in his eulogy.

"He loved hearing their stories. He loved connecting with people. He was incredibly generous with everyone," the prime minister added.

For his daughter Caroline, 49, "No one gave a speech like my dad. With his beautiful baritone voice, his sense of humor and his impeccable timing. My dad held an audience in the palm of his hand."

As Canada's 18th prime minister, Mulroney made his political mark in the 1980s securing a ground-breaking free trade agreement with the United States that later expanded to include Mexico.

He also opposed apartheid in South Africa, helped secure a landmark treaty on acid rain with Washington and a global deal to phase out ozone-depleting substances.

A lawyer by training, with twinkling blue eyes, he led his Progressive Conservatives in 1984 to win the largest majority government in history, bringing an end to almost two decades of Liberal rule in Ottawa.

He would go on to bring in a consumption tax still reviled by Canadians to this day. His efforts to drive constitutional reform, in large part to bring wayward Quebec into the fold, however, ended in failure.

Less than three months after his exit in 1993, the Tories suffered a humiliating election defeat that saw the party's number of seats in the House of Commons reduced from 151 to two.

Mulroney briefly came out of retirement in 2017 at Trudeau's behest to advise on a new continental trade deal.

He worked behind the scenes for months to convince his occasional golfing buddy Donald Trump not to walk away from the talks to revamp NAFTA.

A new agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, came into effect in July 2020.