Mark Mulroney says family 'loved' hearing Canadians' stories about former PM

For more than eight hours on Tuesday, the late Brian Mulroney's family — wife Mila, daughter Caroline and sons Ben, Mark and Nicolas — stood in a receiving line and greeted almost everyone who came to pay their respects to the former prime minister.

On Wednesday morning, they again took up their stations next to the flag-draped casket, the official portrait and the military honour guard. For more than four hours, they shook hands with well-wishers who offered condolences and shared stories about a key figure in Canadian politics.

«I was thinking about how tired their feet must get,» said Tony Bull, one of the people who lined up Wednesday morning.

«But it must be comforting for them to see the breadth of interest of people paying tribute to Mr. Mulroney.»

Mark Mulroney, the second youngest sibling, said greeting the public «was never even a question.»

«It started and people said, 'Oh, you can go in shifts.' And my mom says, 'We're not going in shifts, these people have waited outside for hours,'» he told CBC News host Rosemary Barton in an interview Wednesday, which would have been Brian Mulroney's 85th birthday.

«No one said I'm tired or I can't do this, ever. We've loved it. We've gotten energy from people waiting in line and the stories we hear.»

It's been a joy, said Mulroney, to hear new stories from Canadians about a man he thought he knew everything about.

«And now there's a whole new book of efforts and things that my dad put out there that we just didn't even know,» he said.

«Relationships that were created where people met around my dad or, you know, just stories that would have happened even pre-'83 or post-'93, where people said my dad reached out to them, or people said, 'We were touched dramatically by something