by Craig Oliver
Jean Chrétien created a persona for himself as the “little guy from Shawinigan” and had enough modesty to his biography that he was allowed to play the part of a common man even after he became a millionaire. His slightly garbled speech patterns only added to his Everyman appeal. Listeners sometimes strained to follow an indecipherable pronouncement, then smiled in relief when Chrétien ended with a solid point and a witty and insightful one at that.
What I saw in Chrétien was a fellow survivor. His father, a tradesman in a rural Quebec town, had struggled to give his nine children an education. Jean spent years at a gritty boarding school where, as he is fond of telling people, he had to win a fight every day on the ice rink or in the playground. He was single-minded and hard driving in pursuit of a law degree from Laval University and became a dedicated worker for his hometown Liberal organization, battling the corrupt local ward healers of the Duplessis regime. Inevitably he was elected to Parliament—at the age of just twenty-nine.
When I first met Chrétien in 1974, he was a junior minister in Pierre Trudeau’s Cabinet and, even then, a popular political figure with the public. A close friend of mine, Judd Buchanan, mentored Chrétien, who would eventually follow in Buchanan’s footsteps as minister of Indian Affairs. Chrétien and I saw a lot of each other on the social circuit and he became a likeable regular at my annual Christmas parties. He spent time listening and absorbing information, rather than attempting to dominate the conversation. He was clearly aware that Parliament Hill reporters could influence his career, and he was quick to tell self-deprecating jokes about his poor English. Nonetheless, he seemed to me almost preternaturally shrewd and seriously ambitious. Like the best populist politicians, he could analyze complex issues with street-smart intuition.
In those early years of Cabinet tenure, Chrétien ingratiated himself with the more powerful ministers and with their canny deputies, many of whom would be surprised years later to find themselves working for him. Among the elites close to Trudeau, Chrétien was regarded as a charming hick, with his thick accent and down-home humour—certainly an intellectual lightweight. My sources in the Cabinet told me that Trudeau did not hold Chrétien in particularly high regard, although he recognized him as a loyal ally with genuine political value in Quebec, if not beyond. Judd Buchanan, however, believed Chrétien had the potential to win over English-speaking Canada, where voters found him sincere and unthreatening.
Perhaps Chrétien’s greatest asset then was an immense self-confidence that allowed him to have the courage of his convictions. He hired strong staffers and knew when to follow their lead, and he did not mind being underestimated in the short term. He was looking ahead to the future. Some in the Trudeau entourage—although not the prime minister himself, it must be said—lived fast and loose lives in those years. Plenty of attractive young women, not to mention abundant booze and drugs, were available to any upwardly mobile young man so close to the seat of power. Possibly his basic nature would not have allowed it, but Chrétien did nothing that could later come back to haunt him.
A character as earthy and colourful as Chrétien could not escape the attention of my mother. She made quick and instinctive judgments about people that were seldom wrong, and I often relied on her trenchant observations. She met Chrétien at one of my Christmas get-togethers in the late 1970s and was attracted by what she regarded as his common touch. She also sensed something in him that I never did: a vulnerability born of his childhood brush with Bell’s palsy, a disorder that left him with a partial but permanent paralysis of the left side of his face. She formed a strong attachment to him and never wavered in her admiration. After he became prime minister, any criticism of Chrétien by our bureau brought a swift call from Mother, questioning my “fairness.”
Occasionally Mom’s partisanship caused me embarrassment, as during the spring 1984 Liberal leadership campaign when Jean Chrétien and John Turner were duking it out for the party’s top job. I was assigned to cover Turner’s campaign and was with his entourage in Terrace, B.C., on a day when Chrétien was also expected to arrive. Mom decided to pay a surprise visit too, and she appeared in time to interrupt my lunch with a group of Turner’s senior advisers. Before I could make introductions, she demanded to know why I was working for “that jerk, Turner.” I explained that I was covering Mr. Turner, not working for him, to which she replied, “It was damn hard to tell the difference.” She then turned to the astonished company and announced that Turner wouldn’t be prime minister for long, if ever; Chrétien would make the better leader for the country. Turner’s staff fled in horror, but Mom’s prediction turned out to be prescient. Turner won the party leadership yet later that year served as prime minister for less than three months.
But worse was to come that day in Terrace. When Chrétien’s plane landed an hour after the lunch incident, my mother ran across the airfield and wrapped her idol in a bear hug as he stepped onto the tarmac. The photographers had a field day with that shot, and it was Chrétien and not Turner who won the picture of the day in the national newspapers. One of the other reporters travelling with Chrétien wondered aloud, “Who was that crazy old gal the local Liberals had rolled out?” I had to admit she was my mother and she didn’t even live in the city.
After two electoral defeats at the hands of Brian Mulroney, John Turner resigned the Liberal helm in 1990. At the convention that year, Chrétien bested Paul Martin for the leadership of the party, inheriting an organization that was in disarray and near bankruptcy. By 1993, however, with the neophyte Kim Campbell heading the Conservatives and the NDP no threat, Chrétien led the Liberals to a resounding majority, winning seats across the country, including twenty in Quebec, this despite the strength of the Bloc, who formed the Official Opposition. He and Martin, his capable and admired finance minister, proceeded to slash spending to reduce the national deficit, with no apparent long-term ill effects on the Liberals’ popularity.
One of Chrétien’s great strengths was his ability to read the electorate’s mood on domestic issues. And while he was taking the temperature of public opinion, he fuzzed his answers about where the government stood. He got away with a lot, making fractured off-the-cuff remarks that would have discredited other politicians. Reporters tolerated Chrétien’s tortured syntax in both languages, in part because of his childhood illness, in part because they understood he was slightly dyslexic. Most of all, his malapropisms were funny and made good copy. An example: Until he had finally mastered the word, he would refuse to answer questions that he deemed to be hypo-political. The suspicion never left me that Chrétien used these wacky expressions as diverting and intentional obfuscations.
The technique was less successful in the area of foreign affairs; indeed, his poor grasp of the nuances of foreign policy generally caused him grief more than once. His first foreign trip as prime minister was to a NATO summit in Brussels, where his remarks were invariably naïve and out of sync with longstanding Western alliance positions. At one point he told reporters that Canadian peacekeepers should act like members of the Red Cross, only with guns. His artful press aide, Peter Donolo, attempted damage control, asking me to do a one-on-one interview that might cover some of the same ground and allow the prime minister to correct his earlier remarks. Reporters would then be obliged to write their stories based on the revised version. I refused, saying that I did not want to serve as a patsy for the Prime Minister’s Office. Donolo replied that if I did not agree, I would never be granted another exclusive interview with Chrétien as long as he resided at 24 Sussex. Considering that Chrétien’s government appeared to be destined for a long tenure, I caved in. I rationalized this surrender with the excuse that the prime minister was only recently elected, that he’d had no previous exposure to the grand strategies of the NATO alliance, and that it was only fair to give him a chance to find his feet.
Seven years later, however, Chrétien was still unsteady. In April 2000, he undertook a twelve-day trip to the Middle East that was so marred by gaffes and erro
rs that I dubbed it “the debacle in the desert.” Every day the accompanying foreign affairs officials had to hold off-the-record briefings with reporters to explain that what the prime minister had said wasn’t really what he meant. When Chrétien met with Yasser Arafat in Gaza, the PLO leader told him that he might issue a unilateral declaration of independence for the Palestinians. Chrétien agreed this would be a good idea. Reporters ran to their computers to write stories about the implications for Quebec sovereignty. Even as his government jet was lifting off, Chrétien held a hasty news conference to backpedal from those remarks. In Ottawa, the Opposition Reform Party demanded that the prime minister return home before he started a new Middle East war.
As the tour progressed, the relationship between the reporters and Chrétien’s staff deteriorated from frosty to hostile. At one point the elegant and usually unflappable chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, stormed into the press room and accused me of being the ringleader of a press lynch mob. “I am tired of your shit,” he declared. “You must be on a different trip than I am.”
Once back in Ottawa, Pelletier was gentleman enough to call me and apologize for his outburst. I told him I understood and admired his loyalty to his boss. Chrétien however was not so forgiving. At a cocktail party soon after, the prime minister approached me in a crowd and in a voice low enough that no one else could hear asked, “How do you manage to look yourself in the mirror every morning?” As he turned on his heel, he may not have caught my attempt to defuse the tension between us: “Actually, sir, I’m barely able to see myself in the mirror.”
Midway through his first mandate, Chrétien suffered two events that might have unnerved lesser mortals, but that summoned his survivor’s instinct and sent him back into the fray with added steel. The first was the 1995 Quebec referendum, perhaps the lowest point of Chrétien’s prime ministerial career. At the outset of that contest with the separatists, Chrétien was full of confidence. All we have to do to win, he assured me, is to keep the federalist position low profile and avoid provoking the yes vote. In speeches across the country, he counselled Canadians not to say or do anything that might give ammunition to the other side. Pierre Trudeau was told to stay mum in Montreal. In the first weeks of the campaign, I suggested to Chrétien that, as they say in old westerns, things were too quiet out there. Was trouble brewing? He insisted that a do-little strategy would win the day.
The separatists had found themselves a charismatic new champion in Lucien Bouchard, and soon matters were not unfolding as official Ottawa had predicted. On the night of the vote, October 30, I was at federalist headquarters in Montreal. Minutes before the results began coming in, I received a call from Ted Johnson who was helping out at Chrétien’s headquarters in Ottawa. He was distraught, his voice heavy with emotion. “We are going to lose the nation tonight,” he told me. “The tide is running against us.” During our short conversation I choked up myself and found it difficult to go on air. For the first time in my professional life, I felt emotionally overwhelmed, too personally involved with a news story. My country seemed on the brink of dissolution.
The night ended with a victory for the federalist side, but only by a heartbeat. A few thousand votes could have ended the Canada we had known, and Chrétien would have been responsible. White-faced and obviously shaken, he went on national television and promised to make changes to the federation. That he did, but not quite the changes many Quebecers had expected. Reform Party leader Preston Manning had been preaching tough love with Quebec. Tell them the price of independence, he urged. Chrétien and his advisers picked up on those ideas and added a few of their own in drafting the so-called “Clarity Bill” and then testing its legality in the Supreme Court. Never again would Quebecers be asked to take a leap into the dark. They would know the consequences, including the fragility of their own borders, if they chose independence. Which I doubt they ever will.
Sanctioned in 2000, the Clarity Act was one of several initiatives that divided Chrétien and Paul Martin. Martin opposed it, fearing it would arouse a backlash against the federalist cause in Quebec. He was wrong, but his trepidation infuriated Chrétien and reinforced his view that Martin was an easy mark for the separatists. A more immediate but highly questionable response to the near-miss of the referendum was the attempt to reinforce the federalist vision in Quebecers’ minds with a little-known “sponsorship” program. If Quebecers knew better what Ottawa was doing for them, the reasoning went, they would better appreciate the federalist option. It proved to be a misguided scheme that would loom larger in the fates of the two men.
Chrétien faced a more personally threatening event just a few days after the referendum vote, on the night of November 5, 1995. I learned of it the next morning, when a telephone call from the Prime Minister’s Office caught me just as I was heading out for a trail ride. The caller was Eddie Goldenberg, prepared to hand me a stunning scoop provided no one knew that it had come from the PMO. According to Goldenberg, an intruder at 24 Sussex had tried to kill Chrétien and his wife, Aline, the night before. The knife-wielding culprit had reached the hall outside the couple’s bedroom before Aline discovered his presence, retreated behind the bedroom door, and raised the alarm. RCMP officers then took several minutes to arrive at the scene, during which the Chrétiens, barricaded into their bedroom, prepared to defend themselves.
The red-faced Mounties were trying to cover up the incident, claimed Goldenberg, and were planning to put out a simple statement that a man had been arrested following a minor incident at the official residence during which no one was hurt. Their intention was to gloss over a potentially fatal failure of the prime minister’s personal protection detail. Goldenberg was furious at their evasion of responsibility.
At that moment the prime minister was two hours away from boarding his government jet for an official visit to Israel, where he would attend the funeral of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated scant days before. No doubt I cut a comic figure as I rushed into the military airport, clad in riding breeches, boots, and spurs. Colleagues from the press gallery who were waiting to board Chrétien’s plane were mildly amused, then incredulous, when I told them that I intended to ask the prime minister about an attempt on his life in the early hours of the morning. Peter Donolo was astonished and declared my tale “plain crazy.” He turned to me with that look of concerned pity one gives to a person who has gone over the edge. “Craig, I’m sure the prime minister will not comment on any such nasty story, even if it were true.” Shortly after, a sombre Jean Chrétien arrived and confirmed the harrowing tale.
Much later I learned that during his RCMP interrogation, the would-be attacker said he would certainly have stabbed Chrétien in the chest had Mme Chrétien not come to the door of the bedroom. He said he didn’t know exactly where Chrétien was and assumed that Aline was a housemaid. Both the prime minister and his wife needed time to overcome the psychological trauma of the attack, and Aline underwent weeks of counselling.
Then a few months later, in February 1996, Chrétien was involved in another bizarre event. In full view of the cameras, Chrétien put a chokehold on a protester who stood his ground as the prime minister made his way through an unfriendly crowd at a Flag Day ceremony in Hull. It was an unwarranted assault by the prime minister, whose dark glasses and fierce grimace made him look like a mafia hit man. Peter Donolo begged me not to overplay the incident, suggesting that Chrétien’s behaviour was an instinctive reaction to the lingering intruder incident, an explanation that might have been accepted. Later, though, that line was dropped and replaced with the excuse that the protester had aggressively tried to block the prime minister’s right of way. The media’s interest was soon diverted amid jokes about the “Shawinigan Handshake,” and Chrétien didn’t suffer in the opinion polls. Still, the episode had revealed the street fighter not far below the surface of le petit gars.
In the period that followed, the former easy charm was less in evidence. Chrétien agreed to much heavier security prote
ction and seemed to become both more isolated and less tolerant of criticism. His government began to take a harder line on justice issues and, in barely noticeable increments, adopted an uncharacteristically arrogant and nasty tone. Chrétien seemed much more stressed than before, sometimes saying bizarre and unaccountable things. His defence of the Mounties’ use of pepper spray on protesting students at an Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) meeting in Vancouver in 1997 was flippant and combative. His government’s abrupt shuttering of the Somalia Inquiry into the brutal actions of a rogue military unit in Somalia flew in the face of Chrétien’s insistence on a full investigation when he was Opposition leader. In 2000, he reacted badly when an internal audit uncovered massive incompetence at the huge Human Resources Department, where bureaucrats looked like the gang that couldn’t count straight. Were these examples of rare testiness or was the mask slipping?
Chrétien had won another election in 1997, and with two back-to-back majorities for the history books, he would, almost everyone believed, relinquish the leadership and leave politics at the end of his second term. Certainly that was the expectation of Paul Martin’s supporters. While Chrétien was busy governing the country, Martin and his troops worked to gain control of key posts in the party hierarchy and to win the loyalty of the rank and file. But Chrétien was enjoying the job and, as he once told me, “My worst day as prime minister is better than my best day as Opposition leader.” Three years into his second term he showed no signs of moving on, and so the Martin forces made an attempt to oust him at the 2000 national convention of the Liberal Party in Ottawa. The convention erupted when someone leaked the plan to organize a vote against Chrétien on the convention floor—one he might have lost.