by Conrad Black
It also made a mockery of the Liberals’ sanctimonious attacks on Brian Mulroney, who had his frailties of judgment but never was compromised to this extent or in these amounts. And in January 2000 came the beginning of the long-drawn-out revelations of gross mismanagement, involving some millions of dollars, in thirty-seven separate projects of the Department of Human Resources Development, though these did not lead to any direct benefit to Chrétien himself. The government managed to keep these matters out of proceedings where evidence was taken under oath and in the hands of the dawdling RCMP, and the media, which had been whipped up to considerable hostility against Mulroney, couldn’t quite do it all again with Chrétien. But the public, though it liked Chrétien personally, was tired of it.
Chrétien turned sixty-six in January 2000, and Paul Martin (b. 1938), as the strong man of the government, five years younger than Chrétien and a very respected finance minister, was discernibly anxious to replace his leader. His followers were hyperactive in the parliamentary caucus and the federal Liberal organization. Chrétien felt acutely the absence of the sort of moral and intellectual authority and political popularity that Trudeau had possessed, but they were very different people. Chrétien had been elected to Parliament two years before Trudeau and was brought into government at the same time by Pearson, but as a minister without portfolio. He moved to national revenue when Trudeau succeeded Pearson, and had held Indian affairs and northern development; the Treasury Board; industry, trade and commerce; finance; justice; energy, mines and resources; and then, under John Turner, deputy prime minister and secretary of state for external affairs. Of those people elected prime minister, only Macdonald, Laurier, and ultimately Diefenbaker served as long in Parliament, and none had held as many cabinet positions. He had never been a star as Trudeau and Turner had been, and while he had his loyalists, they tended not to be the strongest players on the Liberal team.
Chrétien had tightened the leader’s control over the party at the expense of the constituency associations, and this was not popular with the rank and file. His position was fraying at the edges everywhere. His government had been successful, though fortunate in the disintegration of the opposition, and he was well-liked and thought to be competent if unexciting. Martin was the chief author of the triumph of the balanced budget, though Chrétien had solidly backed him, and his great achievement in the Clarity Act was underappreciated in English Canada, which apart from specialists never really understood what was happening in Quebec or why there were any separatists to begin with.
In Quebec, Chrétien was not regarded as urbane and authoritative enough to be the unquestioned spokesman for French Canada in times of “national” – that is, French Quebec – crises, as Laurier, Gouin, Lapointe, Taschereau, St. Laurent, Duplessis, Lesage, Johnson (père), Trudeau, Lévesque, and Bouchard had been. His portrayal of himself as the dutiful foot soldier gradually advancing through the ranks didn’t contain, and he did not possess, any of the magic required to be accepted in Quebec as un chef. Relations between Chrétien and Martin had never altogether recovered from the bruising leadership battle they conducted in 1990, when Martin attacked Chrétien for his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord and large numbers of Martin supporters screamed “Judas” and other unflattering epithets at him.
There were constant internecine frictions in the governing caucus, which had only a bare parliamentary majority, and there were disaffected sub-groups within the Liberal parliamentary party. Martin spoke English much better than Chrétien did, and, unlike in Trudeau’s time, most of the Liberal MPs were from Ontario. At one point, outspoken anti-American MP Carolyn Parrish, who regularly denounced the United States and especially the incoming administration of George W. Bush in vitriolic terms but was a Chrétien loyalist from Mississauga, attacked the Italian-Canadian Liberal MPs as “wimps and shitheads [in the] pasta caucus”1 and accused them of disloyalty to Chrétien. This led to a strained meeting between the prime minister and the eight MPs involved, all Martin supporters.
Chrétien’s elder brother Maurice advised the press that it was time for his brother to retire, and the prime minister’s entourage was reduced to suggesting that Maurice Chrétien was senile, which was obviously not the case. There soon followed, at one of the Toronto airport hotels just before an annual party conference, a meeting of Martin and his senior organizers and helpers for the long-expected drive to succeed Chrétien, an occasion that quickly was brought to the prime minister’s attention and stirred his always susceptible concerns about loyalty. There was a good deal of jockeying at the party conference, and Martin somewhat upstaged his leader and acknowledged that he hoped to succeed him eventually, but they all got through it, and Chrétien made it clear that he would lead the Liberals in another election. Nothing was happening, the opposition was still fragmented, and Chrétien used these premature elections as reassurance that his position was invulnerable (like Mackenzie King in his latter days, telling the party faithful that he led a more united party than ever).
Chrétien, who had no feel for foreign affairs and had not held that ministry long enough to acquire any knowledge of it, and whose ideas were scarcely developed beyond replication of Trudeau’s anti-Americanism, inexplicably embarked on a trip to the Middle East, where he indulged his talent for vigorous, cloth-eared indiscretions. He implied he favoured a Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence, and then denied it and stated his sympathy for Israel’s desire to have entire control of the freshwater Sea of Galilee, and then recanted on that position, leaving everyone dissatisfied. “Clueless in Gaza,” headlined the National Post.
External affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy announced his retirement in the summer to lead a Western provinces think tank. He had devised the Canadian version of “soft power,” which was a fraud, as the concept was devised by Clinton national security adviser Joe Nye as a method for the United States to pursue in foreign policy in preference to the “hard power” option Republican presidents generally preferred. With Canada, there was no hard power option, and no one would pay any attention to Canadian entreaties, as they were not backed with anything, economic or military, and would only be of interest to those whose interests they served. It was like Chrétien’s passionate interest in United Nations peacekeeping: it satisfied the gullible Canadian soft left that Canada was making an important contribution to the well-being of mankind without following in lockstep behind the United States, while facilitating shrinking defence budgets.
But in fact most of these operations were ineffectual, as in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, and many were just methods for impoverished United Nations member states to rent out their forces to factions in exchange for hard currency provided both by the UN and the local warring parties, who used the peacekeepers as mercenaries (though Canadian forces were never misused in this way). This was largely what happened in the largest peacekeeping operation, in the Congo. But it was a satisfactory disguise for Chrétien, as it had been for Trudeau, as he starved the Canadian military of money, equipment, and personnel while unctuously pretending to be toiling effectively in the vineyards of peace.
Chrétien, overcoming significant dissent within his party, finally dissolved Parliament for new elections in September 2000, shortly after Pierre Trudeau’s funeral (he died at age eighty) and, though this was only incidental, after Fidel Castro advised him to do that following a brief encounter Castro had after Trudeau’s funeral with the new Opposition leader, Stockwell Day.2 Chrétien was obviously going to win again, but two-thirds of Canadians thought it was time for him to go, and a great many of his own MPs and party organizers were opposed to an election, although his approval rating was still high at about 60 per cent. Everyone who took the trouble to develop an informed opinion saw that it was just a ruse to keep Martin out and himself in a while longer. As only the Liberal Party had any chance of forming a government, the real political action was now within the governing party. But the Liberals were not going to be able to turn this screw much longer.<
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The Reform Party had renamed itself the Canadian Alliance. (This was their fifth name in sixty years: Conservative, National Government, Progressive Conservative, Reform.) And they had a new leader. Day was the former treasurer of Alberta and a somewhat more pan-Canadian leader than Preston Manning. He was also a rather more contemporary figure in manner and presentation, and came to his first press conference on a jet ski in a wetsuit. This caused Mulroney to refer to “the Reform Party in pantyhose,” Joe Clark to call it “the costume party,” and newspapers to refer to “Daywatch.” Day was a hard-liner on same-sex marriage, gay rights generally, abortion, immigration, crime, programs for native people, welfare, and transfer payments, and was for the return of the death penalty. And although religion did not enter directly into the campaign, the fact that Day was an evangelical Christian and creationist was well-known and did not resonate well in sophisticated urban centres, east and west.
Joe Clark had taken back the Progressive Conservative leadership when Jean Charest departed to become Liberal leader in Quebec, because Clark wanted to block a Reform takeover of his old party, which had been a Red Tory operation federally at least since Robert Stanfield, if not John Diefenbaker though Mulroney generally finessed these issues. But the two parties were clearly going to unite eventually, and the creation of the Canadian Alliance was just preparing the way. Brian Mulroney had dissolved the Liberal stranglehold on the country: its lock on Quebec. Mulroney was not able to hold the same kind of lock on the province for his own party, though he carried Quebec with heavy majorities in two straight elections, and when his party splintered, those constituencies did not revert to the Liberals as they did after the Duplessis aberration of 1958 (despite Créditiste inroads). Reform and the Progressive Conservatives together had about as many votes as the Liberals, and although a balance of power in a minority Parliament was likely to be in the hands of a party of the left, either the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, the clear advantage of the Liberals as the permanent party of government was over as soon as the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives made a division of constituencies to assist each other in a fusion alternative. Brian Mulroney had not only been the most successful federal Conservative leader since John A. Macdonald, he had taken the essential step to turn the country from a one-and-a-half- to a two-party system in terms of eligibility to form a government by cracking the Liberal lock on Quebec.
The Liberals had a substantial surplus, and Martin produced a well-designed pre-election budget cutting income tax, while Chrétien threw another chunk of money at the ever-more expensive health-care system. There were no issues really, other than the Liberal portrayal of Day as an extremist, especially in being a closet supporter of two-tier health care, and the opposition attacks on the Liberals as complacent and corrupt. (A further series of revelations came out about Grand-Mère, including that Chrétien had lobbied personally for the Business Development Bank’s $615,000 loan and that there had been over two million dollars invested by wealthy immigrants in projects of interest to the government as they were granted entry to the country.) It was a lacklustre, and of course rather unsuspenseful, campaign. Alexa McDonough of Nova Scotia was the NDP leader, and next to the doughty Joe Clark she was the best of the campaigners among the party leaders. Day was well-informed but not overly personable; Chrétien was folksy and entertaining but didn’t sound any more like a figure of authority than he had in the previous thirty-seven years of his electoral career.
Election day was November 27, 2000. The Liberals won, for the twentieth time in the last twenty-nine elections, with 172 MPs and 40.9 per cent of the vote (1997 result, 155 MPs and 38.5 per cent); the Canadian Alliance had 66 MPs and 25.5 per cent (previously, Reform had 60 MPs and 19.4 per cent); Bloc Québécois, 38 MPs and 10.7 per cent (previously, 44 MPs and 10.7 per cent); Progressive Conservatives, 12 MPs and 12.2 per cent; NDP, 13 MPs and 8.5 per cent (previously, 13 MPs and 11.1 per cent). The turnout, at 62 per cent of eligible voters, was one of the lowest in Canadian history and five points below that of 1997 (which had been no triumph of political virtuosity either). Day had called on Chrétien to hold the election, which mitigated to some extent the country’s irritation that it was taking place at all, but all of the party leaders except McDonough were pretty tired, and the gain by the two main parties combined of 8.5 per cent of the vote indicated the trend to a less fragmented electorate.
The Liberals had split almost evenly with the Bloc in Quebec, 37 to 38 MPs, and had narrowly led them in the popular vote, though not among French Quebeckers, confirming the subsidence of the overheated spirit of the 1995 referendum aftermath.
In January 2001, while Chrétien was in Florida on a golfing holiday, Lucien Bouchard announced his retirement from politics. The much less imposing Bernard Landry (b. 1937) replaced him as premier, and the fire had gone from the separatist cause. Bouchard had been a formidable but volcanic leader who deserted Lévesque to join Mulroney, first as ambassador to France and then in the government, gave his all for Meech Lake, and then turned 180 degrees, wrenched control of the independentist movement from Jacques Parizeau, and almost won the 1995 referendum because of Chrétien’s temporary incompetence. But he was not the man for endless perseverance toward a distant goal, and he decamped.
Chrétien would have great difficulty holding his party in place for a full term, and if the Canadian Alliance could just make even a division of constituencies with the PCs, the game would turn dramatically from all the rules that had obtained for living memory. Chrétien had no ideas and no reform plan to renew his government. He had somewhat strengthened his government by bringing in the premier of Newfoundland, Brian Tobin, at trade and commerce and moving the incumbent, John Manley, to external affairs in place of Axworthy. Both were very capable ministers and potential party leaders. But the leader’s only policy was to repel boarders and put his party objectors on the rack.
Chrétien had a relatively cordial visit to Washington with the new president, George W. Bush, having had an exceptionally good relationship with Bill Clinton, who was very helpful with his supportive speech in the prelude to the Clarity Act. Chrétien went on to China, where he did help to continue the upward momentum in bilateral trade. But at home, Shawinigate, as the Grand-Mère quagmire was now called, would not go away, and the Alliance skilfully manoeuvred the government into repudiating its own electoral promise of an independent ethics commissioner. Chrétien kept changing his story, claiming endlessly that his interest had been in a blind trust all the time he was prime minister (a falsehood, at least in terms of his knowledge of the progress of the investment) and missing the year when he had raised the matter of his unhonoured balance of sale to his ethics counsellor, Howard Wilson. He was also contradicted by his partners and buyers on important aspects of the story. It was a very shabby business, but eventually, with Wilson steadily upholding Chrétien’s version of events, it all just petered out. Chrétien would not give it to a commission of inquiry that could compel sworn evidence, and the RCMP were notoriously incompetent, and Wilson, who as an ethics counsellor was apparently not independent, simply approved the conduct of his employer at every stage.
After the monstrous smear job Chrétien committed against Mulroney, and after all his pretenses to being the honest little man from Shawinigan, it was a startling development for him to be up to his eyeballs in the greatest federal government scandal in Canadian history that reflected personally on a prime minister’s probity. John A. Macdonald did not personally benefit from the Pacific Scandal, though his receipt of campaign funds from a claimant of government favours was outrageous. Mackenzie King did not profit a cent from the customs scandal of the 1920s and was not even aware that his hotel bill was being paid in Bermuda (and the amount of four hundred dollars was not material). It was widely suspected that Chrétien was complicit in the false accusation that Mulroney had accepted a five-million-dollar bribe in the award of a contract for civil airliners. The media widely alleged that Shawinigate was of some direc
t benefit to Chrétien and that the whole subject involved a number of improprieties and a prolonged campaign of dissembling and evasion. He used his parliamentary majority to shut down a serious unearthing of what really happened. But the whole murky and tawdry saga strained his standing in the Liberal Party. League of political roués though it was, it was not beyond embarrassment at such questionable conduct in the country’s highest political office.
There was growing restiveness in the cabinet and caucus at Chrétien’s heavy-handed repression of any real discussion or collegiality, and Martin advanced steadily in the parliamentary party and the national organization, promising greater consultation and more respect for Parliament and for traditional cabinet government.
Chrétien hosted quite a convivial hemispheric trade conference at Quebec City in early September, and his personal relations with President Bush continued to be good. Canada and the world were horrified on September 11, 2001, by the terrorist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing thousands of people and bringing down two of the most famous buildings in the world. Canada accepted the landing of hundreds of civil airliners destined for the U.S. which were rerouted to Canada when American airspace was closed, and lodged the passengers and assisted in delivering them by surface to their destinations. For the first time in history, the presidential aircraft flew with a fighter escort in domestic airspace, though there were no further incidents. Chrétien held an open-air memorial service on Parliament Hill attended by about one hundred thousand people and spoke movingly at it. But there was a sentiment in the American administration and among pro-American circles in Canada that Chrétien could have shown greater solidarity with the United States after this extreme provocation, for which Bush had promised vengeance on the night of September 11, declaring that all countries would be divided into those that opposed terrorism in fact and those that did not, and that no distinction would be made between terrorists and countries that tolerated or abetted terrorism.