Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Bush responded forcefully, and spoke well, at a joint session of Congress and in a special memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral. In the speech before Congress, Bush thanked Australia, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Great Britain, even Iran, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, and South Korea, but not Canada. On September 29, 2001, Chrétien took the other four party leaders to New York and went with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers had been brought down. All were moved by the carnage and devastation and eloquent in their reflections.

  There had been some recriminations about Canada being too easy a jumping-off point for terrorists to enter the United States, and there was much talk in the United States about substantially sealing the Canadian border, an act that would have had very serious consequences economically for Canada. Manley handled delicate negotiations skilfully. The Americans plunged into Afghanistan, where the terrorist attacks had been planned and directed, and had vast support from the United Nations and NATO. Canada joined in, but the United States did most of the work and chased out the primitive theocratic regime with only the destabilizing activities of a relatively small number of special forces.

  The terrorist crisis highlighted the government’s failure to replace navy and rescue helicopters that had been in service for forty years. Pilots called the old machines “ten thousand nuts and bolts flying in loose formation.”3 Kim Campbell, when Mulroney’s defence minister, had intended to have them replaced, but Chrétien came in and cancelled the contract that had been let, incurring a non-performance penalty of $500 million. Eventually, the same firm the Conservatives had retained was rehired, another embarrassment to the government, but it was used to such toing and froing. Justice minister Anne McLellan introduced some fierce tightening of security rules in an anti-terrorism bill, including the usual panoply of pre-emptive measures, among them preventive detention. It was, in places, a near regularization of the War Measures Act that Trudeau had imposed thirty-two years before, but this was meant to be permanent legislation.

  All through 2002, the Chrétien government crumbled from within. There were revelations that public works minister Alfonso Gagliano, who had been calling the plays for Chrétien in the run-up to the near-death national experience of the 1995 referendum, was presiding over, to say the least, a very reckless patronage machine. A whistle-blower who had been the head of Canada Lands Company, a Crown corporation, furnished the auditor general, Sheila Fraser, with evidence of favours for friends of the regime that cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, and Chrétien reluctantly shipped Gagliano off to Denmark as ambassador and conducted his usual effort to shut the subject down without a proper inquiry. More seriously, Fraser was starting to turn up evidence of what haemorrhaged into the “sponsorship scandal,” and announced that Public Works had not implemented any of the reforms proposed in 1996 by external auditors and had “broken every rule in the book.”

  Paul Martin’s chief rival to succeed Chrétien was Brian Tobin, trade and commerce minister, who was championing a billion-dollar program for a national broadband internet network. Martin was preparing a supplementary budget to allow for additional security expenses to assure against terrorist infiltration of the United States from Canada after it had come to light that some of the September 11 terrorists had entered the United States by that route. The U.S. required such measures, and they were agreed as part of the retention of the heavy trading relationship between the countries. Martin was going to add some other betterments to the government’s standing, and Chrétien claimed to Tobin that he had asked Martin to include Tobin’s preferred program. Martin only included funding for about 10 per cent of it, and Tobin, to Chrétien’s surprise, abruptly quit politics for the private sector in central Canada.

  Chrétien then determined on a radical cabinet shuffle and dismissed his senior minister and chief loyalist, Herb Gray, the deputy prime minister and a popular figure in the caucus, as former House leader and an emollient figure at the weekly meeting with MPs. He gave Gray no reason and offered him nothing to move on to, and it seemed to most of their colleagues a shabby treatment of a man who was personally well-liked by all factions and had carried water on both shoulders for the Liberal Party through thirty-four years as an MP. As Tobin vanished as a rival to Martin, and Gray (who had replaced Paul Martin Sr. in his constituency in Windsor*

  ) wondered what to do next in his life, defence minister Art Eggleton, a former mayor of Toronto and another well-liked, rather gentle, personality, was revealed as having given a $36,500 contract to a paramour. Eggleton was abruptly dismissed from government on the advice of the same Howard Wilson who supported every limp excuse Chrétien had improvised for recurrent, and much larger, liberties and extravagances, including the early warnings about the sponsorship scandal. It was all designed to show Chrétien’s control of the government and the Liberal Party, but it had the effect of driving more MPs and party regulars into the outstretched arms of Paul Martin.

  While the government was in disarray, the Canadian Alliance managed an almost effortless ouster of Stockwell Day, who had not been a successful leader, though he had made appreciable gains in the 2000 election (adding six MPs to Reform’s 1997 total and gaining 6 per cent of the popular vote) and had moved the Alliance up from Reform’s parity in popular vote with the Progressive Conservatives to twice that level of support. Day continued as an MP and became the shadow external affairs minister. A substantial political career still awaited him.

  The new leader of the Alliance was a much more serious challenger to the trembling Liberal ascendancy: Stephen Harper. Aged forty-three (to Chrétien’s sixty-nine and Martin’s sixty-four), Harper (b. 1959)was a former Reform MP and then the head of the National Citizens Coalition, a taxpayer and public policy advocacy group, and was a substantial academic economist. He was a very presentable, articulate, and bilingual alternative head of government. With the Bloc holding thirty-eight Quebec MPs, if Harper could unite with the Progressive Conservatives – and he would be much harder for Joe Clark and the others to resist than were the more severely regional and ideological Preston Manning and Stockwell Day – he was a likely winner. The country was singularly unimpressed with the unfolding spectacle of the outright corruption of the Chrétien government and the prime minister’s cavalier dismissal of it. In his parliamentary opener as Opposition leader, Harper made the point that he was only four years old when the prime minister entered Parliament, and “I recall turning to my mother, who is here today, and saying, ‘Someone has to do something to stop that guy.’ ”4

  In 2001, Chrétien had said that those who might wish to succeed him could begin organizing and fundraising for such a purpose, though he had no intention of retiring anytime soon. He now did an about-turn and ordered the immediate cessation of all such activity, and his office tried to exercise a right of censorship over Martin’s speeches as they attempted to force him to resign. Martin told the press on May 31, 2002, that he would have to “reflect upon my options,” and on June 2 he learned from the radio that Manley had been appointed as his successor as finance minister. The Chrétien camp tried to claim Martin had (petulantly) resigned and had been disloyal, and Martin and his followers claimed he had been fired by a frightened, grasping, superannuated, and even slightly senescent King Lear of a prime minister who was headed for the last round-up with his party and with his countrymen. This was not the mighty Liberal Party of disciplined legions, in good times and bad, of Laurier, King, St. Laurent, Pearson, and Trudeau. That era, like the old electoral map coloured Liberal red across Quebec, was ending.

  Chrétien had a fairly successful G8 summit meeting at Kananaskis, Alberta, on June 26 and 27, in a provincial park near Jasper. (Russia, as a courtesy, had been added to the G7 when the Soviet Union collapsed.) Demonstrators had taken to vandalizing the environs of these meetings in protests against globalization, environmental offences, and out of a mixture of esoteric causes and the temptations of mere hooliganism. This was an inn
ovative venue, as Chrétien could receive his guests in tranquility, many miles of bear-, mosquito-, and even wolf- as well as Mountie-infested forest from the nearest agitator. Chrétien proposed an ambitious plan for aid to sub-Saharan Africa in exchange for pledges of clean and democratic government. This was received with some skepticism by his distinguished guests and his own countrymen as a late rally to an unexceptionable cause that he had ignored for nine years as prime minister, and it was sidetracked by President Bush’s advocacy of a new Palestinian leadership. The meeting went well, out of sight, and Chrétien claimed a great victory for his African project, which in fact attracted only inconsequential lip service.

  Chrétien spent the summer trying to rally support for the upcoming leadership review of the Liberal Party. His staff came up with the idea of requiring letters of absolute loyalty from all the Liberal MPs, but many refused, and some of those who signed publicly announced their retractions. There was a party caucus meeting at Chicoutimi in mid-August, and Chrétien gave a spirited statement of legislative intent, the first that had been heard since before the adoption of the Clarity Act in 1999. He promised an ambitious agenda of reform of policy toward native people, the environment (he swallowed the completely unworkable Kyoto Protocol holus-bolus), additional funding of health care, urban infrastructure, scientific research, and new approaches to eradicating poverty. It was another grab bag of places to spend Martin’s surplus, but at least it showed some imagination and a broader approach to government than just firing loyalty risks in the cabinet and intimidating reticent caucus members.

  By this time, Martin had control of the caucus (his nominee had been elected caucus leader) and of the party organization, and Chrétien was just somnambulating to the leadership review vote, which he would lose, and if he insisted on a convention he would be defeated, humiliated, and expelled from his position by Martin. The venerable scrapper finally seized the last train that would take him away with any dignity and announced at Chicoutimi that he would retire in eighteen months. This obviated the leadership vote, but there was considerable skepticism that he would be able to hang on for eighteen months with a party and caucus that had clearly determined that he must go and would not hesitate to sack him.

  Chrétien pre-recorded an interview for the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and announced that this occasion was a time “to realize … that the Western world is getting too rich in relation to the poor world and necessarily will be looked upon as being arrogant and self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits.” This applied to “the Western world, not just the Americans,” he thoughtfully reassured viewers. This was not the message most Canadians thought it appropriate to give on the anniversary of suicide attackers smashing hijacked civil airliners into buildings and massacring thousands of innocent civilians.

  Chrétien became more eccentric than ever, strongly supporting the Kyoto accord, which bought into the whole, subsequently largely debunked, hysteria about global warming and the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars to underdeveloped countries as penance for operating successful economies based on carbon-based energy. He dismissed concerns about his solicitor general, Lawrence MacAulay, directing government funds to a college led by his brother, which even Howard Wilson had a problem with, and which caused another ministerial resignation. And he went down opposing a vote requiring that House committee chairmanships be filled by secret ballot of the committees and not the imposition of the prime minister; fifty-seven Liberal MPs led by Paul Martin deserted the prime minister and passed the Alliance motion over Chrétien and his loyalists. He stubbornly refused even to reprimand one of his more belligerent aides for calling the U.S. president “a moron,” which, regardless of the facts, was a violent departure from diplomatic norms, given the relations between the two countries. (The same charge was not infrequently, though at least as unjustly, levelled against Chrétien.)

  Chrétien doubled down on the hideously expensive health-care system, which yet produced longer and longer waiting lines, with a $237 billion, five-year spending increase by the federal government (which provided barely 25 per cent of the funding). Manley, in his first budget, unleashed an 11 per cent spending increase, pouring out money for Chrétien’s departing programs.

  A highlight of Chrétien’s extended twilight, and one for which he deserves significant credit, was the Quebec election on April 14, 2003, in which Jean Charest’s Liberals, a federalist Liberal-Conservative coalition in fact, defeated Bernard Landry’s Parti Québécois with 76 members of the National Assembly to the PQ’s 45, and 46 per cent of the vote to 33.2. This reversed the previous election total of 76 PQ members to 48 Liberal, and 42.9 per cent of the vote for the PQ to 43.6 for the Liberals. Mario Dumont’s Action Démocratique, still trying to sell a quasi-Duplessist message of being more nationalist than the Liberals but not separatist, raised its share of the vote from 11.8 per cent to 18.2, and its deputation from 1 to 4. This was the end of the Parti Québécois’s second tour in government, which Jacques Parizeau had opened in 1993. To win the support of one-third of the voters was the PQ’s poorest performance since 1973, and they had lost even the francophone vote, decisively, to Charest, an emollient and likeable figure but far from a mighty federalist standard-bearer like Trudeau or Lesage. Chrétien’s government was drawing somewhat undistinguishedly to a close, but he had played an important role in the victory of federalism – behind Trudeau, certainly, but along with Mulroney and ahead of the many others. His lonely decades of fighting off the separatists and the almost occult forces of créditisme in the hinterland of the vast province had not been wasted and have not gone unrecognized.

  Chrétien declined to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, as he considered that it was not lawful under international criteria if it was not supported by the United Nations, and he was unconvinced of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The principal American and allied arguments (including Great Britain and Australia) were that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had ignored seventeen consecutive United Nations Security Council resolutions, had failed to comply in important respects with the ceasefire agreement at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and was guilty of crimes against humanity because of his atrocities inflicted on his own people. Chrétien was correct not to enter the war, but not for the reason he gave; it was impossible to foresee that the United States would attempt to transform Iraq instantly into a sophisticated democracy and that it would take temporary responsibility for the governance of the entire country, beginning by dismissing all four hundred thousand members of Saddam’s armed forces and police, who would, though unemployed, be free to retire with their weapons and munitions and then rent themselves out, individually and in groups, to the factions in a fierce civil, sectarian, and ethnic war within Iraq. As a sequel, the Americans fired practically the entire civil service, leaving Iraq with no public administration at all above the provincial level. It was, however, the correct decision for Canada all the same, and Chrétien deserves credit for it, even though the Americans and their allies were quite within their rights to dispose of Saddam.

  Chrétien rounded out his long career with a stringent campaign-finance reform – which severely restricted acceptable contributions from corporations and unions and increased public contributions to campaigns based on a criterion of previous party electoral performance; and with a judicially legitimized recognition of same-sex marriage rights.

  Martin and his supporters were not prepared to tolerate Chrétien going a full eighteen months from his announcement of his retirement at Chicoutimi in August 2002, and the prime minister took his leave at the party conference in November 2003. Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2 and a crusader for the Third World, joked, accurately, of Chrétien and Martin that he was “the only subject these two can agree on.” Martin was voted leader without significant opposition and succeeded Chrétien as prime minister on December 12, 2003. He won 93 per cent of the convention vote, w
ith almost all the rest going to Sheila Copps (daughter of the former mayor of Hamilton, leader of the so-called Brat Pack of Liberal MPs, and immortalized by Mordecai Richler as “the captain of a women’s industrial league bowling team”).

  One week earlier, the Canadian Alliance and the federal Progressive Conservatives merged to become the Conservative Party of Canada, back to its name in the times of Macdonald, Borden, Meighen, and Bennett. The free Liberal ride was over, as more than 90 per cent of those voting in both parties approved the merger. Joe Clark had unwittingly rendered great service to the Liberals when he fumbled out of government after six months in 1979; had done them great harm when he fumbled out of the leadership of his party in 1982 and lost to Brian Mulroney; had helped them again by maintaining the fractured conservative vote with his return as party leader from 1998 to 2002; but had concluded this astonishing minuet by inadvertently striking the Liberals an almost mortal blow by retiring from the leadership in favour of Peter MacKay. MacKay had pledged to maintain the party, but on the elevation of Stephen Harper over Stockwell Day, and after negotiation on some policy matters, the two leaders agreed on a merger on October 15, 2003. This would prove an epochal event.

  It was forty years and eight months since Jean Chrétien had first entered Parliament. (He had retired from Parliament between 1985 and 1990.) He was a sincere and a courageous federalist, in times and places when it was far from fashionable. He deserved better than he received from Pierre Trudeau, whom he served loyally and capably in many positions, including the senior ministries of justice and finance. He rendered immense service by salvaging the constitutional amendment and patriation formula that was agreed by nine provinces and enacted in 1981. As loyal as he was to Trudeau, he had been disloyal to John Turner, though he was not as obligated to be an enthusiastic booster of the man who had defeated him for the succession to Trudeau. And as scheming and underhanded as he was with Turner, he was oppressive and unreasonable to Paul Martin, whom he had defeated in the succession to Turner, and he was ungrateful for Martin’s irreplaceable services to the government by his fiscal competence, though Chrétien did support him in difficult policy decisions. Chrétien almost jeopardized the entire country with his bungled management of the 1995 referendum campaign, which was the more inexcusable given that he had worked closely with Trudeau in the brilliantly managed 1980 referendum. His state of panic and near collapse on the eve of the 1995 referendum was a shocking breakdown at one of the decisive moments of Canadian history, but he made up for it, almost miraculously, by his sudden and relatively uncontroversial presentation and adoption of the Clarity Act in the last weeks of the millennium.