by Conrad Black
Jean Chrétien was generally unimaginative, often small-minded, suspicious, and lumbered with the self-conscious testiness of the outsider and the rough-hewn in a world dominated by more sophisticated people. But he possessed many virtues, including physical and political bravery, perseverance, and a raw cunning based on long experience in the back alleys of political life in a very tough place. Though personable and humorous, he was not very articulate and was rarely eloquent. (When he appeared on television in France, he was rather gratuitously given subtitles, as if his French were incomprehensible; Queen Elizabeth, who is bilingual, found him difficult to understand in either language, though she thought him convivial and diligent.) He would never have enjoyed the success he did if he had not taken over his party when the official Opposition dissolved into fragments, or relinquished it when the Opposition was reassembled. But as Napoleon said of generals, the greatest political leaders are lucky during, if not at the end of, their careers. He was the only Liberal leader never electorally defeated, personally or as party leader, but he was also the only elected prime minister of Canada to be dumped as prime minister by his own party. Where only one party has a chance to govern, politics does not cease, it intensifies, within the governing party.
He intuitively understood both the value of and the need for maintaining the Anglo-French consensus in the country and successfully delivered three decisive reinforcements of the country as a transcontinental, bicultural, federal state: his role in constitutional patriation; the restoration of fiscal solidity beyond any other G8 country; and a probable death blow to the forces of separatism in the requirement for a clear referendum question and a decisive vote, conditions that his distinguished predecessors Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney could have stipulated but did not. In the whole history of the country, only Canada’s greatest leaders can claim to have made such a contribution. His limitations were more obvious than those of most of Canada’s prominent leaders. The sponsorship scandal would soon blow up spectacularly and taint his government and record, but, withal, Jean Chrétien was an important, and on balance a good and successful, prime minister, who governed sensibly and in a long career earned the respect and gratitude of Canada.
2. Paul Martin and the End of the Liberal Ascendancy, 2003–2006
Paul Martin was prime minister at last, a position that had eluded his father and him a total of three times (in the Liberal conventions of 1958, 1968, and 1990), but he faced a newly united Conservative opposition directed by an attractive, articulate, and bilingual leader who was learning quickly on the job, with a separatist third party as the principal representative from the Liberals’ ancient fortress of Quebec, and after eleven years of Liberal government in which the antics of his predecessor had strained the patience of the country and made it susceptible to the allure of change.
Martin had been such a successful finance minister and had so artfully pushed a tenacious incumbent out of the highest office that much was expected of him. In his quest for office, he had engaged a phalanx of polling and policy consultants who had constantly canvassed public tastes and ambitions, and then pitched to them. As prime minister, he was still in the habit of seeking to discover public ambitions and then satisfy them, rather than leading. It was a hazardous technique that was bound to convey an impression of some irresolution.
Chrétien had left behind grenades with the pins pulled: the sponsorship problem was about to blow up with a tremendous report; and Chrétien’s campaign-finance reform abruptly shut the wicket on the Liberals’ traditional source of funding advantage, as the post-Mulroney Conservatives were an unlikely beneficiary of the largesse of big business. The Liberals had a big lump-sum payment because of their relatively large number of votes, but they couldn’t get at the large corporate donations, which, because of Martin’s fine performance at finance, they could have attracted.
On February 9, 2004, auditor general Sheila Fraser declared that of $250 million devoted to the sponsorship program – which was designed, through advertising and public relations agencies, to promote events and programs that would demonstrate the benefits of federalism in Quebec – $100 million had vanished. It was a shocking allegation from a serious source. Martin did not pursue the now rather discredited method of the Chrétien government of leaving it to the RCMP and intervening on the fringes of the investigation, but set up a commission of inquiry under Justice John Gomery, who was alleged to be a friend of Martin’s, and, to thicken the plot, chose as his commission counsel former Mulroney chief of staff Bernard Roy. Martin and Chrétien had gone through three years of opposition and nine generally successful years in government together, but Martin had inflicted a unique humiliation on Chrétien, and Chrétien had used his last year as prime minister as best he could to sandbag Martin. In leaving the sponsorship scandal behind, the departing prime minister would blow the Liberal Party to pieces. In probing it as he did, Martin was settling scores both for himself and for Mulroney, but the collateral damage would engulf him. It was like a suicide pact, as Martin and Chrétien took each other down and their party with them.
Having set up the commission, Martin dissolved Parliament for new elections on June 28, 2004. It was a strenuous campaign, in which the Liberals reviled Harper in personal attack ads as an extremist and a “harsh” conservative, and the Conservatives attacked the Liberals as corrupt, too long in office, and cynical, cowardly manipulators. As the Conservatives were an amalgamation of Reform, the Canadian Alliance, and the Progressive Conservatives, they lost some of the old Red Tories to the Liberals and NDP, and some of the true Reform believers sat it out. Martin did well to hold the decline from the Liberals’ 40.9 per cent in 2000 to 36.7 in 2004, but they lost 37 MPs, dropping from 172 to 135; while Harper, whose two former parties had 37.7 per cent of the vote in 2000, emerged with just 29.6 per cent, but the combined total of Conservative MPs jumped from 78 to 99. In the confusion, the fallout benefited the third parties: the Bloc Québécois rose from 10.7 per cent to just 12.4 but jumped from 38 MPs to 54; and the NDP rose from 8.5 per cent to 15.7 and from 13 MPs to 19. The Liberal government was 21 seats short of a majority, the first minority since Joe Clark’s ill-fated government of 1979, and the balance of power rested with the Bloc. It was going to be difficult, but it was transitional; Harper would get more of his Western Reformers out, and the Bloc could not hold 54 MPs from Quebec indefinitely, though this was a challenge that called for a specialist in tactical parliamentary manoeuvre, which was not Paul Martin’s strong suit. Harper, on the other hand – a secretive, not overly companionable loner, a one-time university dropout before becoming an academic economist – was to prove the greatest party leader at parliamentary and election tactics since King. Beneath a presentable and clean-cut and articulate exterior, he was a formidable political operator who revealed nothing of his intricate game plan.
In a First Ministers’ Conference from September 13 to 15, 2004, Martin worked out a $41 billion ten-year plan to help pay for the health-care system’s endlessly rising costs, but in October, the opposition parties, led by Harper, put through amendments in the guise of reasserting the rights of Parliament over the single will of the leader of the largest party when that party did not have a majority. Paul Martin was reaping what Jean Chrétien had sown. Martin had promised Newfoundland and Nova Scotia all the revenues from offshore oil and gas, after the federal government had retrieved its equalization payments to those provinces. Harper had promised a complete provincial benefit from that source without reclamation of the equalization payments, and the combined opposition votes eventually imposed this on the government, which was forced into a climb-down from an unsustainable position.
Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien both appeared before the Gomery Commission in February 2005. Martin’s appearance was uncontroversial, but Chrétien had already moved for the recusal of Gomery for bias, after Gomery had described Chrétien to a journalist as being “small town cheap,” and Chrétien concluded his testimony by taking a series of golf balls
from his pockets inscribed with the names of U.S. presidents and asking if the American leaders could be so described. It was a strong, but not a conclusive, performance by Chrétien, who argued that the sponsorship affair had been on behalf of Canadian unity and should not be so discredited, as there was no evidence that government officials had pocketed the vanished sums. This breezy approach to vast misappropriations wasn’t going to fly, but Chrétien did get himself clear of any suspicion of direct involvement.
On February 24, 2005, the external affairs minister, Pierre Pettigrew, played the nationalist card on the government’s behalf and announced that Canada would not participate in the American continental missile defence system, but Martin allowed that he would expect to be consulted before any missiles overflew Canadian air space. This was a vapid position, as Canada had no standing to enforce it, and the missiles would be at very high altitudes and go over the length or breadth of Canada in a few minutes. It all smacked of Diefenbaker’s fumbling of the nuclear issue, a pretense to a state of military self-reliance Canada did not possess. More positively, he did put in train the beginning of a defence plan that provided an alternative to leaving the entire defence of Canada explicitly to the United States, which had been the default strategy since the Second World War and even, up to a point, since Roosevelt had pledged to defend Canada from foreign attack at Kingston in 1938. The idea of Canada taking more responsibility for its own defence was an imaginative concept, but it wasn’t seriously developed, and Martin and Pettigrew did not present it in a way that attracted much public interest.
The rising tide of outrage over the Gomery Commission revelations kept tremendous pressure on the government. Paul Martin had not imagined that he would be facing the day-by-day battering of his party and his predecessor with a minority in Parliament. The NDP did not in itself have enough MPs to determine the vote, but the Bloc was completely unreliable, and Harper was always enticing them with side deals in the interest of the reassertion of parliamentary democracy – a scam, of course, but an effective cover for his relentless agitation among the unofficial opposition. The NDP made its support for the budget in May 2005 conditional on not making planned corporate tax cuts and instead splashing money around some of the NDP’s preferred beneficiaries of public largesse. The three opposition parties intermittently outdid each other in accusations of cynical opportunism, almost all of them well-founded charges.
As a very tight vote on the budget shaped up, Martin and his finance minister, Ralph Goodale, injected a chunk of aid for the persecuted Christians of Darfur, South Sudan, to round up the vote of David Kilgour, a Liberal MP for Edmonton who for the first half of his career in Parliament had been a Conservative and was now threatening to sit as an independent (and was John Turner’s brother-in-law, though their relations were tenuous). But this did not budge Kilgour. Reaching into the old King-Pickersgill bag of tricks, Martin attracted Belinda Stronach, daughter of auto parts and racetrack magnate Frank Stronach and a Toronto area Conservative MP, with direct admission to the cabinet as minister of human resources and skills development. She was a glamorous and flamboyant woman who had run second to Harper for the Conservative leadership with a flashy campaign financed by her father, and who was more or less cohabiting with former Conservative leader Peter MacKay, who had delivered the rump of the old Progressive Conservatives to the Canadian Alliance. Stronach claimed that she was rebelling against the reactionary tendencies of Stephen Harper and fighting for women and the disadvantaged. This explanation was not entirely implausible, given Harper’s cold and authoritarian personality. But her critics imputed to her a less disinterested motivation. With the Speaker of the House casting a deciding vote, the Martin government limped through the budget by a single vote (that of the new minister).
Martin spent a precarious summer but soldiered on. In September, he received a visit from Chinese president Hu Jintao, and together they announced a (rather vague but sonorous) “strategic partnership” between the two countries. He also led the creation of the G20, an expanded and multi-continental version of the G8 that included China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. (The former exotic rarity of the summit conference was becoming the merest commonplace and an almost continuous, itinerant, process. At Munich, Tehran, Yalta, Postdam, Geneva (1955), and in the subsequent bilateral U.S.-Soviet meetings, they were confined to great powers.) In November, Martin was able to announce – with the premiers, the governments of the territories, and the leaders of the native peoples’ and Métis groups – the Kelowna Accord, which pledged the whole country to the elimination of any inequalities between aboriginals and non-aboriginals in health care, housing, education, and employment opportunity.
The Gomery Commission’s big shoe dropped with its report on November 1, 2005. Gomery completely cleared Martin and blamed Chrétien as responsible for the conduct of his high-handed chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, who was, the justice wrote, guilty of gross negligence in not imposing any safeguards at all on the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. Paul Martin had served up a full dose of revenge on Jean Chrétien, but Stephen Harper in particular made sure that it was the Liberals, and not just one or another Liberal prime minister, who carried the can for this debacle. There was a court gag order on the findings, but it was completely evaded by bloggers from the United States. NDP leader Jack Layton, playing above his head, given that he only had 19 MPs, stipulated more exigent terms for continued support, which were not agreed, and on November 28, on Harper’s motion of non-confidence, the government was defeated 171 to 133, thanks to the Bloc Québécois. The country’s fourth general election in just over eight years was called for January 23, 2006.
Inevitably, it was another messy campaign. Harper proceeded on the plan of making a major policy announcement each day, while Martin waited until the new year for a serious re-electoral effort. The Liberals then launched a traditional campaign based on better health care and daycare, tax cuts, and increasing Canadian autonomy in its relations with the United States (which was now mired in an Iraqi civil war and the Bush administration was quite unpopular, at home and elsewhere). The Conservatives held their position in the polls, leading, but not by a wide margin, and the Liberals resorted to attack ads, which had served them in 2004. This time, however, Harper was ready, and the ad campaign backfired.
The Canadian Liberal Party had been the most successful party in the democratic world, having held office for 80 of the 110 years since the rise of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896 (Chapter 4). The great Liberal ascendancy ended on election day 2006. The results (2004 results in brackets) were: Conservatives, 124 MPs and 36.3 per cent of the vote (99 MPs and 29.6 per cent); Liberals, 103 MPs and 30.2 per cent (135 MPs and 36.7 per cent); Bloc Québécois, 51 MPs and 10.5 per cent (54 MPs and 12.7 per cent); NDP, 29 MPs and 17.5 per cent (19 MPs and 15.7 per cent). Harper’s position was even more vulnerable than Martin’s in parliamentary terms, but he wasn’t carrying Chrétien’s baggage and the disingenuousness of years, and after four elections in nine years, the opposition could not precipitate a fifth in less than two years; they had to give Stephen Harper a chance. He was forty-six, and was sworn in as prime minister on February 6, 2006.
Paul Martin retired as Liberal leader and from political life. He had been a brilliant finance minister, but only an average prime minister. His government had been hampered from the start by the Chrétien legacy of scandal, arrogance of office, and unhelpful changes to campaign financing rules. Martin had shown a disposition to think differently in defence and strategic terms, and sought to reduce taxes and promote a greater incentive economy, but he was never able to focus on government while the Gomery Commission kept dropping bombshells about previous Liberal transgressions and Stephen Harper played skilfully on the vanity and ambitions of the unofficial opposition leaders. Now, there was no quick fix to restore the Liberals as there had been in the Bennett, Diefenbaker, and Clark interregna: the retrieval of temporarily lost constituencies in Quebec in the first
two instances, and of anti-Trudeau votes in Greater Toronto in the case of the Clark aberration (for that was what it was). And Harper had healed the schism with the West that had sunk Mulroney. The government was in the hands of a very agile leader, a less ponderous and pudgy (and more open-minded, though more autocratic) but apparently no less cunning Mackenzie King. Harper had moved to the centre on gay rights, bilingualism, and several social issues, and was an unfrightening figure of the moderate right, facing three left-of-centre parties (though Martin himself was a centrist). He was competent and he was not another Quebecker like all the other prime ministers elected to full terms over the last forty years after Pearson. This was not going to be another brief Conservative interlude, amateurish and eccentric, like that of Diefenbaker or Clark, or a longer and admirably imaginative and perhaps combustibly over-ambitious one, like that of Mulroney. Harper was an intense and overly serious person, whose campaign plane was sarcastically dubbed “Mr. Happy’s Flying Circus.”5
