Jean Chretien
I'm certainly old enough to remember when he was a young Member of Parliament, a young, vigorous, earnest and trustworthy member of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's cabinet. I remember him as Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs. I remember him as a smiling, energetic young man, whom you just knew could do the job. I remember back in 1986, when Trudeau had stepped down and there was a Liberal party leadership convention and that many Canadians wanted Jean Chretien to be voted in as next leader of the Liberals, but John Turner got the vote. That, we thought, was a sad day. But guess what? after working for decades as a high-priced lawyer in a prestigious law firm, after John Turner had failed so abysmally as a short-lived Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien made a successful come-back, and then he was the winner in the leadership convention to follow.I remember reading his heartfelt autobiography, "Straight From The Heart". Oh yes, the self-styled 'little man from Shawinigan' won everyone's heart. He was so self-effacing, so convincing as the man who had Canada's interests at heart, so hard done by in the process to prove himself the saviour of Canada, the man who would knit the Two Solitudes together into a stronger, more vital country.
So what happened? This man who held out such great promise, the favourite of everyone who admired his dogged determination to succeed, his everyman approach, with his fumbling, stumbling, amusing speech patterns? He so much endeared himself to Canadians, refusing to give up on himself, making us in turn refuse to give up on him. He was the man to pull us together, to lead us into a new, brighter era.
We were so fed up with Brian Mulroney, the Conservative Prime Minister who easily batted away John Turner's inept governance, and who himself smooth-talked us ultimately into detesting his smarmy, self adoration. Well, Brian Mulroney introduced Canada to the hated GST, the Canada-U.S. Trade Agreement, and Chretien promised both would be toast with him as leader of the country. Who was it that said it was foolish of any electorate to expect any government of any stripe to sign away revenue once invoked? Well, we were foolish to believe Chretien and when he gained power both the GST and NAFTA were here to stay. So big deal, right?
The puzzle is that despite his tepid leadership style, his allegiance to the status quo, his neverending quips that made no sense whatever, he was still trusted, admired and high in the polls. It's true that he did some good things, but that was perhaps by default, reading the tea leaves of one public opinion poll after another. Yes, he had the pulse of the nation.
Yet when we were horrified, as a peace-loving, peace-keeping nation to discover that some of our Canadian soldiers had tortured a young Somalian, and an enquiry was getting to the root of the problem, he shut down the enquiry; too embarrassing. That wasn't the only time he invoked his powers, just the most disturbing.
When anti-WTO activists were demonstrating during the Asia-Pacific Economic Congress (APEC) and decrying the presence of heads of criminally-repressive regimes at the Vancouver conference he arranged to have them confined to an area where they could do the least to embarrass him, and when a scandal erupted after they were pepper-sprayed he laughed it off, quipping about putting pepper on his steaks, and what was that other stuff? When an angry electorate demanded an explanation for this abuse of power in the face of public dissent, an enquiry was called at which similarly embarrassing facts were unearthed, mostly to the effect that Chretien's personal goons were involved at his behest, and didn't he shut that one down prematurely as well?
When an anti-poverty activist happened to be unfortunate enough to be standing close to the Prime Minister in a vain attempt to draw his attention to the plight of the poor and disenfranchised in Canada he behaved like the street tough he once was and would always be in his heart, and began to throttle the surprised unfortunate until the man dropped. That was amusing too, to Jean Chretien who quipped that people improvident enough to get in his way could expect to bring out the fighter in him. As who would behave differently?
He was pilloried in the Ottawa media years back for market manipulation of a golf club property he owned, of having a trusted confidante blackmail a highly placed banking officer on his behalf, and denied it all, although the proof was there for all to see. He arranged for a cash-strapped national museum to truck priceless treasures out to his home grounds in Shawinigan to bring glory to the area and the residents, to the detriment of both the gallery and the national capital.
He decided, after the Quebec referendum that almost saw that province separate by vote from the rest of Canada, to implement an advertising scheme to prove to Quebecois that they were beloved of the rest of Canada, that they belonged in the confederation, that they benefitted mightily from economic association. He insisted on personally overseeing the campaign to make Quebec love Canada, and in the process permitted the most egregious waste of taxpayer funds to trickle down into the greedy hands of friends and colleagues of the Liberal party in Quebec. Post-event he denied all responsibility of oversight, claiming that a handful of crooked civil servants were to blame, not himself, not his trusted lieutenants, not his friends and supporters.
The miserable behaviour of this man will live long in the memory of the Canadian electorate. We will remember that he did some things that we collectively desired, like keeping Canada out of the U.S. war on Iraq, like not signing on to the Bush administration's Star Wars initiative of militarizing space, but that was a result of consensus by poll, not a matter of personal conviction.
The man, sadly, is a disgrace to the office he once held. He could have been other than what he ultimately turned out to be, an autocratic egotist who brooked no dissent, a man with a long and vicious memory when spurned, a man who placed his own interests and that of his friends above that of his country. Time for him to fade into the woodwork.
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 03, 2005
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