Chrétien’s legacy of conservative feats
Former Liberal prime minister was one of our great leaders, Bob Plamondon writes.
The following is adapted from a recent speech by Ottawa author Bob Plamondon to the Albany Club. It’s based on Plamondon’s latest book, The Shawinigan Fox: How Jean Chrétien Defied the Elites and Reshaped Canada.
Sir John A. Macdonald, Robert Borden, R.B. Bennett, John Diefenbaker, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper were leaders of majority Conservative governments who all left their mark on our country.
But who was the biggest “smallc” conservative prime minister? Who most lessened the burden of government; paid down public debt; promoted Canadian goods and services around the world; valued work more than welfare; and kept the federal government out of provincial affairs?
Having written a book that covers every Conservative leader from Macdonald to Harper, I conclude that Canada’s most conservative prime minister was the 20th person to hold the job: the Rt.-Hon Jean Chrétien — a Liberal.
Let me ask, which conservative prime minister said this? “We have to break that mentality in which people work long enough to qualify for social assistance, then quit. It’s better to have them at 50-per-cent productivity than to be sitting at home drinking beer. It’s not the government that’s complaining, it’s the wives of the unemployed, who were upset about their husbands hanging around the house.”
While it was instinctive for Chrétien to support those who were down on their luck or who had become disabled, he had no sympathy for the lazy. In Jean Chrétien’s small-town Shawinigan way of thinking, it was disrespectful to live off the hard work of others. When a Saskatchewan woman with three university degrees confronted Chrétien at a townhall meeting about her lack of job opportunities, he replied that some people were lucky and some were unlucky. “If you can’t find a job,” Chrétien said, “you should move.”
Can you imagine a Conservative prime minister saying any of these things?
Former Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest said Chrétien’s conservative values were a constant. Indeed, when Chrétien became president of the Treasury Board in the 1970s, his Liberal colleagues called him Dr. No, a nickname he took pride in.
Former Liberal cabinet minister and Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin told me that Chrétien knew what the clear majority of working families go through every day looking for ways to save money while stretching their budget from paycheque to paycheque. “Chrétien understands that before a dollar could be spent, it had to be earned.”
As prime minister, he was not a tax-and-spend Liberal. Both went down under Chrétien. To rightsize government to what we could afford, program spending was reduced by one-third. He said his motivation wasn’t economic theory but mathematics.
He ended a string of 27 consecutive deficits and began a string of 11 consecutive surpluses. Even after the books were balanced in 1997, he did not ramp up government spending.
He remodelled, but did not expand basic social programs. His most significant reforms were in the area of employment insurance. He made sure that if you quit your job, there was no EI. If you made good money during seasonal work and collected EI, the benefits were clawed back.
Had Chrétien maintained the same level of program spending he inherited from Mulroney, the government would have spent an additional $53 billion in 2003.
On the economic front, almost everything he did was connected to job creation. He let the dollar float to its natural level. He ratified NAFTA, then led Team Canada trade missions. He was a driving force behind the development of the oilsands.
Under his leadership, the unemployment rate declined by onethird. Virtually every standard-ofliving measure improved under Chrétien. It was Paul Martin, as finance minister, who delivered the budgets and claimed the credit. But it was Chrétien who kept his government and cabinet in line on economic matters. It was Chrétien who established and managed the program review process. It was Chretien who made the tough decisions.
It helped that Chrétien didn’t appear to enjoy gutting government programs. “I’m a Liberal, and I feel like a Liberal, and it’s painful. But it’s needed,” he said.
Chrétien was conservative in other ways. While maintaining the same level of immigration as Mulroney, he doubled the proportion from the economic class. In federal-provincial affairs, he loosened restrictions on how provinces could spend federal transfers and gave them more clout over environmental reviews and labour-market training.
The reality was that Chrétien was the right man for the times when the country was divided, broke and fatigued from constitutional wrangling.
The voters liked him — largely because he took the job more seriously than he did himself.
He had the great ability to see the big picture and to boil issues down to their essence. He said the only people who could not summarize an issue to a single page were the ones who didn’t know what they were talking about. Chrétien understood that the fine print is not where political leadership is exercised.
But his plain-spoken style grated on the intellectuals, academics and elites. Prime ministerial historian Michael Bliss wrote that Chrétien was, “moderately competent and only moderately corrupt.” Peter C. Newman wrote that Chrétien led a baleful and listless administration — an interregnum — without a defining legacy. Respect for Chrétien was hard to come by even from within factions of his own party. This, despite his progressive credentials in obtaining a land mine treaty, helping to establish the International Criminal Court, and signing the Kyoto Protocol.
It’s only now that we see that Chrétien has amassed a legacy that places him in the category of one of our great prime ministers. Canada was more united when Chrétien left office than it had been over the previous 50 years. Government finances went from near-collapse to one of leadership in the G7. He kept us out of the Iraq war when just about every powerful interest in the country was urging him to do otherwise. And he rebuilt the intellectual infrastructure of the nation, turning a brain drain into a brain gain, much inspired by his belief that education was the great leveller in Canadian society.
Chrétien may not have had Sir John A. Macdonald’s great national vision, but he did everything he could to strengthen what Macdonald had started.
As prime minister, he was not a tax-and-spend Liberal. Both went down under Chrétien.