Liberal leaders know when to zip it
WORTH REPEATING
Liberal prime ministers of Canada work their way up by serving as cabinet ministers in someone else’s government. Conservative prime ministers such as Brian Mulroney, whose unguarded remarks to writer Peter Newman were published last week, usually arrive in the job without cabinet apprenticeship. This helps account for some of the differences between the records of the two parties.
Robert Borden had never been a cabinet minister when the Conservatives won the 1911 election. He led the country through the 1914- 18 war and won recognition for Canada as an independent country apart from the British Empire. R. B. Bennett, who had been Borden’s finance minister, served one disastrous term as prime minister, governing so badly that the party was kept in opposition for the following 22 years. John Diefenbaker had never run anything more complicated than a law office when he took power in 1957. He won two further elections, gave Canada its first national hospital insurance and its first bill of rights. Joe Clark had never been a cabinet minister and he only survived nine months in office. When Clark lost the party leadership in the face of internal criticism, Mulroney took his place and soon became prime minister — his first federal government job. He gave Canada free trade with the United States, a goods and services tax and an arduous attempt to win Quebec assent to the 1982 Liberals who reach the top have been trained to keep out of trouble Constitution. He won re- election in 1988. Not a breathtaking list of accomplishments, perhaps, but he did it without training as a cabinet minister. Mackenzie King, by contrast, had been Laurier’s labour minister. Louis St. Laurent had been King’s justice minister. Lester Pearson had been St. Laurent’s foreign minister. Pierre Trudeau had been Pearson’s justice min- ister. Jean Chrétien had been Trudeau’s foreign minister, revenue minister, finance minister, justice minister, and Indian affairs minister with brief stops at a couple of other posts. Paul Martin was Chrétien’s finance minister. By the time a Liberal reaches the top, he has been trained, formed, moulded to the prevailing habits of mind of Ottawa and the practicalities of keeping out of trouble in a wide and
diverse country.
The long training of Liberal prime
ministers does not necessarily make
them better prime ministers but it
does make them more cautious,
more conscious of the pitfalls set to
catch the unwary.
Liberals are just as prone to anger, just as familiar with gutter language, but there is something that they learn in the course of the Liberal training program that nobody ever taught Brian Mulroney: They learn when to keep their mouths shut. This is an edited version of an editorial from the Winnipeg Free Press.