Oliver's Twist (32 page)

Chrétien had won another election in 1997, and with two back-to-back majorities for the history books, he would, almost everyone believed, relinquish the leadership and leave politics at the end of his second term. Certainly that was the expectation of Paul Martin's supporters. While Chrétien was busy governing the country, Martin and his troops worked to gain control of key posts in the party hierarchy and to win the loyalty of the rank and file. But Chrétien was enjoying the job and, as he once told me, “My worst day as prime minister is better than
my best day as Opposition leader.” Three years into his second term he showed no signs of moving on, and so the Martin forces made an attempt to oust him at the 2000 national convention of the Liberal Party in Ottawa. The convention erupted when someone leaked the plan to organize a vote against Chrétien on the convention floor—one he might have lost.

Chrétien wrote his own keynote address to the delegates, heavily promoted in advance as a statement of the prime minister's vision for the future of the party and the country and the blueprint for the Liberals' next election platform. Yet he delivered a rambling dud of a speech. Astonishingly, many delegates wandered out of the hall while Chrétien was still at the podium. My report that night focused on how pedestrian the address had sounded to me. Moreover, I drew attention to a grim truth for the prime minister: that Paul Martin was clearly the star of the convention, outdrawing Chrétien in applause time after time that weekend. I observed that Chrétien seemed weary and listless and wondered aloud if he was ready to quit.

Martin called off his troops and allowed Chrétien to win a pro forma vote on his leadership, but only after Jean Pelletier had assured Martin that the prime minister would not seek a third term. Whether this was an educated gamble on Pelletier's part, designed to head off an open revolt on the floor, or whether Chrétien had instructed him to deliver the message, we never knew.

At the news conference closing the convention, Chrétien refused to answer my questions about his personal future and glared at me darkly as he left the room. The depth of his disapproval was made evident the following Monday morning, when my luncheon meeting with a Cabinet minister close to Chrétien
was cancelled at the last moment. In the weeks to come, calls to normally helpful sources in the government went unreturned. A friend in Cabinet eventually took me aside and warned me that, as he put it, in the coming death struggle between Martin and Chrétien, I was regarded as having joined the ranks of the enemy. This was how the prime minister's camp spoke of its own finance minister.

My friend and canoe partner of many years, Eddie Goldenberg, sent me to Coventry. He avoided me at social gatherings and did not respond to my phone messages. Eddie felt that I had betrayed him personally by what he regarded as unfair coverage at the convention. Conveniently, however, he renewed our friendship shortly before the next election. I always knew when an election was in the offing, well before my colleagues in the press gallery, because Eddie would call with an invitation to dinner, complaining that it had been too long since we'd got together. Over a fine meal, Eddie would do his best to persuade me that the Liberals had done a magnificent job and deserved to be re-elected. It was usually I who paid the bill.

Sensing that the new Reform Party leader, Stockwell Day, was vulnerable, and feeling the hot breath of the Martinites on his neck, Chrétien called a snap election for late November 2000, well before the end of his second mandate. It earned him a third consecutive majority and the everlasting enmity of the Martin faction. Yet Chrétien had undeniably run a flawless campaign. His experienced team, headed by Senator David Smith who had once worked for Lester Pearson, ran rings around the hapless and unprepared Day. Our national campaign coverage reflected that reality, and soon I was back in the PMO's favour. I was not surprised when, following our annual year-end television
interview with the prime minister in December, Lloyd Robertson and I were invited back to 24 Sussex for a seasonal drink or two.

The prime minister settled into a comfortable sofa in front of the fire, with a glass of white wine in his hand, and held forth on life and politics. As he spoke, I could not avoid making comparisons with the likeable young pol I had met years earlier. Chrétien had become self-absorbed, edgy, and devastating in his criticism of his opponents. Any topic of conversation was soon narrowed to focus on him. This may be the inevitable result of years in power, of being the centre of attention of all who surround you.

His wife, Aline, sat close beside him on the sofa, clearly enjoying her husband. She is a warm, engaging woman who has worked hard to overcome her innate shyness. She was a beauty in her youth and those stunning good looks have been inherited by her daughter, France, who, as Chrétien is fond of telling people, is married to a son of the wealthy Desmarais family.

After four decades of marriage, the Chrétiens seemed almost extensions of each other. Both were in their sixties at the time of our chat, but the sexual attraction between the two was palpable. Aline is a woman of real character. She never wavered in her love and support for her adopted son, Michel, who suffered several courtroom exposés leading up to his imprisonment for sexual assault and confinement. Friends say Michel is probably a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. In 1990, Aline and Chrétien, then Opposition leader, were present throughout a trial in which all the lurid details of Michel's case were made public. I have always been impressed that the television networks and even the tabloids gave very little attention to the story, leaving the Chrétiens to their private grief and personal agony.

But on the occasion of our year-end chat in 2000, Chrétien was in a belligerent mood. The Martin camp was restive yet still unsuccessful in its efforts to unseat Chrétien. The public opinion polls had never shown higher approval ratings for the Liberal Party or for Chrétien personally. At the start of a new decade, he said, he was doing what he wanted to do: spending time with his wife and grandchildren and golfing with old cronies, many of whom had no connection to politics. Chrétien was sending a message, thumbing his nose at his party rivals, at the Opposition, and at the pundits who had discounted and underestimated him for so many years.

He wagged his finger and scolded me for telling Canadians that there was a race on for his job. “I am here to announce there is no race.” But Aline interjected, “What do you mean, no race?”

Then Lloyd and I learned something significant. It was Aline as much as anyone who had kept her husband in the prime minister's chair. Before the 2000 convention, almost everyone inside Chrétien's circle believed he was ready to retire and leave the job wide open for Martin. Afterwards, however, a fierce debate took place among Chrétien's closest advisers, including John Rae, Eddie Goldenberg, Allan Rock, and David Collenette, about whether or not to call an early election. In one crucial meeting, Collenette had warned Chrétien, “If we wait too much longer, Martin will have your balls for breakfast.” It was Aline who swung the argument. She had never forgiven Martin for his aborted coup attempt at the convention, and she resented the pressure the Martin forces were putting on her husband to take his leave. Chrétien revealed that she told him to run again and to hell with Martin.

I was emboldened after a few glasses of Scotch to tell Chrétien that one of his ministers, a Martinite, had lamented to me that
the third victory was “the worst thing that could have happened to us. Another goddamned majority!”

I did not report that another of Martin's fanatic advocates had wanted me to do a story on how the prime minister was losing his mind, perhaps had Alzheimer's disease, which I did not believe for a minute. “Yes, Chrétien is crazy,” was my response. “Like a fox.”

It is said that a year in politics is a century, and in the late fall of 2002, when Lloyd and I were once again at the prime ministerial residence for a private drink, we found much had changed. Chrétien's government was awash in allegations of financial skulduggery, some of it involving his former ownership and mortgage of a golf course and hotel in his hometown. The sponsorship program designed to foster warm federalist feelings in Quebec was revealed as a cash cow for a number of Liberal-friendly ad agencies in Montreal. Several Cabinet ministers had been fired for ethical lapses. And the previous August, the Martin gang had forced Chrétien to announce his resignation as prime minister, though he declared he would not actually go until February 2004.

For weeks in television reports, I had been indirectly chiding Chrétien for his insistence on this long goodbye when the party and the country were clearly impatient for his departure. A few days earlier, I had referred to him as a political dead duck. But he had won a parliamentary vote on the Kyoto Accord just the day before and was able to throw that remark back at me. “Some dead duck,” he said and laughed uproariously. He jabbed a finger in my direction and demanded, “Why don't you resign? You look older than me and Lloyd put together!”

Though Martin had been out of Cabinet for months, Chrétien railed against him, recounting how often he had had
to stiffen the indecisive minister's spine in a crisis. Apparently Chrétien was reluctant to step aside because Martin was not tough enough to take on the separatists. “They are just waiting for me to leave,” he said, “because they will make a strong comeback with Martin as the leader.” But he was equally concerned that if he stayed, his caucus, dominated then by Martin's supporters, would turn against him. There were rumours that some MPs might refuse to support Chrétien in the Commons. “Let them,” he declared defiantly, “and as always I'll go to the Governor General and ask her for an election, and who the hell do you think will win it?” A Liberal MP later told me that Martin had better tread carefully: “The crazy bugger just might do it.”

In all my years on Parliament Hill, I had never had a Cabinet meeting leak of any importance. On May 30, 2002, I received two of them. The first was a call from a familiar ministerial voice, uncharacteristically tense, telling me that at that morning's Cabinet gathering, the prime minister had given a very pointed shut up or ship out order to the dissidents in his ranks. Looking directly across the table at his finance minister but without addressing him by name, Chrétien had demanded that anyone who wanted to campaign for the leader's job do so from outside the government. Knowing the wily Chrétien as well as I did, my bet was that he must have orchestrated this leak, since once I'd reported the news on television Martin would be forced to make a public declaration one way or the other.

Within the hour another caller, this one a Martin loyalist, also broke Cabinet secrecy, claiming remorse for the breach but
saying he was too angry to help himself. “That son of a bitch Chrétien has just invited Martin to leave the Cabinet! We have taken all we can stand from this guy.”

That night I told the country that one of the most popular finance ministers in Canadian history had likely bought himself a ticket out of government. The following morning Martin would say to reporters only that he was considering his options. Of course, he knew he had none, and nine years after joining the government he was gone; whether as a result of firing or resigning, we never knew for certain.

The internecine battle was out in the open after a long history. Chrétien and Martin had been undeclared rivals for the Liberal leadership from the moment Martin was elected to Parliament in 1988. The two could not have been more different in background. Martin was a wealthy and handsome patrician, highly successful in business before he entered politics and, as the son of a Pearson-era Cabinet heavyweight, Paul Martin Senior, a member of the Liberal aristocracy. Both he and Chrétien had inherited the friends and the enemies of earlier incumbents: Chrétien had the party's Trudeau-era veterans on his side, while Martin was backed by John Turner's former supporters, still bitter at Chrétien's backroom machinations after Turner won the leadership in 1984. But Chrétien's team had the greater experience in the trenches, and at the first formal match between the two rivals, the 1990 leadership vote in Calgary, Martin found himself outmanoeuvred. Chrétien claimed victory on the first ballot.

Nowhere is defeat more an orphan than in Ottawa. Martin returned to the Opposition benches with a less-than-promising political horoscope, his confidence rattled, according to friends.
When I ran into him on Parliament Hill one day shortly after the convention, he seemed something of a lost soul. He asked whether I was free for dinner that night, which as it happened I was not. Back at the office, however, I had second thoughts and rearranged my schedule.

Over dinner he spoke passionately about two subjects that rarely evoke emotion: the economy and the national debt. Under the Conservatives, the latter had soared to unprecedented levels. Martin convinced me as no one had before that Canada was heading into deep financial trouble. Without urgent action, he predicted, Canada's public finances could face the equivalent of insolvency. For more years than I can remember, I have heard politicians declaim the grand legislative agendas they will enact if ever they get the chance. That night, Martin outlined for me an impressive roster of monetary and fiscal measures that he deemed essential; a few years later, he put them all into place as minister of Finance.