Canada Those Irish Eyes Are Smiling Again

By George Russell

At the hockey arena in the gritty Quebec town of Baie Comeau, lasers flashed and a nine-piece band pumped out noisy dance numbers. Amid the din, 3,000 supporters of the Progressive Conservative Party whooped it up, delighting in one of Canada's most momentous election triumphs -- and waiting for the hometown hero to make his appearance. Then the doors opened, the television lights switched on, and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, 49, strode in. "Feels great," he said as he shouldered his way across temporary plywood flooring toward a stage set up roughly at center ice, with a huge red-and-white Mapleleaf Flag as backdrop. "Feels great."

Moments later, with his wife Mila and their three eldest children looking on, the Prime Minister declared on national television that Canada had embarked on an era of "openness to the rest of the world." Voters, he said, "have stated with a clear sense of their identity what they want to be and what they want to do."

Mulroney had just emerged from the most emotional and vituperative election campaign in Canadian memory -- a battle that at one point it seemed he might lose. Mulroney's Conservatives were returned to power, taking 169 seats in the 295-seat House of Commons. The opposition Liberals, led by former Prime Minister John Turner, 59, won 83 seats, while the New Democrats, under Edward Broadbent, 52, gained 43.

The margin amounted to a firm endorsement of the issue that totally dominated the campaign: the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. Signed by Mulroney and Ronald Reagan last January and passed by the U.S. Congress, the accord will bind the world's largest bilateral trading relationship -- last year's value was about $132.5 billion -- into a single duty-free market within ten years. Two days after the triumph, the Prime Minister's office announced that Parliament would meet Dec. 12 to approve the pact.

The free-trade deal could prove to be the key economic event of the decade for both countries. Economists have estimated that by 1999 Canada could have added 2% to 3% to its gross national product under the agreement, and the U.S. about 1% to its GNP. Equally important, the accord is expected to provide impetus for free trade globally at a time when protectionist forces are on the rise.

In Canadian terms, the election reflects a maturing sense of identity, which for more than a century has been defined in large measure by a rejection of closer economic ties with a more populous (246 million, vs. 26 million), richer and more assertive neighbor to the south. Twice in the past century, Canadian governments have lost elections on the issue of free trade with the U.S.

This time, says Michael McCracken, president of Informetrica, an Ottawa- based economic-research firm, "the Canadian voter took a leap of faith, opting for trade liberalization and to move against an inward-looking, anti- American approach to the economy." In effect Mulroney's victory amounted to an affirmation that Canada's identity and sovereignty are sturdy enough to survive a closer economic embrace with its best friend and neighbor.

Contrariness over the trade issue reached a peak on Oct. 25, during the second of two nationally televised debates between the party leaders. In that confrontation, and throughout the 26 remaining days of the campaign, Turner described Mulroney as a man willing to "sell out" Canada and reduce the country to an "economic colony" of the U.S.

Over Mulroney's sputtered rejoinder, the Liberal leader's attack struck a nerve with the 6 million viewers who tuned in to the exchange. Turner's critics argued that he had fallen on the nationalist strategy not so much out of principle but out of desperation: down in the polls, they said, he faced ouster as his party's leader if the Liberal campaign failed. But the tactic worked: within four days, the Liberals enjoyed, according to one poll, a 4- point lead.

Smelling advantage, Turner persistently -- and with no hard evidence to back up his claims -- warned that ratification of free trade would lead to U.S. and Canadian pressure to reduce Canada's comprehensive system of medicare and generous old-age pensions. Other opponents of free trade, many of them organized in the activist coalition known as the Pro-Canada Network, published a pamphlet that featured cartoons of, among other things, Mulroney pledging allegiance in front of the Stars and Stripes. A pro-Mulroney heckler who showed up at a Turner rally in Montreal was beaten bloody, an incident that shocked a law-and-order-minded country.

In the late days of the race, Turner's pitch grew increasingly shrill. U.S. officials had remained silent to avoid any hint of interference in Canadian affairs. Yet when Ronald Reagan made a bland 30-second reference to the free- trade pact in a long-planned speech on global trade -- the President called the accord "an example of cooperation at its best" -- Turner described Reagan's words as a "major breach of courtesy between the two nations" and castigated Mulroney for getting "his good friend at head office, Ronald Reagan, to help him do a job he can't complete himself." Again and again, Turner hammered at his main theme: "Mr. Mulroney wants to turn us into the 51st state."

Mulroney's response was simple and accurate: the virtues of free trade could be measured in jobs, jobs, jobs. At a rally in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, he told supporters that "2 million jobs are dependent on trade." Wherever he traveled the Prime Minister declaimed, "John Turner says the cause of his life is to tear up a treaty; the cause of my life is to build a nation." Failure to endorse the trade agreement, he warned, would leave the country mired in the "poverty of protectionism."

As so often happens in Canadian politics, Quebec provided the decisive margin last week. The Conservatives benefited, of course, from the fact that Mulroney is a native son, fluent in both English and locally accented French. The party also enjoyed the strong support of Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, a Liberal but a believer in free trade and Quebec's prospects in a more open North American economy. Most important, Quebec's response reflected the degree to which the French-speaking province has become politically and culturally self-assured, apparently more confident than much of English Canada that its identity will not be submerged into a North American amalgam. Even the separatist Parti Quebecois, now a minority group, urged supporters to back free trade and Mulroney. Said Liberal strategist Patrick Gossage, a member of Turner's campaign staff: "There's a new Quebec out there. It's a happy, comfortable province."

The Liberals knew the battle was over when results began streaming in from Ontario, Canada's industrial, financial and communications heartland. Canadian nationalism has always been strong in southern Ontario, particularly among the intelligentsia and the union movement. Despite the appeal and support of David Peterson, the personable Ontario Premier, the Liberals won only 43 of 99 seats. In the traditionally Conservative West, the results were virtually a foregone conclusion: a healthy margin for Mulroney, but also a strong showing ) for the socialist New Democrats.

Free trade will hardly mean the end of all Canada-U.S. commercial disputes. Naturally enough, in a dense and complex trading relationship, some issues are almost always simmering. Among the most sensitive is a long-standing U.S. complaint that Canada illegally protects West Coast fish processors. And by Dec. 6, the Reagan Administration must rule on the continuation of a punitive 35% tariff on imports of Canadian cedar shakes and shingles.

In the euphoria of victory, however, two other revelations loomed as more important. The first was the voters' devotion to Canadian values, which Mulroney checked off in his victory speech. Among them: sovereignty, protection of minority rights and of social programs, and a commitment to the environment and to the development of unequal regions. The election, said Mulroney, "was not about those values, but about the means to give them greater effect."

The other was the country's growing confidence. For decades, the national debate has been dominated by two uncertainties: economic and cultural survival in the shadow of the southern neighbor, and political survival as a bilingual confederation. Both challenges pushed the country into prolonged and often painful bouts of introspection. Mulroney's greatest accomplishment may well be to preside over the waning of an era of self-doubt.

With reporting by Gavin Scott/Ottawa