"Yesterday's Man" Charts the Future

By Michael S. Serrill

Only two days had passed since the Liberal Party's landslide victory, but Jean Chretien was raring to go into action. The man who will be Canada's 20th Prime Minister does not take office until this week, but at his first postelection press conference he plunged into a small torrent of pronouncements. "It's time to pull the country together, time to get to work," Chretien declared. He clearly meant it. So eager was he to get on with his busy schedule that he fled the planned 45-minute news conference after just 22 minutes -- only to find that the limousine taking him to his next meeting had not arrived yet.

Chretien could have used the spare time to savor the Liberals' stunning comeback to power after nine years in opposition. He had been derided by the ruling Progressive Conservatives as "yesterday's man" -- until voters handed the Tories the worst defeat in the history of any Canadian party. In Oct. 25 balloting, they reduced the party's House of Commons strength from 155 seats to a shockingly rock-bottom 2 and simultaneously gave Chretien a comfortable 177-seat majority. Prime Minister Kim Campbell lost her seat and soon, no doubt, will lose the leadership post she held for only three months. In the taunt of foes, it was only Kim's summer job after all.

Soaring into the vacuum left by the imploding Conservatives, two new regional parties gained substantial power -- dragging with them the perennial issue of Canada's political survival. For the first time, the official opposition party, the Bloc Quebecois, with 54 seats, is an organization dedicated to the country's dismemberment. The Bloc, led by Lucien Bouchard, 54, aims to take Canada's predominantly French-speaking province out of Confederation. In the west the conservative populist Reform Party won 52 seats. Its leader, Preston Manning, 51, has often declared himself unwilling to make further constitutional concessions as the price for Quebec's remaining in the union.

Pitted against these bipolar forces is one of the country's most experienced politicians -- the holder of nine Cabinet posts in previous Liberal governments -- and a vocal federalist. Chretien, 59, takes office with a clear, if daunting, mandate: to turn around the limp economy while preserving an expensive social-service network that 28.5 million Canadians -- and Chretien himself -- see as an inalienable right.

The task is not going to be easy. Canada has a $26 billion federal deficit and a foreign debt of $225 billion -- the largest, per capita, in the industrialized world. The country also has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the West, at 11.2%. During his campaign, Chretien promised to create 120,000 jobs in the public sector, most of them building and repairing Canada's eroding infrastructure. But, says John Clinkard, chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Toronto, "the fiscal cupboard is essentially bare. The Liberals can play around the edges with fiscal policy -- but they can have no significant increases in spending."

Another problem that may prove easier to solve in rhetoric than in practice is the Liberal stance toward the North American Free Trade Agreement, already endorsed by Canada, Mexico and the U.S. Chretien vowed to renegotiate the pact and struck a chord among many voters, who blame free trade for Canada's severe recession. He bonged no similar chimes in Washington. President Bill Clinton, who telephoned his congratulations to Chretien, declared that the Liberal victory would have "no impact at all" on NAFTA. The treaty will go before Congress on Nov. 17 and, if passed, is due to go into effect on Jan. 1.

In contrast with the mercurial Campbell, Chretien projected a calming image to voters, buttressed by his plain-folks persona. The 18th of 19 children born to a machinist and his wife in rural Shawinigan, Quebec, Chretien began campaigning for Liberal candidates in local pool halls at age 15. Undeterred by a mild facial paralysis that has plagued him since childhood and by his unfamiliarity with English, Chretien won a seat in Parliament in 1963. He quickly rose through a succession of increasingly important Cabinet jobs, including Finance and External Affairs.

Today Chretien is the first Liberal Prime Minister ever to win office without a majority of the seats from Quebec -- all the more surprising given his origins. That apparent rejection of the favorite son has much to do with Chretien's role as an enthusiastic spear carrier for federalism and his rejection of any special status for his native province. "I've seen these ((separatist)) tides come and go," Chretien told TIME. "I believe Canada will remain together." Bloc Quebecois leader Bouchard has given a cruel assessment of Chretien's technique for turning Quebec's scorn into a national advantage: "It is making himself sufficiently detestable in Quebec to be loved elsewhere."

Soon enough, that love will be tested. Once the glow of his victory wears off, Chretien will be under assault: from the Reformers for taxing and spending too much, from the separatists for elbowing aside Quebec's sovereignty, from the left wing of his own party for his fiscal moderation and, in all likelihood, for failing to take a combative stance toward the U.S. It seems there is no such thing as a comfortable majority in Canada. Kim Campbell, after all, had one too.

With reporting by Gavin Scott and Courtney Tower/Ottawa