Chretien, 59, is a rough-hewed French Canadian who water-skis in his bare feet, admires Harry Truman and is stubbornly determined to keep his native Quebec from seceding. He says he has a lot in common with Bill Clinton, another pragmatic liberal. They “both come from the rural part of the nation,” he observed in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK. “We’re not from the establishment by family background. So…I’m comfortable.” But Chretien does not want to get too comfortable with his powerful neighbor. There will be no special relationship, like the cozy closeness that Ronald Reagan and George Bush developed with former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney. Chretien says he does not want to go fishing with the American president; he’s afraid he might end up as the fish.
In fact, after a congratulatory phone call from Clinton last week, Chretien was heading for at least a minor collision with the U.S. president over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Chretien wants to renegotiate parts of NAFTA to obtain greater protection for Canadian exporters and to prevent American energy companies from buying up Canadian reserves. Canadians are nervous about NAFTA for the same reason that many Americans are; they fear the loss of jobs. In their weak economy, unemployment already stands at 11.2 percent, nearly double the U.S. rate.
Clinton himself renegotiated with Mexico after he took office, and now Chretien says it’s his turn. The problem for Clinton is that the prospect of Canadian renegotiation might give fence-sitting U.S. lawmakers an excuse to vote against NAFTA when it comes up for approval later this month. “I see no reason to renegotiate the agreement,” Clinton said last week. His spinners predicted that Chretien would roll over. In the NEWSWEEK interview, however, the prime minister-designate stood his ground. “My position is a moderate one,” he insisted. “But I know what I need. And…some say that it’s not that much.”
Chretien’s new majority in the House of Commons is so large–177 seats out of 295–that he can probably do whatever he thinks he has to on NAFTA. But ironically, his sweeping victory may only widen the lines in Canadian society. Other parties that support federalism were decimated. Hardest hit were the Conservatives. Their outspoken prime minister, Kim Campbell, the first woman to hold the job, ran a spectacularly inept campaign, rarely opening her mouth, it seemed, except to change feet. She lost her own seat, and Tory strength in the Commons dropped from 153 seats to just two.
The role of official opposition party falls to the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist movement formed three years ago to promote Quebec’s interests on the national level. Leader Lucien Bouchard, 54, a former Tory minister, promised to play a “positive and responsible” role in Ottawa. But most of the bloc’s 54 new M.Ps have no experience in Parliament and don’t speak fluent English.
The right-wing, populist Reform Party, which won 52 seats, got a Perot-style vote from people, mostly in the west, who want to cut taxes, reduce immigration, pare down big government and deny Quebec any special status. Its leader, Preston Manning, 51, is an earnest evangelical Christian. But some of his supporters are kooks and racists–“bugs drawn to the light,” Manning calls them.
Polls suggest that many people who voted for the two new parties were registering a protest against the shortcomings of traditional politics. Few politicians are more traditional than Chretien. He says the previous government alienated most of Canada by ignoring bread-and-butter issues. The Tories “spent too much time on constitutional affairs and not enough on the economy,” he says. “So I want to do exactly the reverse.” He plans a big public-works program to “kick-start the economy,” arguing that “now is the time to build the infrastructure of a country that needs a lot of rebuilding.”
During the campaign, his opponents derided him as “yesterday’s man,” a lackluster relic of 21 years in previous Liberal governments. Chretien is a homespun politician, the 18th of 19 children in a rural family. He speaks awkwardly in both French and English, partly the result of a birth defect that paralyzed one side of his face. But he is no yokel. As the Tories self-destructed and the strident new parties gained strength, Chretien kept his head and waged a smart campaign. “Yesterday” began to look better and better to many middle-of-the-road Canadians. Now the question is whether Chretien and his old-fashioned Liberals can hold Canada together all by themselves.
