Jean Chretien: Noriega of the north
Peter C. Newman, National Post
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Regardless of what happens to Parliament, less than a month from now, Jean
Chretien's lawyers will storm Federal Court in a desperate attempt to halt
Justice John Gomery's Adscam inquiry. It will be the final destructive
gesture of Chretien, the once amiable political lightweight who turned
himself into the Noriega of the North, and now finds himself being blamed
for the Liberal party's descent into the anterooms of hell.
This is not the same man I first met on July 22, 1965, the day he was picked
out of the Liberal backbenches to become parliamentary secretary to prime
minister Lester Pearson. At 31, his charm was irresistible -- a stir-fry of
homespun humility, self-deprecating humour and upfront decency. I remember
thinking how comfortable he seemed in his skin, one of those rare
politicians who didn't need genuflecting flunkies to legitimize his worth.
Chretien had entered federal politics in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was
still canoodling in the White House, and for three long decades successfully
scuffled in the vestibules of Liberal power. He was blessed by his inability
to make enemies and the most valuable quality for any political neophyte:
always being underestimated, which admittedly was not hard in those days.
During our several interviews he treated politics not as a science or art,
but as an exchange of favours -- "a game of friends," as he called it. Talk
about foreshadowing: No other Canadian prime minister, including Brian
Mulroney, was so cynically personal in his distribution of favours.
In later years, he proved to be one tough mother. I saw the mature M.
Chretien several times when he ventured to the West Coast and I noticed that
his charm had fled. Nothing danced in his eyes; instead, he gave off a
distant, lunar chill.
His attempts to discredit the Gomery inquiry are entirely in keeping with
this latter character. It's history repeating itself, in fact. In the
mid-1990s, Justice Horace Krever's commission of inquiry into the
distribution of tainted blood by the Red Cross featured daily revelations
that the supposedly compassionate agency had knowingly distributed blood
infected with hepatitis C and tainted with the HIV virus -- and that Ottawa
had done nothing about it. Chretien got into the fight by stubbornly
refusing to compensate some hep-C victims. Instead of a simple humanitarian
gesture that might have diffused the tragic situation, his intervention
turned the controversy cruel and ugly.
The next flare-up was the commission of inquiry into the brutal 1993
torture-murder by Canadian military peacekeepers of Somalian teenager
Shidane Abukar Arone. As soon as Chretien appointees came under criticism,
the prime minister viciously assaulted the commission, shut it down
prematurely, and ignored its recommendations.
This once-kindly politician was at his most insensitive in 1997, when his
office dealt brutally with students from the University of British Columbia
protesting a visit from Indonesian dictator Suharto. The RCMP received
direct orders from the PMO to protect the visiting despot -- not just from
harm, but from embarrassment. Staff Sergeant Hugh Stewart assaulted peaceful
UBC protestors with pepper spray. When asked about the incident, Chretien
made the tense situation worse by joking about it. At the conference's
closing banquet, he quipped: "For me, pepper, I put it on my steak."
Next up was the scandal over Human Resources Minister Jane Stewart's
pathetic handling of the department's job creation programs. RCMP
investigations backed up critics who attacked the hapless minister for her
befuddled department's operating style. Chretien insisted the department's
shortfalls amounted to only $6,500, even though a Human Resources' internal
audit revealed that at least 469 departmental files lacked proper
documentation and follow-ups. When the Auditor-General confirmed the
problem, Chretien shut down the subsequent hearings by forbidding Liberals
members to attend, thus denying the committee its necessary quorum.
Throughout his career, much was made of Chretien's weird pronouncements. It
was virtually impossible to follow his butchered language, and his train of
thought was always on the point of derailing itself. So his attempt to
highlight the lack of proof of any wrongdoing, when asked while still in
office to comment on the questionable Quebec sponsorship scheme currently
being examined by Judge Gomery, was typical. "The proof is the proof," he
said, bypassing one of his rare excursions into coherence. "And when you
have a good proof, it's proven."
With every revelation from the Gomery inquiry, and Chretien's attempt to
derail it, we're getting some good proof indeed. Proof, that is, of just how
little Chretien came to resemble the decent man I met four decades ago.
© National Post 2005
Regardless of what happens to Parliament, less than a month from now, Jean
Chretien's lawyers will storm Federal Court in a desperate attempt to halt
Justice John Gomery's Adscam inquiry. It will be the final destructive
gesture of Chretien, the once amiable political lightweight who turned
himself into the Noriega of the North, and now finds himself being blamed
for the Liberal party's descent into the anterooms of hell.
This is not the same man I first met on July 22, 1965, the day he was picked
out of the Liberal backbenches to become parliamentary secretary to prime
minister Lester Pearson. At 31, his charm was irresistible -- a stir-fry of
homespun humility, self-deprecating humour and upfront decency. I remember
thinking how comfortable he seemed in his skin, one of those rare
politicians who didn't need genuflecting flunkies to legitimize his worth.
Chretien had entered federal politics in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was
still canoodling in the White House, and for three long decades successfully
scuffled in the vestibules of Liberal power. He was blessed by his inability
to make enemies and the most valuable quality for any political neophyte:
always being underestimated, which admittedly was not hard in those days.
During our several interviews he treated politics not as a science or art,
but as an exchange of favours -- "a game of friends," as he called it. Talk
about foreshadowing: No other Canadian prime minister, including Brian
Mulroney, was so cynically personal in his distribution of favours.
In later years, he proved to be one tough mother. I saw the mature M.
Chretien several times when he ventured to the West Coast and I noticed that
his charm had fled. Nothing danced in his eyes; instead, he gave off a
distant, lunar chill.
His attempts to discredit the Gomery inquiry are entirely in keeping with
this latter character. It's history repeating itself, in fact. In the
mid-1990s, Justice Horace Krever's commission of inquiry into the
distribution of tainted blood by the Red Cross featured daily revelations
that the supposedly compassionate agency had knowingly distributed blood
infected with hepatitis C and tainted with the HIV virus -- and that Ottawa
had done nothing about it. Chretien got into the fight by stubbornly
refusing to compensate some hep-C victims. Instead of a simple humanitarian
gesture that might have diffused the tragic situation, his intervention
turned the controversy cruel and ugly.
The next flare-up was the commission of inquiry into the brutal 1993
torture-murder by Canadian military peacekeepers of Somalian teenager
Shidane Abukar Arone. As soon as Chretien appointees came under criticism,
the prime minister viciously assaulted the commission, shut it down
prematurely, and ignored its recommendations.
This once-kindly politician was at his most insensitive in 1997, when his
office dealt brutally with students from the University of British Columbia
protesting a visit from Indonesian dictator Suharto. The RCMP received
direct orders from the PMO to protect the visiting despot -- not just from
harm, but from embarrassment. Staff Sergeant Hugh Stewart assaulted peaceful
UBC protestors with pepper spray. When asked about the incident, Chretien
made the tense situation worse by joking about it. At the conference's
closing banquet, he quipped: "For me, pepper, I put it on my steak."
Next up was the scandal over Human Resources Minister Jane Stewart's
pathetic handling of the department's job creation programs. RCMP
investigations backed up critics who attacked the hapless minister for her
befuddled department's operating style. Chretien insisted the department's
shortfalls amounted to only $6,500, even though a Human Resources' internal
audit revealed that at least 469 departmental files lacked proper
documentation and follow-ups. When the Auditor-General confirmed the
problem, Chretien shut down the subsequent hearings by forbidding Liberals
members to attend, thus denying the committee its necessary quorum.
Throughout his career, much was made of Chretien's weird pronouncements. It
was virtually impossible to follow his butchered language, and his train of
thought was always on the point of derailing itself. So his attempt to
highlight the lack of proof of any wrongdoing, when asked while still in
office to comment on the questionable Quebec sponsorship scheme currently
being examined by Judge Gomery, was typical. "The proof is the proof," he
said, bypassing one of his rare excursions into coherence. "And when you
have a good proof, it's proven."
With every revelation from the Gomery inquiry, and Chretien's attempt to
derail it, we're getting some good proof indeed. Proof, that is, of just how
little Chretien came to resemble the decent man I met four decades ago.
© National Post 2005