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In 1993 French-Canadian politician Jean Chrétien became prime minister of Canada after serving in Parliament for 27 years as a representative of the Liberal Party. During his long political career Chrétien built a reputation for tackling some of the country’s most divisive political, economic, and social issues. As a member of Parliament and as prime minister, Chrétien consistently opposed the separatist movement in Québec while trying to bridge the differences between French- and English-speaking Canadians. This 1990 profile from Current Biography traces his ascent from the ranks of the Liberal Party to his assumption of party leadership.
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In June 1990 Jean Chretien succeeded John Turner as the leader of the Liberal party in Canada. First elected to Parliament in 1963, he held a number of cabinet-level posts in the successive governments of Pierre Trudeau before leaving Parliament in 1986 to return to his law practice. Throughout his political career Chretien, a populist with a carefully cultivated image as the 'little guy' from Shawinigan, Quebec, has practiced his concept of the art of politics: 'learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face.' His earthy candor, mixed with a self-deprecating humor, an ardent nationalism, and an impulsive impatience to act, has been both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness. Although he is one of the few Canadian politicians who can excite a crowd by his mere presence, Chretien's glib style has led critics to dismiss him as a 'policy lightweight.' His impressive first-ballot victory in his party's recent leadership election went a long way toward helping him shed that label.
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Jean Joseph-Jacques Chretien was born on January 11, 1934 in a suburb of Shawinigan, Quebec, a pulp-and-paper-mill town 113 miles northeast of Montreal, the second-youngest of the nineteen children of Wellie Chretien and his wife, the former Marie Boisvert. He grew up in an apartment block owned by the mill where his father worked as a machinist. Only nine of Jean Chretien's siblings survived infancy. Nothing if not ambitious, Wellie Chretien held down three jobs while working as an organizer for the Liberal party. 'Although my family was far from rich, we were seen as successful, almost aristocratic,' Chretien recalled in his best-selling autobiography, Straight from the Heart (1985).
When Marie Chretien fell ill in 1939, young Jean and two of his brothers were sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school. Self-conscious after infantile paralysis had distorted his mouth and had left him deaf in the right ear, Jean Chretien was so desperately homesick there that he refused to study and deliberately got into trouble in the hope that he would be sent home. Expelled from two schools, he was sent to another. 'My father told me there had to be a black sheep in every family, and I was it,' Chretien recalled during an interview with Glen Allen of Maclean's (May 3, 1976). Rebellion was the leitmotif of Chretien's early life. He was in frequent arguments, sometimes brawls, at the local pool hall. He took on those who teased him about his physical appearance as well as those who defended the corrupt Union Nationale administration of Premier Maurice Duplessis.
Following in his father's footsteps, Chretien discovered politics so early that by the age of twelve he was working for the Liberals and attending party rallies. In 1955 the sixteen-year-old Chretien began to weigh the possibilities of higher education as a springboard to politics. On graduating from high school, at his father's urging he enrolled in the law school of Laval University in Quebec City, because he knew that a law degree might help him get elected to Parliament.
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To put himself through law school, Chretien worked weekends and summers at the Shawinigan paper mill. In his spare time, he ran the campus Liberal club at Laval and organized the party's campaign in the 1956 provincial election. After passing his bar examination in 1958, he opened a law practice in Shawinigan and plunged into local politics. In 1963 he won a seat as the member of Parliament for the riding of St. Maurice, defeating the Social Credit incumbent. At the time, Chretien spoke only French, but since the capital city of Ottawa was predominantly English-speaking, he determined to become bilingual by reading Time and Newsweek and by fraternizing with a group of young, English-speaking MPs. Chretien also took English lessons from a private tutor who advised him to keep his accent, which he did, and it later became his trademark.
In 1964 Jean Chretien, a rising star in the Liberal party, was approached by Rene Levesque, then a cabinet minister in Quebec's Liberal government and later the leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, about running for a seat in the provincial assembly. After indulging in much soul-searching, Chretien opted to stay in Parliament. His loyalty was rewarded the following year, when Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson named him his parliamentary secretary and then, six months later, appointed him to the same job under the finance minister, Mitchell Sharp.
Chretien later told Anthony Westell of the Toronto Globe and Mail (February 2, 1967), 'It was the best year of my life. Nothing has been too secret for me to see. I learned much.' Evidently agreeing, when he shuffled his cabinet in April 1967, Pearson appointed Chretien minister without portfolio, attached to finance. Among the other new faces in the cabinet was a young Quebec MP named Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who had been named justice minister. When Pearson retired not long afterwards, Chretien supported Trudeau in his bid to become leader of the Liberal party, and a victorious Trudeau returned the favor in July 1968, when he appointed Chretien minister of Indian affairs and northern development—a notoriously difficult assignment.
For the next six years, Chretien juggled the competing interests of natives, environmentalists, and developers, proving himself to be both tough and effective but also flexible when the need arose. He streamlined the Indian-affairs bureaucracy, set about reorganizing the government of Canada's vast northern territories, launched a bold initiative to create ten new national parks, and held his own in the cabinet. In June 1969 he outlined a controversial plan to end what he termed Canada's 'paternalistic policy' toward native people by closing the reservations and integrating their residents into Canadian society. After two years of bitter debate, Chretien withdrew his proposal, though he would not budge in his refusal to renegotiate Indian treaty rights.
By 1975 Canada's economic growth had decelerated, a controversial program of federal wage-and-price controls had run its course, and the government had become increasingly concerned about the deficit. Because he needed a strong minister to act as president of the Treasury Board of Canada, Trudeau appointed Chretien, whose mission it was to trim $1 billion in government spending and to say no to new initiatives. One Canadian journalist wrote at the time: 'It is Chretien who plays the heavy, the hired gun.… And it is [he], in charge of spending close to $40 billion a year, who must do it.'
To the surprise of many observers, Chretien reduced government spending without making political enemies within the cabinet. Impressed by Chretien's obvious skills in handling people, in September 1976 Trudeau named him minister of industry, trade, and commerce. At the time, some expected Chretien to leave federal politics and seek the leadership of the Quebec wing of the Liberal party, since the separatist Parti Quebecois was in power there, and the opposition Liberals, in disarray, were desperate for a new leader. Chretien seriously considered such a move but decided he could do the most to keep Quebec within the confederation by remaining in Ottawa and accepting Trudeau's offer of the finance portfolio. That appointment, announced in September 1977, fulfilled Chretien's dream of becoming the country's first French-Canadian finance minister. 'I accept the job with humility, but also with confidence,' he told reporters.
Jean Chretien was unlucky enough to arrive in finance when the economy was in its worst shape since the 1930s: unemployment was nearing 10 percent, the Canadian dollar had plummeted to an all-time low, and inflation was rampant. At the urging of bureaucrats and advisers, on April 10, 1978 he delivered his first budget. Apart from proposing $1.1 billion in tax cuts and recommending the formal end of wage-and-price controls, there was little substance in the eleven-page document, one of the briefest ever. In Quebec City, the Parti Quebecois government sparked a heated row with Ottawa by refusing to take part in Chretien's plan to stimulate the economy by reducing provincial retail-sales taxes.
Many observers felt Chretien's political career was stagnating, and that analysis seemed proved when in August 1978 Prime Minister Trudeau, just back from an economic summit in West Germany, announced $2 billion in government spending cuts. A chagrined Chretien, who had not even been consulted, considered resigning and was dissuaded only by an apologetic Trudeau. 'I've never quite decided whether it was a breakdown in communications or a power play by the prime minister's office,' Chretien wrote in his autobiography. As a conciliatory gesture, Trudeau agreed to let Chretien introduce a new budget.
Faced with a falling dollar and increasingly bleak economic news, Chretien announced on November 16 that he was reducing taxes a further $1.38 billion and allowing the federal deficit to rise to a record $12.1 billion in an effort to prod the sluggish economy. A writer for Maclean's (November 27, 1978) noted that 'if this budget is perceived as a success, [Chretien] will receive all the credit, and his political career will be back on track again.' But an editorial that appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail (November 17, 1978) lamented: 'This is just not a stimulative budget, no matter how cheerfully it may be worded to sound like one.'
The skeptics were proved right; the November budget was both too little and too late. Because the economic picture was so grim, the prime minister delayed the general election until May 22, 1979. The delay was no advantage, for the rival Tories under Joe Clark were elected to a minority government. That government fell after just six months, and in the subsequent general election held on February 18, 1980 the resurgent Liberals won with a majority. All eyes then turned to Quebec, where the Parti Quebecois had called a referendum for May 20 to decide if the province should secede from Canada. Pierre Trudeau assigned the crucial task of leading the federal forces in the referendum battle to Chretien, appointing him minister of justice in March 1980. 'It was the last goddamn thing I ever wanted to do. But the boss insisted,' Chretien told Ron Graham in an interview for Saturday Night (March 1981).
The ensuing referendum campaign took on the aura of an evangelical crusade for both sides, and Chretien was in the thick of it, with his 'finger-jabbing, fist-clenching, and earthy colloquialisms in both official languages,' to quote Toronto Globe and Mail (April 29, 1980) reporter Robert Shepherd. Speaking at rallies virtually every night, Chretien drove himself to exhaustion and lost ten pounds and countless hours of sleep in the process. But the effort paid off when the people of Quebec voted to reject separatism. Yet the victory was bittersweet for Chretien. 'Even in the moment of victory, I felt sorry for those who had fought so hard for what they believed in,' he later recalled.
With the referendum battle won, there remained just two matters on Pierre Trudeau's political agenda: repatriation of Canada's constitution from Great Britain and the creation of a charter of rights. Again, it was Chretien who, as Trudeau's chief lieutenant, traveled across the country and conferred with the provincial premiers in an effort to reach agreement on how best to proceed. But even Chretien could find no consensus. When the prime minister and the premiers met in September 1981, the conference broke up in a welter of name-calling and acrimony. But buoyed by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that the federal government could legally act on its own, Trudeau decided to do so.
Faced with that prospect, the provincial premiers reluctantly assembled in Ottawa to meet with the prime minister one last time. Much to everyone's surprise, on November 5, 1981 an agreement was reached, and, with all of the provinces except Quebec now supporting the constitutional proposal and charter, the necessary legislation was passed by Parliament on December 8. A few days later, Chretien flew to London, where he briefed Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the specifics of the legislation. Despite some last-minute opposition by Canadian native groups and a few surly British MPs, on March 29, 1982 the new Canadian constitution was passed by the British House of Commons. In a formal ceremony in Ottawa on April 17, Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Trudeau signed the Constitution Act, severing the last remaining legal ties between Great Britain and her former colony. 'In a kind gesture by Trudeau, I signed my name just below Her Majesty's,' Chretien noted in Straight from the Heart, 'although there was no technical reason for my signature to have been there.'
Delighted to have succeeded where critics said he would not, Trudeau reshuffled his cabinet a few months later, and Chretien was named minister of energy. But if the appointment to that relatively low-profile job was intended as a reward, it failed to work out that way, for world oil prices were fluctuating, and Ottawa and the energy-producing provinces, Alberta in particular, got into a heated dispute over the price to be charged domestic consumers. Again, Chretien found himself involved in a major controversy, and again he found a way out of what had seemed to be an impasse. On June 30, 1983 Chretien announced that he and his Alberta counterpart, John Zaozirny, had agreed on a new oil-pricing formula.
Meanwhile, on February 29, 1984 Trudeau announced that after spending sixteen years in Canadian politics he would retire on June 30. The favorites to succeed him were Jean Chretien and John Turner, a former finance minister who had left the Trudeau cabinet in 1975. Chretien knew that in order to succeed, he would have to buck a longstanding Liberal 'tradition' of alternating anglophones and francophones as party leader. When asked, he was noncommittal about his plans, other than to say that the Liberal party should select a new leader who represented 'Main Street, not Bay Street'—a thinly veiled gibe at Turner, a corporate lawyer in Toronto.
Backed by fifty-two members of the Liberal caucus, on March 21, 1984 Chretien announced his candidacy for the party leadership. In the early weeks of the campaign, polls indicated that he and Turner were tied in terms of popularity with delegates, but, as the June 16 convention neared, Turner picked up strength. Mary Janigan of Maclean's (April 4, 1984) observed: '[Chretien] is running flat-out on an unabashed appeal to the heart, and he is calling on old loyalties and new debts.' As it turned out, the polls were right, for Turner defeated Chretien on the second ballot, 1,862 votes to1,368. What made the loss especially hard for Chretien was the fact that many Quebec Liberals backed Turner because they regarded Chretien as an 'Uncle Tom' who curried favor with anglophones.
When Chretien and Turner met after the convention, they agreed to work together, and Turner appointed Chretien his minister of external affairs. Just a few months later, Turner's short-lived government was swept from office by Brian Mulroney's Conservatives in a general election on September 4, 1984. In the wake of that crushing defeat, Chretien brooded about his political career, but it was not long before he and Turner were at odds again, this time over Chretien's hesitancy to pledge his unqualified support to the party leader. On March 1, 1986 a bitter and angry Chretien announced that 'enough is enough.' Resigning his seat in Parliament, he quit the cabinet and went back to his legal career—ironically, exactly as Turner himself had done eleven years before. His decision highlighted a growing disorganization within the Liberal ranks that led to another electoral defeat at the hands of the Conservatives on November 21, 1988. Faced with dissension within the party, Turner announced on May 3, 1989 that he was stepping down as Liberal leader, prompting party organizers to call a leadership convention for June 22-24, 1990 in Calgary.
In the four years he had been out of politics, Chretien had remained active on the periphery, making himself available for Liberal fund-raisers and dinners. One poll showed that he was still one of Canada's best-known political figures; another indicated that 43 percent of Canadians felt that he would make a good prime minister. Observers speculated that Chretien would be a likely choice to succeed Turner, but when reporters asked him about his intentions, he declined to comment. He was engaged in testing the political waters, sounding out support for his call to renegotiate aspects of the recent Canada-United States free-trade agreement and to reject the Conservative government's proposed Meech Lake accord. An outspoken proponent of strong central government, Chretien was critical of the accord's decentralizing thrust and its aim of bringing Quebec into the Canadian constitution by granting it special status as a 'distinct society.'
On January 23, 1990 Chretien declared his candidacy for the Liberal leadership by announcing that 'the prime minister … must speak for all Canada, must inspire Canadians with a national vision of this country, and must protect the equality and citizenship of all Canadians.' The campaign for the Liberal party leadership was somewhat overshadowed by public debate about the Meech Lake accord. According to Graham Fraser of the Toronto Globe and Mail (June 22, 1990), Chretien, who had often voiced his opposition to the agreement, eventually acknowledged that he had been involved in the behind-the-scenes discussions with the provincial premiers to work out a compromise solution. In his stump speeches, however, he was uncharacteristically silent on the divisive issue. As Fraser put it, Chretien seemed to be 'caught on the horns of his two allegiances; to English Canadians who are viscerally opposed to the constitutional accord, and to Quebecers who want to see it passed.'
On June 23, 1990, the day after the Meech Lake accord failed to win approval from the provinces of Newfoundland and Manitoba, Chretien was elected leader of the Liberal party on the first ballot at the party's convention in Calgary, taking 57 percent of the votes cast. His closest rival among the four other candidates, Paul Martin, a strong supporter of Meech Lake, received only 25 percent of the votes. In his victory speech, Chretien emphasized the need to rebuild the party following the defeat of Meech Lake and asked those who had backed the accord for their help and their 'good ideas.' At a news conference on June 24, he recommended a cooling-off period before beginning new constitutional talks with Quebec. 'Two years is probably a good break,' he told reporters. Two days later, Chretien publicly rejected Mulroney's suggestion that he try immediately for a seat in the House of Commons, saying he had 'other priorities' and planned to wait at least six months before running for office.
Jean Chretien, who has described himself as a 'hyperactive sort of guy,' is six feet tall and of medium build. Apart from politics, the focus of his life is his family. He and his wife, the former Aline Chaine, whom he married in 1957, have three grown children: a daughter, France, and sons Hubert and Michel, a native Indian boy whom the Chretiens adopted in the early 1970s. Chretien, who enjoys an occasional beer, counts among his leisure-time activities skiing, golfing, watching baseball on TV, reading, and listening to classical music.
Source: Copyright (c) 1990 All rights reserved. From Wilson Biographies, reprinted by permission of the H. W. Wilson Co.
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Chrétien, (Joseph Jacques) Jean; Liberal Party (Canada); Canada
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