Jean Chrétien

Prime minister of Canada (1993–2003)

• Born: January 11, 1934
• Place of Birth: Shawinigan, Quebec, Canada

Chrétien was a fervent federalist committed to defending individual rights within a unified Canada. In the 1993 and 1997 Canadian elections, he led his Liberal Party to absolute majorities in the House of Commons. His victory in 1993 ended nine years of Conservative Party control in Canada.

Early Life

Jean Chrétien (zhahn kray-tee-ehn) was born on January 11, 1934, in the small Quebec town of Shawinigan, which is located near Trois-Rivières. His parents were French-speaking Roman Catholics. His mother was Marie Chrétien, and his father, Wellie, worked in a paper mill and was active in the Liberal Party. His grandfather had served for thirty years as the mayor of St.-Étienne-des-Grés and was one of the organizers of the Liberal Party in Quebec.

Chrétien was the eighteenth of nineteen children, but ten did not survive infancy. Jean Chrétien was born deaf in his right ear and partially paralyzed on the left side of his face. Despite his physical disabilities, he was mainstreamed in local grammar schools and high schools. His parents worked hard to ensure that he and his siblings received an excellent education. For high school he attended St. Joseph’s Seminary in Trois-Rivières. His brother, Michel, became a well-known endocrinologist in Montreal, while Chrétien studied at Laval University in Quebec City, where he received both his undergraduate and law degrees.

While Chrétien was a law student he married Aline Chaîne. They had a daughter named France and a son named Hubert. Chrétien was admitted to the bar in 1958, and he began working for a law firm in his native city of Shawinigan.

Life’s Work

In 1963, Chrétien was successful in his first run for political office. The voters in St. Maurice, Quebec, elected him to represent them as a Liberal member of Parliament. Soon after his arrival in Ottawa, he began to study English, realizing that learning English would be essential to his political career in bilingual Canada, in which French and English were official languages. Chrétien became fully bilingual.

He soon impressed Lester B. Pearson, the Liberal Party leader who served as prime minister from 1963 to 1968. Within two years of his entrance into Parliament, Chrétien was appointed the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister. Just two years later, Pearson selected him to serve as minister of state for finance. At the age of thirty-three, he became the youngest federal minister in the history of Canada. From 1968 until 1984, the liberal Pierre Trudeau served as the prime minister of Canada, with the exception of a few months in 1979 when Joe Clark, a conservative, was prime minister. During the Trudeau years in Ottawa, Chrétien became an increasingly influential leader of the Liberal Party. Like Trudeau, he was fully committed to bilingualism in Canada, but he also shared Trudeau’s opposition to the separation of Quebec and to granting special rights or a special legal status to the French-speaking majority in Quebec. Chrétien was a federalist who strove to maintain the unity of Canada while at the same time protecting the linguistic and political rights of all Canadians.

Between 1968 and 1984, Chrétien held diverse federal positions that enabled him to understand the rich complexity of Canadian politics. As the minister of national revenue and minister of finance, he learned how the federal government’s tax policies could encourage economic development throughout Canada to fight such serious problems as unemployment, inflation, and budgetary deficits. Chrétien grew up in a purely French-speaking town in Quebec and had very little previous contact with indigenous Canadians. From 1968 until 1974, however, he served as the minister of Indian affairs and northern development. He became very involved in defending their rights and in improving the quality of their lives. In 1972, Chrétien and his wife, Aline, adopted an orphaned child from the Gwichin tribe whom they named Michel.

Chrétien later served as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada. In 1980, he played a central role in persuading Quebecers to vote against separation from Canada. He argued eloquently that French- and English-speaking Canadians shared the same rights, which would be protected effectively only in a unified Canada. The 1980 referendum failed by a 20 percent margin in Quebec. English-speaking Canadians admired Chrétien’s forceful defense of Canadian unity, but sovereignists in Quebec were angered by his successful efforts to prevent Quebec’s secession from Canada. Two years later, he successfully negotiated a significant change in the British North America Act of 1867, which had created Canada as an independent dominion within the British Empire. This old law required laws passed by the Canadian parliament to be submitted for the approval of the English king or queen. Many Canadians viewed this requirement as an affront to their sovereignty. This law was changed in 1982 so that Canada gained the right to amend its own constitution.

One effect of the 1982 law was that Quebec lost its ability to veto constitutional changes. Chrétien viewed this as a very positive and democratic step because he believed that it was not conducive to Canadian unity to allow Quebec or any other province to frustrate the will of the majority. As a member of the French-speaking minority in Canada, he was sensitive to its aspirations and the fervent desire to protect the French language and culture from the English-speaking majority, but he felt that it served little purpose to modify the constitution by declaring that Quebec was a “distinct society” within Canada. If Quebec received special treatment under the law, then every group would demand and expect preferential treatment under the law. In 1984, Trudeau stepped down as prime minister, and the Liberals in the House of Commons selected John Turner as their new leader and prime minister. The Liberals under the leadership of Turner were soundly defeated by the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney in both the 1984 and 1988 federal elections.

In 1985, Chrétien published his autobiography Straight from the Heart , which was a best seller in Canada. The next year, he resigned his seat in the House of Commons and temporarily withdrew from politics. He accepted a position with an influential Ottawa law firm, where he worked between 1986 and 1990. In hindsight, commentators have speculated that Chrétien was simply waiting for Canadian public opinion to turn against the policies of Mulroney. By 1990, unemployment and inflation had increased significantly in Canada, and Mulroney’s solution to reducing the deficit was to impose a national goods and services tax on Canadians. When the budget deficit increased even after the imposition of this tax, the popularity of Mulroney plummeted. In 1990, Chrétien was reelected to the House of Commons and then became the Liberal Party leader. In 1993, Mulroney resigned, and he was succeeded by Kim Campbell.

In the middle of turmoil, many conservatives joined the new Reform Party. In the October 25, 1993, federal election, the Liberal Party, under Chrétien, won 177 out of the 295 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party won only two seats, while the Reform Party, the New Democrats, and the sovereignist Bloc Québécois held the other 116 seats. During his first four years as prime minister, Chrétien governed as a fiscal conservative and social liberal. His main goals were to create jobs by increasing exports to the United States and other countries, to reduce the national deficit, to maintain Canadian unity, and to keep taxes low while ensuring quality education and medical care for all Canadians. He fully implemented the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Mexico and played a key role in persuading Quebec voters in October 1995 to vote once more against separation from Canada.

One of the most traumatic events during Chrétien’s first term as prime minister occurred on the morning of November 5, 1995, when knife-wielding André Dallaire entered the Chrétien residence and wandered the halls for twenty minutes. Aline heard his steps and awakened her husband, who called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police agents stationed in their residence. It took the officers seven minutes to reach the Chrétiens’ bedroom and arrest Dallaire. It later became public that this assassination attempt might well have succeeded had the quick-thinking Aline not locked the door to their bedroom from the inside.

In the spring of 1997, Chrétien called federal elections in which his party once again won an absolute majority. He was the first Liberal Party prime minister since Louis St. Laurent in the 1950s to win two successive absolute majorities in the House of Commons. In the June 2 election, the Liberals won 155 seats out of 295 in the House of Commons. The Liberals won a respectable number of seats in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, but their main area of strength was in Ontario, where they won 101 out of 103 seats. Canadians expressed their support for Chrétien’s efforts to improve the economy while at the same time maintaining national unity.

Following the second consecutive victory of his Liberal Party, Chrétien could once again govern with an absolute majority in the House of Commons. He continued his general policy of fiscal discipline in order to keep reducing the large budget deficits accumulated during Mulroney’s nine years as prime minister (1984–1993). Canadian citizens were generally pleased with Chrétien’s skill in maintaining the well-established Canadian tradition of strong support for public education and the Canadian national health program. They were especially impressed with his ability to do so while reducing discretionary budgetary expenditures.

Because members of the House generally do not vote against the policies of their respective party, Chrétien did not need votes from opposition members for his proposals to become law. To govern effectively, minority prime ministers, however, had to approve unneeded and expensive public programs to gain the support of members of Parliament.

As the 1990s were coming to an end, the Canadian economy experienced significant growth across all of Canada, so Chrétien decided to call for elections in November 2000, almost two full years before federal elections were required. He was confident of success because Canadian conservatives were still dividing their votes between two separate political parties, the ultraconservative Canadian Alliance and the slightly less conservative Progressive Conservative Party. The Liberals increased their absolute majority from 15 to 172 of the 301 seats in the House.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States impelled Chrétien to take action on a variety of fronts. He was forced to approve major increases in expenditures for national security and defense. As the leader of a loyal member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he sent Canadian forces to help the United States and its allies remove the Taliban from Afghanistan. Canada moved away from its policies of fiscal restraint in the face of global terrorism.

In 2003, two events forced Chrétien to consider retirement. After nine years in the majority, many Canadian Liberals wanted to replace Chrétien with the popular Liberal politician Paul Martin. That same year, the two Canadian conservative parties decided to join together, forming the Conservative Party of Canada. In December 2003, at the age of sixty-nine, Chrétien decided to retire. He was succeeded by Martin. He withdrew from politics but resumed his career as a lawyer by joining the Ottawa and Montreal law firm of Heenan Blaikie. Chrétien was an informal adviser to Canadian Liberal politicians such as Stéphane Dion, who became the leader of the Liberal Party in December 2006. Like many earlier prime ministers of Canada, Chrétien tried to avoid partisan politics as much as possible during his years of retirement. In 2009, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Chrétien to the Order of Merit.

Chrétien was heavily criticized in 2021, after he stated in an interview that he had no knowledge of the ongoing abuse of Indigenous children in Canada's Indian Residential Schools during his time as Indian Affairs Minister. Chrétien went on to compare childrens' experience in Indian Residential Schools to his time in boarding school. Notably, Canada's Indian Residential Schools, both directly and indirectly, led to the deaths of thousands of children.

Significance

Chrétien’s political evolution was quite extraordinary. Until his election to the House of Commons in 1963, his interests did not extend beyond Quebec, and he spoke French only. Within a few years of his arrival in Ottawa, he became concerned with all aspects of Canadian society and politics, and he became a fervent federalist committed to defending individual rights within a unified Canada. Had it not been for a Liberal Party tradition that the party leadership alternate between native speakers of English and native speakers of French, Chrétien would have most probably become prime minister in 1984 after the resignation of Trudeau. However, he would have been soundly defeated by Mulroney because Canadian opinion polls indicated that the Liberals could not have hoped to defeat the Conservatives in 1984. The selection of Turner by the Liberals in 1984 was a blessing in disguise for Chrétien because it was Turner and not Chrétien who lost the 1984 and 1988 federal elections.

With the collapse in the popularity of the Conservatives in the early 1990s, the Liberals became the sole political party with solid representation in the House from all Canadian provinces. The other four parties became largely regional in their appeal to voters. Chrétien developed a vision of a unified Canada that impressed both voters in English-speaking provinces and Quebecers opposed to separation from Canada.

Bibliography

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