Juggernaut: Paul Martin's Campaign for Chretien's Crown - Rilegato

Delacourt, Susan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0771026056 ISBN 13: 9780771026058

Casa editrice: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2004

Riassunto

An inside account of Paul Martin’s decades-long campaign for the prime minister’s chair: how he did it, at what cost, and where he will take the country in the years ahead

The most riveting political contest of the past decade has not been fought at the polling booths, nor on the floor of the House of Commons: it has been waged, mostly out of sight, within the palace ranks of the ruling Liberal Party.

In the early 1990s, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin forged a political alliance that kept the Liberals comfortably in power and the Opposition in disarray: Martin’s fundamental retooling of government spending and winning economic policies gave lustre to Chrétien’s leadership; Chrétien’s support for his star minister gave Martin a pedestal for his larger ambitions.

Those ambitions could not be higher. Since the early eighties, Martin’s interest in political office has meant interest in the prime minister’s office. At the 1990 leadership convention, however, he finished second to Chrétien. Their corrosive rivalry and very different political styles could not be buried for long: their duel for supremacy – played out only partly in public view – culminated in the infamous weekend in June 2002 when Martin was fired – or did he walk? – from Chretién’s cabinet.

Juggernaut charts in intimate detail Martin’s long journey to the leadership now within his grasp. Central to that story is the role played by Martin’s corps of committed kingmakers – public relations experts, savvy pollsters, and true believers -who will have enormous influence on the prime ministership to be.

Based on extraordinary access to players from all camps, Juggernaut offers Canadians an inside account of the rise of the man now poised to take power, how he got there, at what cost, and where he will take the country in the years ahead.

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L'autore:

Susan Delacourt has covered the federal Liberals and leadership politics over two decades. She is the Ottawa Bureau Chief for The Toronto Star, a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, and a regular commentator for CBC Newsworld’s “Politics” show and CBC Radio's “The House.” She is the author of United We Fall, an account of the doomed Charlottetown constitutional accord, and Shaughnessy: The Passionate Politics of Shaughnessy Cohen.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

OFF CENTRE
During the Liberals’ years in power after 1993, the seat of government authority and the still point of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s far-reaching control were known by a single moniker: the Centre.

The Centre was a place and it was a state of mind; it was a cadre and it was an individual. It was where the buck stopped and started. It was both the maker and breaker of political careers. Cabinet ministers flagged vital instructions to aides with the warning, “This comes from the Centre.”

But in the early months of 2002, political spectators began to see a weakening of this omnipotence. As William Butler Yeats observed, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

The erosion was nearly painful to watch. Chrétien had to shuffle his cabinet repeatedly to replace ministers touched by conflict-of-interest controversies. Every day in the House of Commons the opposition raised allegations of scandal over how the government had doled out federal advertising contracts in Quebec. The Liberals lost two traditionally safe ridings in spring by-elections, while the Canadian Alliance, under new leader Stephen Harper, was patching up old quarrels and pulling itself together. The prime minister, by contrast, seemed more easily rattled than before, his testy pronouncements in caucus shared with reporters by mischievous MPs. In public too, Chrétien seemed perpetually irritated, defiantly barking back at his critics. In one of his more memorable lines that difficult spring, the prime minister appeared to be offering his resignation in return for a media truce: Leave me alone, maybe I’ll go. It had come to this.

The Centre’s deeper rift was far more personal: it was about leadership, the L-word, the ambition that dare not speak its name. Chrétien’s most daunting challenge, which neither he nor anyone in his government would openly acknowledge, was the belief of many of his fellow Liberals that the prime minister, now sixty-eight years old, had passed his best-before date. The obvious heir apparent, Finance Minister Paul Martin, was waiting — and waiting — in the wings. Since his strong second-place showing in the 1990 Liberal leadership contest and during twelve years as the right hand of Jean Chrétien, Martin, now sixty-three, had attracted a devoted following. And though levels of impatience varied in intensity among the “Martinites,” for most the appetite for change had become a consuming hunger.

At the beginning of the last week of May 2002, Parliament was in session, but the prime minister ­wasn’t in the capital. He’d shuffled his cabinet on Sunday — for the second time that year — then flown to Italy for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders’ summit meeting. So it was that Chrétien found himself an ocean away when the final unravelling of his leadership began.
A small group of representatives of the building-trades unions held a dinner on Monday, May 27, 2002, at Tosca, a cozy Italian restaurant on Metcalfe Street in Ottawa, not far from Parliament Hill. As the group settled in with pre-dinner drinks, two familiar members of Parliament announced their arrival with hearty hellos and handshakes. Joe Fontana, from London, Ontario, was a seasoned Liberal backbencher, a parliamentarian since 1988, and chairman of the government caucus from 1996 to 1999. He’d brought along another MP, his good friend Stan Keyes from Hamilton, Ontario, a former television reporter who was the current chair of the Liberal caucus. Beyond their common political experience on the backbench, Fontana and Keyes shared a number of pursuits: they both were keenly interested in transport issues, were members of the True Grits MP rock band, and were vocal supporters of Paul Martin. Only a couple of years earlier, Fontana and Keyes, with a clutch of others, had gained notoriety when they had publicly, unabashedly, called on Jean Chrétien to step down.

During dinner, the conversation turned to the government’s troubles and the cabinet shuffle of the day before, which saw Don Boudria demoted from Public Works and Defence Minister Art Eggleton punted out of cabinet. Fontana, a tad triumphantly, recounted how many of Chrétien’s most loyal ministers had been scorched by controversy over the past few months. Each new revelation from the press or the opposition touched the very people on whom the prime minister most depended for organizational support, especially in Quebec: Justice Minister Martin Cauchon had been singled out for his fishing trips with advertising contractors. His predecessor as Quebec lieutenant, Alfonso Gagliano, had been dumped from cabinet in January after allegations surfaced of his political interference in government business. Immigration Minister Denis Coderre was also going to tumble, Fontana said. With his inner circle crumbling around him, how did the prime minister intend to stay in power?

“Chrétien’s going to go down too,” Fontana predicted.

The more politically sophisticated around the table knew that what they were hearing was malicious glee, not unusual in Chrétien’s fractious caucus. To at least a couple of political naïfs, though, Fontana’s remarks sounded alarmingly like malicious intent, evidence that Martin’s loyalists were not only delighting in Chrétien’s troubles, but feeding them.

Late that night in Montreal, Coderre was at his riding office when the phone rang. It was one of the union men from the restaurant, who recounted Fontana’s remarks to the incredulous minister.

At thirty-nine years old, Coderre was one of the youngest cabinet ministers, but he was also a hard-knuckle politician and a veteran of two decades of intense ground fighting in Quebec Liberal politics. Coderre saw himself as a protégé of Chrétien, a politician made in the same image. His jaw dropped when he was told what Fontana had said. “So that’s how low we’re going to go,” fumed Coderre.

Knowing that his mentor was out of the country, the minister placed a telephone call to Chrétien’s chief of staff, Percy Downe. Furious at the apparent duplicity of a Liberal backbencher and the implied threat to his own career, Coderre demanded that the prime minister be informed immediately. Downe, true to his low-key reputation, was more cautious. Rumours whipped around Ottawa all the time and it ­wasn’t Downe’s practice to pass them on, unverified, to his boss. Downe told Coderre that he’d do what he could to confirm what was said before he went to Chrétien with the disturbing tale.

Still, this report of Fontana’s outburst was just the latest in a series of rumours about dirty-war tactics that had been buzzing through the political grapevine and the news media. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) was receiving other reports that appeared to point to all-out internal warfare. A Martin supporter in British Columbia had been overheard boasting that Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal, a Chrétien loyalist, would be the next target of media and opposition allegations of controversy. The National Post had recently made public a fundraising letter sent out by the Friends of John Manley, supporters of the deputy prime minister’s leadership aspirations. Written by Toronto lawyer David Gavsie, it solicited contributions as large as $25,000 and advised would-be donors that they might try, “at their own risk,” to write off the gifts as business expenses. Given that the letter was sent out only to Liberals, it stood to reason that the leak had come from within the party.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: McClelland & Stewart Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0771026056
• ISBN 13: 9780771026058
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272