Leaders Discuss Major Issues but Wonder: How Will It Play at Home?

For Canadians, the key issue of the Toronto economic summit is not Third World debt or farm subsidies or any of the other phrases flashed hundreds of times a day in interminable conferences and briefings.

Canadians are far more interested instead in whether the summit will revive the political fortunes of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and propel him to re-election. The betting is no.

The entanglement of Mulroney’s fortunes with those of the summit is neither accidental nor unusual. Through 14 years of summitry, presidents and prime ministers and chancellors have often made a bigger impact on politics back home than on the course of international economics--their supposed reason for assembling. This year in Toronto is no different.

Symbol for French

For the French, for example, the symbol of the Toronto summit is the return of a lone 71-year-old President Francois Mitterrand to the world stage without his rival, Jacques Chirac, dogging his footsteps. For two years, the conservative Chirac, as premier, had insisted on the right to show up, just a few steps behind the Socialist president.

French officials had maintained that this strange double representation would not confuse the others. “France speaks with two mouths but only one voice,” said one official. But the French still looked a little odd, even ridiculous.

Mitterrand rid himself of this annoyance in early May by defeating Chirac in a presidential election. The president then appointed a Socialist, Michel Rocard, as the new premier and left him behind in Paris.

Le Monde, the influential Paris newspaper, ushered in the new era with a front-page cartoon last weekend that pictured an unaware President Reagan welcoming Mitterrand to Toronto. “I don’t see Jacques Chirac,” said Reagan. “Is he ill?” Mitterrand wore a slight, satisfied smile.

For years, it has been no secret that Mitterrand does not like the annual summits. Even at his first one, in Ottawa in 1981, he was caught writing picture postcards while his fellow world leaders droned on. Mitterrand has even hinted from time to time that he might decide to boycott these meetings some day as a waste of precious presidential time.

But there was no talk of boycott this year. After his decisive re-election, Mitterrand tarnished his image somewhat by failing to win a majority for his Socialist Party in parliamentary elections a month later.

In hopes of burnishing his image, Mitterrand not only headed off to Toronto but promoted the cause of summitry by calling on his fellow leaders in advance to cancel much of the debt of the very poorest countries of the world. The proposal will almost surely be adopted in one form or another.

A similar political case for summitry can be made for the other participants this year, with the possible exception of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, who never seems to change her forceful stance or her popular standing, on or off summits.

Although Reagan is a lame-duck President with no elections ahead of him, the summit has become a political stage on which the other leaders shower him with sentimental praise for past economic policies that they once condemned and for a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union that once worried most of them. In the glow of his imminent retirement, they all feel warm enough to try to help bolster his place in American political history.

The need of the others for the boosting of summitry is readily apparent.

Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita of Italy has held office barely two months and needs to show his mettle as a leader.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Takeshita of Japan has held office less than a year and needs to prove that he can stand up to pressure from the West.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany faces election in a couple of years and needs to avoid any political blunders.

No case is more obvious, however, than that of the 49-year-old Canadian prime minister.

Mulroney came to power in 1984 when his Progressive Conservative Party won the largest majority in Canadian history--210 out of 282 seats in the House of Commons. But Canadians tired very qu1768123244leader from Quebec with a command of street French and a flair for ancestral Irish blarney in his native English. A series of scandals aggravated his woes.

Every recent public opinion poll shows not only that Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives would lose power in an election but that they would finish in third place, even behind the socialist New Democratic Party, the perennial third party in federal elections.

A desperate Mulroney, hoping to turn his fortunes around, has poured $20 million into making the Toronto summit a glittering extravaganza calling attention both to himself and the city of Toronto. It is an axiom of Canadian politics that no one can take or keep power without the support of Toronto.

Some advisers want him to take advantage of the summit by calling an election fairly soon, perhaps in the fall, although he does not have to do so until 1989.

“If it’s a successful conference,” said Sen. Norman Atkins, Mulroney’s likely campaign manager in the next election, “then it can help us politically, because I think it reassures Canadians that the prime minister is in league with these other leaders.”

Mulroney has been seen every day on television greeting the leaders of the Western world, hobnobbing with them, joking with them, posing with them. A commentator for CTV, the private television network, described the summit Monday as “a golden photo opportunity for Brian Mulroney.”

‘Negative Effect’ Seen

But most Canadian analysts believe the images will not help. Hugh Winsor, the national political editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, wrote Monday that “there is a real possibility the fallout from the Toronto summit will have a negative political effect.”

Winsor said Mulroney disappointed Canadians at the start of his administration with an excess of spending on pomp and circumstance. “And the $20-million summit,” Winsor said, “may strengthen rather than diminish this notion.”