Tight Canada Race Imperils U.S. Trade Accord : Agreement Will Probably Be Scuttled Even if Mulroney’s Party Retains Power

With the Canadian public’s mood swinging freely as if buffeted by the icy winds of late fall, voters here will pick a new government next week in an election dominated by an emotional debate over the proposed free trade agreement with the United States.

Recent public opinion polls point to a dead-even race between Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Liberal challenger, John Turner. But these same polls seem to suggest that even if Mulroney wins on Nov. 21, it will not be by a large enough margin to salvage the trade pact, which is opposed by both the Liberals and the moderately socialist New Democratic Party.

To the surprise of nearly everyone--perhaps especially the prime minister and his advisers--the campaign has turned into a referendum on U.S.-Canada relations, which had become particularly close under Mulroney and President Reagan, kindred spirits who share a free-market economic philosophy.

Seized on Pact as Issue

Turner, whose party seemed in danger of extinction when it won only 40 of 295 parliamentary seats in a Progressive Conservative sweep four years ago, was running far behind in the polls when he seized on the trade pact during two televised debates on Oct. 24-25.

Following the debates, Turner pulled ahead, although he has since lost most of that edge. A Canadian television poll released Thursday showed the Liberals with 38% of the probable voters, the Conservatives with 37.6% and the New Democrats with 21.1%. Two newspaper polls issued the same day also indicated the difference between the two larger parties was well within the statistical margin of error. One showed the Liberals ahead, and the other had a Conservative lead.

But Canadians do not vote nationwide for prime minister. The election is fought in 295 parliamentary districts, where the races are subject to wide regional and urban-rural differences.

“Because of the vagaries of the electoral map, it looks as if the Tories are doing a little better than the Liberals,” said John Meisel, a Queens University professor hailed as the “father” of Canadian political science. “If the election had been held last week (when the polls were conducted), the Tories would have been fairly close to getting a majority, but maybe not quite.”

No Formal Coalition

By Canadian tradition, the party winning the largest bloc of seats will form the government whether it has a majority or not. Unlike most other multi-party parliamentary democracies, Canada has never had a formal coalition in which more than one party shares Cabinet seats. Instead, a minority government must tailor its program to win the acquiescence of enough opposition members to avoid defeat.

This year, if Mulroney does not win a clear majority, he will have little choice but to scuttle the free trade pact--which would phase out all tariffs and other trade barriers between the United States and Canada during a five-year period starting Jan. 1--because opposition to it unites the Liberals and New Democrats.

The U.S. Congress has already approved the agreement.

In many ways, this campaign parallels the U.S. presidential contest, which preceded it by less than two weeks, except that the roles of George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis are reversed.

Like Dukakis, Mulroney started out well ahead and attempted to keep his head down and avoid a telling mistake. Like Bush, Turner came on strong with a strategy that wrapped him in the flag and attacked his opponent with negative television advertising based more on fear than reason.

When Mulroney called the election in early October, he enjoyed a modest lead in the polls. He built that into a comfortable margin essentially by doing nothing while Turner fumbled and the Liberal party feuded internally.

But Turner scored big in the televised debates, claiming that the free trade agreement would lead to American domination of Canadian society and would somehow substitute American pay-for-service medicine for Canada’s popular government health service. He accused Mulroney, who negotiated the agreement, of a sellout of Canadian interests.

More recently, Mulroney has counterattacked, accusing Turner of lying--a charge that is heard infrequently in the normally gentlemanly world of Canadian politics. He also maintains that the election is more about competence than ideology.

“Turner came into the election very low in the polls, with no observable policy and a very poor image,” said Anthony Westell, dean of journalism at Carlton University in Ottawa. “Suddenly, he latched onto the trade issue. It worked like magic.”

The prime minister was caught unprepared by the trade issue. The pact itself is so complex that most Canadians tell pollsters that they do not understand it. Many independent experts say that the alarmist claims of the Liberals and New Democrats are excessive. But Mulroney has found it difficult to counter the arguments.

“The impact of the trade agreement was heightened by the fact that the prime minister has very low credibility,” Meisel said. “People don’t trust him. He can’t stop himself from exaggerating.”

Image Problems

In truth, both of the major candidates for prime minister came into the election with severe image problems. Turner had been savaged by a popular book on his leadership called “Reign of Error,” and his opponents within the party had tried three times to depose him as leader.

Westell said Turner’s low standing with the voters before the debates proved to be a major advantage to him.

“An outsider, looking at the debates, would conclude that there was no winner,” Westell said. “But if you go into it with a presupposition that one candidate is an idiot, and he turns out not to be, he wins by default.”

Spokesmen for all three parties insist that the debate is not anti-American. All three say there is no question that the next Canadian government will work closely with the Bush Administration.

“The issue is not anti-Americanism,” said Sen. Michael Kirby, chairman of the Liberals’ strategy committee. “The issue is a sense that however much Canadians admire the good things in the United States, Canadians are different.”

But Douglas Fisher, a journalist-politician who served four terms in Parliament in the late 1950s and early 1960s and has been covering Canadian elections since 1935, said, “Of course it’s anti-American, part fear of the Americans and part a superiority complex about the Americans.”

He said Turner and the New Democrats scored heavily by suggesting that the trade pact would destroy Canada’s paternalistic medical system even though it is difficult to demonstrate why that would be so.

The Liberals have relied heavily on negative television advertising, including one commercial that makes unfavorable comparisons between leading Conservative politicians and hogs feeding at a trough.

Mulroney’s strategists hope that a speech by Reagan on Thursday, four days before the Canadian election, will give a boost to the prime minister’s standing, although Conservative officials have insisted that they did not ask the President to intervene.

Reagan is scheduled to discuss his Administration’s overall trade policies in a speech to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce organization. White House officials say it will not focus on the U.S.-Canada agreement although it will cite the pact as an example of the Administration’s successful program.

Kirby, the Liberal party strategist, said that a seeming Reagan endorsement of Mulroney would be “bound to backfire.”

“It is an enormous admission of defeat when the leader of a country has to call on the president of another country to bail him out,” Kirby said.

The anti-business and anti-American overtones to the campaign must be causing Turner some private pain. The Liberal leader, who comes from the right wing of his party, was a successful Bay Street--Canada’s Wall Street--lawyer before he entered politics. And he never dabbled in Yankee-bashing before.

Asked about Turner’s background, Kirby said, “We’ve all done all kinds of things in our past, but that is not the position he has taken in this campaign.”