Profile : Clark’s Star Rising as Mulroney’s Tumbles : Can a ‘benign klutz’ without charisma lead Canada? A Cabinet minister may be headed that way.

Suppose for a moment that you’re the leader of a peaceable middle-sized power, and your approval rating is in the basement. Suppose you’re facing the hideously real possibility that one of your largest, most important provinces will soon break away. And suppose your credibility is in such a shambles that you can do next to nothing about anything.

That is the bind in which Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has found himself. Quebec proposes to hold a referendum on sovereignty this fall, and Mulroney is so discredited that he can barely open his mouth to say good morning without inviting gusts of opprobrium from an irate citizenry.

What to do?

Mulroney’s approach to the situation has been, to say the least, interesting. He has asked his archrival, Joe Clark, the 52-year-old former prime minister Mulroney personally unhorsed as leader of the governing Progressive Conservative Party, to pull the country back together.

At a time when the Mulroney government desperately needs to be seen building bridges, Clark--the country’s constitutional affairs minister--is the designated master builder. His is the most important federal Cabinet portfolio, and he is the most visible politician in Canada.

If Clark succeeds at his difficult mission, all the credit, presumably, will go to him. (He is already scoring points, simply by coming to the aid of the man who ousted him, or at least seeming to.) It may even turn out that he’ll get his old job back.

One poll found last fall that if it were Clark, and not the hapless Mulroney, at the head of the Progressive Conservatives, or Tories, the party would be at the top of the popularity rankings instead of the bottom.

Another survey, conducted in January, found that Clark is better known to Canadians now than any other federal minister. And in yet another poll, 50% of Canadians said they have a favorable impression of Clark. No other minister received even half that positive a rating.

These are hale findings for a man whom pundits have been referring to as “Joe Who?” ever since he won the leadership of the Tory party as a virtual unknown in 1976, and then became prime minister in 1979, only to fall nine months later.

Clark has long been a man with an image problem. “Few people could see him as prime minister of Canada,” wrote Globe and Mail political columnist Jeffrey Simpson in a post-mortem of Clark’s short-lived government. Citing Clark’s ungainly stride, awkward gestures and stiff public speaking style, he added, “Clark was the antithesis of the charismatic leader.”

Clark brought the Tories to power by making the most of Canadians’ growing fatigue with Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who by 1979 had been Liberal Party prime minister for 11 years. But although Clark became the only political leader ever to beat the glamorous and cocksure Trudeau, he was unable to translate his electoral victory into effective political power.

Clark’s minority government went down in the history books as overconfident and ineffectual. He came into office in June, was defeated in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in December and lost the February, 1980, election that--under parliamentary procedures--then had to be called.

Fairly or not, Clark was branded a loser, and it was an image that Tory up-and-comer Mulroney ruthlessly exploited in the next couple of years. In public forums, Mulroney shamelessly professed his support for Clark; behind his back, he was busily lining up his own loyalists. When Clark called an ill-advised party leadership convention in 1983, the gambit worked: Clark lost, and Mulroney replaced him.

A folk memory of Mulroney’s treacherous intraparty campaign of nine years ago still glows in the Canadian mind. And as Mulroney has come to be despised, Clark has come to look more and more like an honorable stiff.

Mulroney made Clark his foreign minister, and Clark vanished into relative obscurity. Luckily for him, though, the foreign portfolio let him keep his distance from Mulroney’s high-profile, conservative economic agenda--free trade with the United States, budget cuts, new taxes--and his policy of accommodating the ever-touchy province of Quebec.

Today, Mulroney’s pet policies stand utterly discredited among Canadians. And in April, when a desperate Mulroney was casting around for someone to handle constitutional affairs, Clark virtually alone among the top ministers had enough credibility to take on the job.

Clark may still have image problems, but now, it seems, Canadians are ready for a man who comes off as an honest bumbler. Clark’s awkward gait, jowly face and sometimes unusual wardrobe--he recently made an appearance in a parka decorated with polar bears--make a pleasant contrast to Mulroney’s over-melodious headwaiter’s voice, impeccable tailoring, glamorous wife and Jay Leno lantern jaw.

“Everybody sort of sees Clark as a benign klutz,” says Hugh Winsor, a Globe and Mail journalist who has covered Clark.

Clark’s newfound high marks with the public are not, alas, the result of a stunning on-the-job performance. His tenure at Constitutional Affairs has often been heavy going, and some of the difficulties have been the result of his mismanagement.

His original national-unity strategy simply collapsed. Clark had fielded a three-party team of Parliament members to travel across Canada and hold town meetings, to give citizens the feeling they were involved in the national-renewal process.

But the itinerary proved too ambitious and the town meetings too hastily planned; one meeting drew a turnout of zero. Political analysts again began to ask questions about Clark’s competence.

Then, Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, smelling blood, decided to boycott the proceedings. At the height of the disarray, one committee co-chairman quit, explaining feebly that his doctor had prescribed more rest.

Clark, retreating from this mess, hastily hauled out Plan B: a series of six meetings in six major Canadian cities, where some 200 delegates could each week debate the elements of a political renewal.

While Plan B has played out more smoothly than Clark’s original scheme, there have still been fumbles. Clark angered Westerners by telling them that their vision of a national renewal--centered on an overhaul of the Canadian Senate, giving each province an equal number of votes--is about as likely as another virgin birth.

The meetings themselves, which concluded on Sunday, have yielded no clear breakthroughs. Delegates repeatedly veered away from the topics Clark had written into the agenda.

But for the moment, at least, none of that seems to reflect poorly on Clark. On the contrary, the free flow of his meetings seems to have convinced participants that they were involved in the raw stuff of policy-making, and not just acting out token roles in a feel-good pageant mounted by Ottawa.

“These conferences, strange as they are, have saved the government’s bacon,” says Winsor. “They’re unpredictable, which is good. And the important thing is, Mulroney’s not at any of them.”

Now that the meetings are over, it remains to be seen whether Clark can hammer out a package of constitutional proposals acceptable to Quebec. The Francophone province has said it will cancel its potentially decisive referendum on sovereignty if English-speaking Canada makes suitable concessions. A parliamentary committee is now supposed to be drafting a package, taking into account the findings Clark brought back from the meetings.

It’s a ticklish process pleasing nationalist Quebecers while not looking as if you’re selling out the country everywhere else. But Clark is better equipped than many to do it. He comes from Alberta, in the West--the region most fed up with Quebec.

Analysts say that it will take a Westerner to build a believable bridge to nationalist Quebec, much as it took a Republican President to open U.S. diplomatic ties with Communist China.

If Clark pulls it off, would the coup be enough to make him party leader--and even prime minister--once again?

Before that could happen, the Progressive Conservatives would have to dump Mulroney--something that, to the bafflement of political observers, they have been unwilling to do. The loyalty of the Conservative caucus to its beleaguered prime minister has been the subject of much speculation here; the pro-Mulroney argument has it that if Mulroney were ousted, the Tories would fall apart.

Still, Mulroney must call an election sometime in 1993. If the Tories are still last in the polls as election time approaches, then Clark’s fortunes within the party might very well rise.

The irony then would be that Clark would still have a hard time winning his seat in his own riding, or parliamentary district.

A recent poll in Clark’s rural Alberta riding, called Yellowhead, showed he had less than half the support of the Reform Party, an Alberta-based, right-wing populist movement.

Biography

Name: Joe Clark

Title: Constitutional Affairs Minister

Age: 52

Career: Won leadership of Tory party in 1976. Named prime minister, December, 1979. Lost election and left office nine months later. Former foreign minister.

Personal: “He’s not patronizing; he’s not superior. He screws up on a regular basis,” says journalist Hugh Winsor. Has wife, Maureen McTeer, and daughter, Catherine.