Chretien Becomes His Own Main Election Foe

With a strong economy and weak opposition, Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s main opponent in Canada’s federal election Monday is himself. But it’s a race that he still might lose.

Chretien, a brusque 66-year-old Liberal, hopes to head his third majority government since he became prime minister in 1993. But his lead has narrowed harrowingly since the beginning of the campaign five weeks ago, from a comfortable 32 percentage points to only 16.

His party is only seven seats away from losing the majority of Parliament’s 301 seats. If the Liberals can’t keep control of the body, he will likely have to step down.

The country’s voters are split almost down the middle, with nearly half behind Chretien’s Liberals and the rest divided among Canada’s four other main parties. But with few real issues or serious challengers, the election has turned into a referendum on Chretien.

Shrewdness Turns Into Arrogance

Chretien, from a small industrial town northeast of Montreal, plays politics the way he played hockey as a young man in Quebec: with his elbows up. But after 30 years in Parliament and seven as prime minister, his political shrewdness has soured into arrogance, his critics say. He is a leader who believes that the role of the government is to spread the nation’s wealth to lift the poor, but he also thinks that there is nothing wrong with using his position to help an associate get a government loan.

“Mr. Chretien has to go,” the influential Globe and Mail newspaper said in a stinging editorial that nevertheless urged Canadians to vote Liberal in hopes that the party would force Chretien out. The prime minister “has become a one-man band, loving power for its own sake . . . treating his position as lord of a fief rather than as a public trust,” the editorial said.

A politician since age 29, Chretien is determined to squeeze out a few last years in office. He called this election just 3 1/2 years into his five-year mandate to take advantage of the Liberal Party’s high approval ratings and to preempt his most popular rival within it, Finance Minister Paul Martin. The move also caught short his most pressing challenger outside the party, a charismatic newcomer named Stockwell Day.

Day, a telegenic, evangelical 50-year-old conservative from Canada’s West, leads the Canadian Alliance, a party meant to offer an alternative to the Liberals’ one-size-fits-all federal government. His promises of low taxes, tougher law and order, more power for the provinces--and most important, a fresh face to run the country--has nearly wiped out the Liberals in Canada’s four western provinces. But as some of his other positions have become known--pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and a potential proponent of a private, American-style health care system--ordinary Canadians have backed away from him as too extreme.

Newcomer’s Platform Has Splintered

Over the course of the 36-day campaign, Day’s platform has splintered, and he has had to defend himself from those who call him a Holocaust denier, a racist and an extremist. After he said he would revoke native Canadians’ tax exemptions, aboriginal protesters occupied his campaign office and twice ran him off the stage at rallies.

And when he’s not being protested against, he’s being made fun of. Some fear that Day wants to put divisive issues such as the death penalty and abortion before voters, and a “Saturday Night Live”-style political satire show decided to test his ideas. The program, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes,” started a petition to force Stockwell Day to change his name to Doris Day. More than 1 million people have signed it.

Day was hoping to shave Parliament seats away from Chretien in the Liberal stronghold of Ontario, the most populous and powerful of Canada’s 10 provinces. But he abandoned his campaign there several days early and headed back to the West, all but surrendering his bid to expand the Canadian Alliance into a party with national support.

But Day still has at least 15 minutes of fame left before he disappears from the national stage. He has purchased a quarter-hour of air time on a Toronto television station for the night before the election. He could deliver another bombshell, like his recent charge that Chretien used his position to help a colleague get a business loan for a hotel in his home district, an act that Chretien acknowledged but denied was improper. A federal ethics investigator decided Tuesday that the prime minister broke no rules because no rules exist to cover conflicts of interest between ministers and government-owned companies like the one involved in the loan.

This election may also determine the future of Canada’s four other major parties. Two of the political groups that helped shape the egalitarian nature of the nation’s government, the New Democratic Party and the Progressive Conservative Party, are wasting away, clinging to a few seats more than the minimum of 12 to be recognized as an official party.

Alexa McDonough, leader of the NDP, hopes that protest votes against the Liberals will enable her party to add a few seats to the 19 that it holds. “A vote for the NDP is a vote to reduce the arrogance of Chretien,” she said at a campaign stop Saturday, adding that a minority government would force the Liberals to be more accountable.

The struggling Progressive Conservatives, led by former Prime Minister Joe Clark, is a potential alliance partner for the Liberals in a minority government, while support for the Canadian Alliance appears to be limited to the West. The fourth main party is the Bloc Quebecois, which advocates the separation of Quebec from Canada.

At the very least, Canada will be heartened by its ability to run a smoother election than its neighbor to the south. Most of the ballots are hand-marked with an “X” and hand-counted. Television is banned by law from broadcasting results before the polls are closed. The results will be certified the next day.