This updated edition includes a new epilogue

During his ten-year reign, Jean Chrétien beat back Quebec separatism and eliminated the deficit. He amassed dictatorial powers, manhandled his opposition, repudiated the neo-conservatives, and said no to American pressures. He triumphed in every election, but his own party pushed him out.

In Iron Man: The Defiant Reign of Jean Chrétien, the former prime minister’s unique story is consummately told by Lawrence Martin, the nation’s foremost journalistic authority on Chrétien. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, key players in the Cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Office, and more than one hundred other officials and politicians, Martin weighs Chrétien’s strengths and weaknesses while revealing how his governance changed Canada. Thorough, engrossing, and sweeping in scope, the second volume of Martin’s bestselling biography is, like the first, a political page-turner.

Chapter One

Welcome to the 1990s

Chrétien had watched a decade earlier as Pierre Trudeau, under the chandeliers of the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa, delighted the Liberal flock with the election-night proclamation “Welcome to the 1980s.” Now a new decade, the nervous nineties, had begun, and it was Chrétien who had a message for the Liberals gathered in the capital. “It’s the arrival of the Chrétien era!” he announced. “I will be my own man.”

It was January 23, 1990, and he was kicking off his second campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party. While he was the favourite, his words had an extravagant ring. No one had ever equated “era’’ with this floor scrubber.

He didn’t convey that day any measure of intoxicating possibilities. He had been around so long as a political careerist that he could more readily be viewed as a relic of a bygone era, an echo of decades past, a 1970s carnival barker.

Throughout the century, Canadians had looked to Liberal men of higher station to lead the nation. There was Pierre Trudeau, cut from the intellectual aristocracy; Lester Pearson, an academic turned lofty man­darin; Louis St. Laurent, an upper-crust, old-money lawyer; Mackenzie King, a bookwormish Harvard man; Wilfrid Laurier, a nobleman in silk. None of them had come from so low on the rung as Jean Chrétien.

Chrétien’s stature, or rather, lack of it, had been a factor in the 1984 campaign. He had not anticipated that party members, including so many from his native Quebec, would turn so frontally to their rusting prince, John Napier Turner. But Liberals felt that Turner was a better fit for prime ministerial garb—or, as the class-conscious Chrétien saw it, the more sophisticated man. In the 1990 campaign, he was pitted against another establishment figure in Paul Martin, and there were indications that the business of pedigree was weighing on Chrétien once again. In trying to recruit caucus members to support him, he called Albina Guarnieri, who had backed him in the 1984 race, into his office to give her the sales pitch. Guarnieri admired him as the guy who struggled against adversity, so she wasn’t prepared for the Chrétien she saw on this day. He told her first that the train was leaving the station and she better get on quick. Then, in reference to one of the other candidates, he said, “My suit is more expensive than Paul Martin’s.” Guarnieri was shocked. That he would think she would be impressed by that kind of thing was enough to make her forget about the idea of supporting him this time. “My God,” she recalled thinking, “After all these years, the inferiority complex is still there.”

It was still there and it would factor into the corrosive Chrétien–Martin feud. Chrétien saw Martin in the same mould as Turner. An establishment big shot. And he could see the unofficial alliance that had been fashioned between Martin supporters and the old Turner crowd. For Chrétien, the new leadership campaign would be a continuance of the Turner wars.

Fractious internal combat wasn’t something that normally plagued the Liberals, but the ascent of the forever-combative Chrétien to the leadership circle brought to the party a new culture of conflict, a culture that had been the reserve of the other great party of federal politics, the Progressive Conservatives. Liberals, as the old saying went, didn’t wash their dirty laundry in public. Lester Pearson, a disaster in his first year as leader of the party, was trounced by John Diefenbaker in the 1958 election. But Paul Martin, Sr., who lost the leadership race to Pearson, didn’t seek to foment any kind of caucus revolt. Similarly, no one openly challenged Pierre Trudeau after his poor performance in the 1972 election or after his loss to Joe Clark in 1979.

But Chrétien came at Turner again and again—and sometimes he wasn’t terribly subtle about it. Ed Broadbent, the New Democratic Party leader, admired the spunk and spark, if not the depth, of Jean Chrétien. But when it came to Turner, he saw a nasty streak in Chrétien that he hadn’t anticipated. “I noticed that any negative comment Chrétien could make about John Turner in the lobbies, he would do it. I didn’t like it.”

David Collenette, a Chrétien man, was director of the Liberal Party in the late 1980s and bore witness to all the scheming. Collenette was a tough guy. He had a direct “I’ll peel your face off” approach to politics, and Chrétien liked that about him. But for all his toughness and his bias in favour of Chrétien, Collenette didn’t appreciate his friend’s behaviour towards Turner in those years. “A lot of things were going on which I don’t even want to talk about.”

A succession of backroom insurrections undermined Turner, but none of it diminished the popularity of Jean Chrétien. While he was out of politics, his ratings, in fact rose. He didn’t have to work hard at it because he was simply maintaining something that he had had since coming to Ottawa—his bond with the people. It was, as his adviser David Zussman was coming to appreciate, the rarest of political gifts. In his natural state, Jean Chrétien was “closely allied with the masses,” noted Zussman. He was at one with the mythical creature called “the average Canadian.” No one could take that magic away.

During the 1988 election, Chrétien was ostensibly stumping for John Turner, but he knew that if Turner got whipped again, the leadership prize would come open. He noted during a stopover in Winnipeg that he had been on the CBC national news four times in the previous ten days. “I lost the leadership, but I fought the establishment—and now I’m more popular than ever.” With Turner’s second loss to Mulroney in 1988, Liberals were impatient in their lust for a new leader. At one unruly caucus meeting, Turner tried to put his foot down. “Listen,” he shouted, “we’re going to do it this way as long as I am leader of this party.” From the back rows came the mocking voices of the Chrétien supporters: “You won’t be leader for long!”

Chrétien was popular across the country. It was a francophone’s turn to head the party, and he had a track record as a good campaigner. But while he was the clear favourite, doubts simmered. John Turner had come out of the past and in from the sidelines to lead the party to nowhere, and what some now feared was that another old warhorse was about to do the same.

Among Chrétien’s challengers—who included Sheila Copps, John Nunziata, and Tom Wappel—Paul Martin was the only one with a hope of winning. In large part because of his famous father, he had been viewed as a potential political star for a long time. He had chosen first, however, to earn his fortune in business, and had done so, purchasing Canada Steamship Lines from Power Corporation, then turning it into a great money-maker. All the while, he kept an eye on the political arena. He bumped into the national columnist Allan Fotheringham in Montreal one evening in the mid-1980s. In short order, they were over at Martin’s office emptying a bottle of Scotch. He told the journalist that he couldn’t decide between politics or missionary work in Africa. But in the way Martin spoke, Fotheringham wasn’t betting on him being in Liberia any time soon. The shipping magnate continued to cultivate journalists, some of whom he’d invite to his beautiful home atop Mount Royal. It sat on a higher plateau than Brian Mulroney’s, though Mulroney wasn’t one who liked to admit it. Once when someone asked him where he lived, Mulroney piped up, “You know the mountain? . . . Right at the fucking top!”

Chrétien had got to know his prime challenger when Martin worked for Power Corporation. John Rae, Chrétien’s political fixer, also worked at Power, and the three of them had the occasional golf outing—which Chrétien enjoyed because he was a better player than Paul Martin. But once the leadership quarrels started, any possibility of friendship was quickly washed away. It was galling to Chrétien that this newcomer, elected for the first time in 1988, would presume to think he could become leader. All he had was the name of his father. Chrétien had been beating the bushes for the Liberal Party since 1963. A dozen Cabinet portfolios. Martin had yet to sniff the government benches.

When the 1990 race began, the constitutional crisis was the issue of the day. Canadians groaned. There was no subject more tedious. Most would rather read a telephone book. Quebec’s place in the federation had preoccupied governments since the October Crisis of 1970. There had followed the separatist victory in the 1976 election, the 1980 referendum, and the extended debate over the question of bringing the Constitution home from Great Britain. Just as the issue seemed mercifully to be receding, the Mulroney government reignited the debate with its attempt to gain approval for the Meech Lake Accord. And now, the same government was careening towards cliff’s edge with the foundering accord strapped to its back.

The Quebec fixation was debilitating. Other national priorities languished. The French problem was certainly not the foremost cause, but some viewed it as no coincidence that during the same period that it was paramount, Canada’s economic growth stalled, living standards levelled off, and the country fell further and further behind the economic standards of the United States.

Mulroney had reached the Meech agreement with the premiers in 1987. It was followed by a three-year ratification process, and as Chrétien took to the podium to announce his leadership candidacy, there remained six months until the ratification deadline. The deadline, in fact, was the very same day, June 23, that the Liberals were to hold their leadership convention in Calgary.

Martin supported Meech Lake, Chrétien didn’t. As the leadership campaign began, the issue was a potential trigger point. Chrétien had long shared Trudeau’s harder-line philosophy of no special status for the province. Mulroney knew that as the next likely Liberal leader, Chrétien would play a decisive role in the accord’s fate. There were already signals that the deal was headed for oblivion. It had received the approval of all premiers in 1987, but new premiers had been elected since that time. One was Clyde Wells of Newfoundland; he stood squarely against the accord, prompting John Crosbie, the tart tongued Tory, to quip, “All’s well that ends Wells.”

At the University of Ottawa, Chrétien gave a much-anticipated speech on his constitutional position just a few days before he declared his leadership candidacy. Vetted by Trudeau, the speech put forward a compromise. In its present form, the Meech Lake Accord was totally deficient, Chrétien stated, but with amendments, he could support it. For him, the chief sticking point was the distinct society clause. He was willing to recognize Quebec as a distinct society in a preamble to the accord, but not in the Constitution itself. He feared that the larger enshrinement would allow Quebec to use the claim to refuse to adhere to a variety of federal requirements.

“I came back into politics for one reason: I want Canada to stay together,” Chrétien declared. “The tragedy of our land is that we have become more British Columbian, more Albertan, more Québécois, and more Ontarian. This is a problem. We have to become Canadian. Otherwise we won’t survive.”

Another vital problem was that under Mulroney, he claimed, the country had become more American. Chrétien wasn’t promising, like Turner had done, to tear up Mulroney’s free trade pact, but he maintained that the deal might have to be abrogated if the Americans declined to make changes. Mulroney, he charged, was in bed with the provinces, in bed with the Americans, in bed with big business. “Canada was built on subsidies,” Chrétien said. “We have a duty to keep Canada Canadian.” He pitched his campaign as a return to traditional Canadian values. Martin’s was more an agenda of change. His vision, Martin was quick to point out, wasn’t rooted in the past, like that of another leadership contender. “Canada,” said Martin, “now needs a new vision that combines a coherent policy on nationhood and brings forward a decade’s worth of new ideas on the economy and social policy.” He condemned the Free Trade Agreement as “a terrible, terrible deal that is in the process of coming apart at the seams.” But, at the same time, he opposed the centralism that characterized much of Trudeau’s policy-making, and that, he charged, marked Jean Chrétien’s thinking as well.

While Chrétien was criticized for operating in an idea-free zone, Martin had a mind that pitched forward. He wrestled with new concepts and theories about where the world was going. He wanted to keep up with the latest books and the useful ideas they might offer. He listened well; one could feel his mind roaming the terrain, looking for the nuggets to pounce on and explore. He was always on high alert.

But Martin soon discovered that after the tumult of the Mulroney years, raucous debates about changing the country were not what the people wanted. There was an appetite instead for peace and quiet. One of the Paul Martin slogans was “PM,” as in “Policy matters.” It was shelved quickly.

Since innovative policy was low on Chrétien’s list of priorities, the mood of the times favoured him. David Zussman had joined him as his executive assistant in the early 1980s, when Chrétien was energy minister. He took on the not-so-easy task of being his personal policy trainer. When it became apparent that his man could well ascend to the Liberal throne, Zussman felt it necessary to set up educational sessions for Chrétien, about a dozen of them. It was odd. Though he had served in all those Cabinet portfolios, maybe more than anyone in Canadian history, Chrétien was effectively being sent back to high school. He wasn’t keen about the lessons, Zussman recalled, but didn’t go to the extent of faking appendicitis to get out of them.

It wasn’t that he suffered from a lack of intelligence, Zussman found. On the contrary, he was very bright and very shrewd. But Chrétien didn’t view expertise in policy areas as fundamental to getting elected. He could absorb policy detail, if so inclined. But he was not often so inclined. Questions on, say, the effect of a social policy on a family of four didn’t interest him. “That really distinguished him from people like Paul Martin and Lloyd Axworthy,” recalled Zussman. “They get far more deeply into the nitty-gritty of the details of policy. It makes them very different people.”

With Chrétien, it was all about values. Shortly after Zussman went to work for him in 1982, Chrétien asked, “Have you ever been to Shawinigan?” Zussman hadn’t. A week later, Chrétien said, “Come on, we’re going.” He took Zussman all over town—to the small home where he grew up, to his schools, to the pool halls, to the factory where he had worked as a summer student. Zussman was struck by the experience. Chrétien was telling him, This is who I am. You want to know my policies? Here they are.

His family home sat against a big hillside that cascaded into the old paper mill. Chrétien’s house was near the bottom of the hill, and he liked to point out that it was the bosses who lived, to borrow a Mulroney phrase, right at the fucking top.

Zussman liked the words “value-based pragmatist” to describe Jean Chrétien. His values ran so deep—were so cemented, so anchored in his mind—that new concepts barely made a dent. He admired Canada the way he had found it in the 1950s. He wanted to change things, but he didn’t want to change them very much.

He differed from Paul Martin in style, intellect, background, party experience. Patrick Lavelle, a long-time friend who was co-chair of his leadership campaign in Ontario, could sense the animosity Chrétien felt towards his chief rival from the outset. “I don’t think Chrétien had any warm feelings about Martin—ever!” That animosity set the stage for an unusual leadership war. Until 1968, the party’s leadership races, the ones anointing King, St. Laurent, and Pearson, had been coronations. The fights in 1968 and 1984 featured some discord, but not of the intensity of the 1990 rivalry.

Joe Comuzzi, a towering MP from Thunder Bay, Ontario, was a Martin guy, fairly new to politics. He had a big, Tony Bennett–like smile and an easygoing manner, and while he knew politics could be a rough game, he wasn’t prepared for the backlash he received simply for stating a preference for Paul Martin. It was one thing to be told he would never get a Cabinet post if he supported Martin. But “how about not even getting your nomination papers signed to run in the next election? That was a real eye-opener.”

Many of the collisions between the two camps occurred at the delegate-selection meetings. The trick in winning those tilts often lay in signing up new Canadians as party members and stacking the meetings with them. It quickly became apparent that the Martin side was paying the ten-dollar membership fees for the ethnics and winning some early victories as a result. Chrétien had to respond. “I needed a tough guy,” recalled Lavelle, his Ontario manager. “A guy who could go on a search-and-destroy [mission], who could do a kamikaze [raid] for our side.” Jimmy Karygiannis, the MP for Scarborough-Agincourt, was his pick. Jimmy K became the most hard-ass Chrétien campaigner on the team. A Greek immigrant, he was a specialist in herding in new ethnic members. He signed up 9,500. “We were getting Greeked,” complained one Martin campaigner. “And if we weren’t getting Greeked, we were getting Sikhed.”

Jimmy K had a couple of tough-guy helpers. One was called Heavy Stick, the other Two-by-Four. “I signed up anything that moved back then,” Karygiannis recalled. Near Peterborough, Ontario, he heard of a family of about fifteen Sikhs living in a shack out in the middle of nowhere. With a Sikh friend, he and Heavy Stick went out at one o’clock in the morning and signed them all up for Chrétien.

At a delegate-selection meeting in Kitchener-Waterloo, Martin organizers were using public phones to call in last-minute recruits before the vote. Karygiannis ran around sticking bubble gum in the pay-phone slots. Martin supporters tried to have him expelled from meetings. Jimmy K’s response was “Get the hell out of my face.” At one meeting, he sensed that a returning officer was playing tricks with the ballots and came down on the fellow with such rage that the Martin supporter was later hospitalized for angina. He told Albina Guarnieri, who had become an effective organizer for Martin, that by the time he was finished with her, she would be “toast.” After his forces defeated hers in a delegate-selection square-off, he sent her over an order of toast—burnt to a crisp.

Karygiannis had thought Chrétien might be a little annoyed when he heard of some of his tactics. Instead, he got the opposite message. “Whatever it takes to win, Jimmy,” Chrétien told him. “Whatever it takes to win.”

“Did we go over the line?” asked David Collenette. “Sure.” But it wasn’t all that dirty, he added. “When we found out about it, we cracked down on a lot of people. I mean, I remember one guy, I ripped the shit out of him.”

Chrétien kept his own charts of the proceedings. He phoned Lavelle at seven every morning for an update on the delegate-selection meetings. Trying to keep the boss happy, Lavelle tended to inflate the numbers. But Chrétien had other sources and often caught him out. “Don’t give me that crap,” he’d say. “I want the real numbers.” He was tough and demanding, recalled Lavelle. “It got so I hated those calls.”

By comparison, Martin was the greenhorn campaigner. His senior strategist, David Herle, pushed him to call potential convention delegates. “What’ll I talk about?” Martin asked. “Talk about the weather, anything. It doesn’t matter,” he was told. “So he’d call up,” recalled Herle, “and say, ‘How’s your weather?’ then hang up!”

Herle’s plan was to build early momentum in Ontario, then have Quebec kick in to give the campaign the look that it could score a big upset. Because Paul Martin favoured the Meech Lake Accord, he was confident of doing well in la belle province. But he misread the situation. While the intelligentsia supported Martin and Meech, the party’s rank and file were more inclined to back Chrétien’s federalist position. Martin didn’t get a Quebec bump. Chrétien did.

By late April 1990, the power of the Chrétien machine had become apparent. With more than two-thirds of the 5,200 delegates chosen, estimates were that he had 1,500 delegates and Martin 500. Sheila Copps had captured about 150, while the other candidates were below 100. “Jean did two things,” said Martin, trashing his rival at an all-candidates meeting in Halifax. “He simply repeated his support for government policies established in the 1970s, most of which have now proven to be dated. And he refused to commit himself to any kind of agenda as to where he would take the country.”

Chrétien was the perceived front-runner and therefore the recipient of the enormous benefits that accrue to those with such status. Ironically, this time around he had the support of most of the party establishment, not because they viewed him as one of their own, but mainly because it was in their interests to be on the side of the victor. He also had had an organization in place since 1984, and as Martin was discovering, these campaigns were won with on-the-ground muscle.

Martin grew enormously frustrated at not being able to drag Chrétien out from behind his vague statements. Chrétien was using the classic front-runner’s strategy of sticking to generalities. His vagueness was bothering not only Martin but some of his own supporters as well. One was the Toronto MP Dennis Mills. He told the media, “I think Chrétien needs more than an ‘I love Canada’ speech to run the country. I think we have to put some ideas in the system.” The next day, when his critique appeared in headlines, Mills’s phone lines started heating up. Headquarters was calling. “The shit had hit the fan,” recalled Mills. “You couldn’t imagine the calls I got.”

As convention day approached, the unity of the party had become a bigger question mark than the identity of the new leader. Internecine warfare had plagued the party since 1984, and the Chrétien–Martin clash had the potential to prolong it. At a leadership debate in Manitoba, Sharon Carstairs, the provincial Liberal leader who was a fervent opponent of Meech Lake, was seated in the audience with Aline Chrétien. At one point, Martin looked over at Chrétien and then pointed at Carstairs. He said that she was going overboard on Quebec, and that Chrétien had better get her in line. Aline turned to Carstairs and said, “Nobody is going to force you to get in line.”

With his anti-Meech pitch, Chrétien was being pilloried in Quebec as willing to do anything to curry favour with the Anglos and get their votes. Few Canadians knew the essentials of the pact: the distinct society clause, the right of veto, the provincial say in the selection of Supreme Court judges, and the rest. The general view in English Canada, though, was that Quebec was being favoured, and that Chrétien was the guy who was saying “Down with the deal.”

He had no easy options on the issue. To keep this support outside Quebec, to keep the support of the Trudeau wing of the party, to be consistent with his history, he had to maintain a negative stance. But the unity package had backing from a broad segment of the media, large numbers in caucus, nationalists in Quebec, and four Liberal premiers, including Robert Bourassa of Quebec. Chrétien did not want to be seen as the great spoiler of the unity pact. His image in Quebec was bad enough. Guy Pratte, a Montreal lawyer who worked on Chrétien’s campaign, found that “as a Quebecer, there was almost a stigma attached to being associated with Mr. Chrétien precisely because he was not perceived, even by staunch federalists, as a particularly sophisticated person.” Pratte found this offensive. “I always thought snobbery was at the root of such criticism.”

Chrétien had his strategists secretly meeting with Mulroney representatives in search of a compromise that could help him out of the jam. That bid was unsuccessful, but Mulroney appointed a special committee, headed by Jean Charest, to try to come up with changes acceptable to all parties. The report’s recommendations, tabled in May, had hardly become public before Lucien Bouchard, then Mulroney’s environment minister, resigned in a great fit of torment over them. His high-voltage exit was cheered by nationalists throughout Quebec. He had been in quiet talks with sovereigntists over the idea of forming a separatist party in Ottawa. In short order, he would do so.

As Bouchard lapped up his hero’s welcome on his home turf, he targeted Chrétien as the politician responsible for derailing progress on the accord. “Jean Chrétien has come back to haunt us like an old ghost dragging his chains,” he told an audience in Alma, Quebec. Chrétien, he predicted, would never form a government in Ottawa because Quebecers would remember how he had denied them their dreams. The shots stung Chrétien. Mulroney was wrong-headed for having taken a sovereigntist into his Cabinet in the first place, he argued. It’s what can happen, he said in a veiled shot at Martin, when an inexperienced politician becomes prime minister.

Three weeks remained until the June 23 convention. Though Martin’s hopes appeared doomed, he maintained that he could still push the vote to a second ballot, where he might have a chance. He arrived at an all-candidates debate in Montreal, where the constitutional accord was certain to be an explosive issue. He wasn’t prepared to play down the rift with Chrétien over it. He decided that he was going to shove it right down his throat. That decision was one that Jean Chrétien—who was capable of carrying grudges—would never forget. The campaign had been hotly contested, but until this moment, there was little to suggest it would leave a permanent scar. As Paul Martin’s supporters prepared to tear open a gash, that was about to change.

In the Liberal Party, there was no group more vocal than the Liberal youth wing, whose members in this campaign were rallying around Paul Martin. In Quebec, the youth of the party were particularly incensed because Chrétien, their native son, was against the Meech Lake Accord. As the candidates’ debate began, Martin pressed for a clear statement of his position. “Don’t give us a great speech,” he demanded of Chrétien. “Just answer the question. What is your bottom line on Meech Lake?” When Chrétien started to respond, he was drowned out by shouts of “Yes or no? Yes or no?”

Martin kept at him. “Those who reject the new Quebec will transform nationalists into separatists,” he charged. “I will keep them Canadian. . . . Jean, for the love of God, you want to become prime minister of Canada, but you give us no indication where you are going.”

When it became obvious that Chrétien, who was trying to put forth a nuanced position, would not make a categorical endorsement of the accord, the demonstrators began pumping their fists. They madly waved placards and began shouting “Vendu! Vendu!” You’re a sellout to the Anglos, they were telling Chrétien, using a word even most separatists were reluctant to employ. You’re a sellout to the Anglos.

Then came chants of “Judas! Judas!”

Supporters for Sheila Copps were among the demonstrators. She, too, blasted Chrétien. “You have not understood Quebec, and you are gambling dangerously with the survival of Canada.”

Chrétien tried to explain his position. “I couldn’t be clearer,” he said of his Meech stance. “If the Charter of Rights is not protected, it’s no.” He had always maintained that the charter had to have priority over a clause in the accord that would define Quebec as a distinct society. If that was made clear with amendments, he could support the accord. It was a hedged, but, in fact, clear position. The rancour in the hall, however, would not subside. “Vendu! Vendu!” they cried again.

In the wings, the president of the Liberal Party, Michel Robert, was trying to contain himself. This was an embarrassment for the party, and he suspected that the Martin campaign had plotted it. He got on his walkie-talkie and demanded that Martin’s representative get his “ass over” to see him right away. When Mark Resnick, who had previously run John Turner’s office, made his way backstage, he faced a raging bull. Robert accused Resnick of deliberately orchestrating the cheap, mudslinging tactics. “No one planned it,” Resnick shot back. The Quebec youth were hotheads. “We can’t control them.”

“Well, get the fuck out there and do something,” cried Robert.

Sure, thought Resnick. “Here I am, a white boy from Brantford, and I am to tell these nationalist Quebecers to cool it.” He tried, and got the expected result: they told him to go fuck himself and kept on chanting.

Chrétien had stared on blankly and coldly as the insults flew at him. It was as if his mind were ticking back in time to insults past, and he was trying to suppress his inner rage. To be levelled by this kind of attack from Lucien Bouchard was one thing. To get it from his own federalist party members at a televised leadership forum was too much to tolerate. “I don’t attack anyone personally in the campaign,” he told reporters afterwards. “It’s the tradition in the party [not to do so], and there are some who didn’t follow it today.”

Martin wasn’t apologetic. “I’m living in the Quebec of today, not the Quebec of fifty years ago. Quebec will not accept being put in its place.” Many years later, he would still insist that the demonstrations were spontaneous, that he hadn’t even noticed them. “To be quite honest I didn’t realize it took place. . . . When you’re a candidate, you have a lot of other things going on. You’re not looking at demonstrations.” The outrage from the Chrétien crowd was over the top, Martin claimed. “A lot of things happen in leadership races. They happen, and you just forget about them and get on with the job.”

There was a tone to Martin’s voice that suggested that those in the Chrétien camp should have been the last to complain about tough tactics. Mark Resnick could go along with that. As John Turner’s assistant, he had sat and watched as the little guy from Shawinigan and his friends stuck the knife in Turner through the late 1980s—and left it there. Still, he could understand why the Chrétien contingent was steamed on that day in Montreal. “Here’s a guy who thinks in his own mind that he has spent his whole career fighting for Quebec, and a bunch of kids are yelling at him that he is a traitor.”

From Chrétien’s perspective, the leadership race was more or less locked up at the time of the debate. Martin was simply showing the desperate behaviour of a sore loser. Chrétien knew it was anglophones shouting out the insults, because they couldn’t pronounce the word vendu properly. “They were coming from Toronto to call me ‘vendu,’” he said, looking back on that time. “You know, I could handle the lies that were in my own language. But coming from Toronto to shout that at me . . . You have the right to be annoyed.” How could the Martin camp claim it was not involved, Chrétien wondered, when this kind of thing was happening?

Describing the turn of events as “awful,” Eddie Goldenberg, a Chrétien adviser, maintained that Martin, or Big Suit, as another Chrétien aide derisively described him, had inflicted lasting damage on the party. “What they did, which was for very short-term gain, was to make it very hard to bring people together afterwards,” Goldenberg said. “That’s a lesson in politics. You have to be very careful, particularly when you aren’t going to win.”

Two weeks before the Liberal leadership convention, Mulroney appeared to have won agreement from all premiers on a revised constitutional pact. The amended agreement was closer to Chrétien’s position, and some of his advisers, Goldenberg included, were now pushing for him to endorse it. In effect, they wanted him to agree with Paul Martin. The backlash against Chrétien in Quebec if he didn’t do so, they feared, would be crippling to his future as leader of the party.

As Chrétien prepared to board a plane to Calgary, where the convention was being held, debate raged in his camp. Never mind the backlash in Quebec, Pat Lavelle told him. What about English Canada? That’s where his delegates were. What about a backlash from there? “You sold the delegates a position on Meech Lake, and you just can’t go in and say ‘Screw it’ at the convention,” Lavelle told him. He was at war with Goldenberg and thought Chrétien was going to capitulate. In the end, however, Chrétien’s long-time mentor, Mitchell Sharp, advised that he just stay quiet in Calgary. That was the course he followed. When he arrived in Cowtown, Chrétien maintained that he had said “everything I have to say on Meech Lake.”

Meanwhile, Mulroney’s new arrangement was unravelling because Newfoundland and Manitoba refused to come on board. The convention was gripped by that drama more than the one on the floor, where the outcome, as anticipated, came on the first ballot. Jean Chrétien—winner in a walk.

When the verdict was announced he stood with Aline, his expression in stark contrast to the tormented look he had worn six years earlier, when Turner defeated him. It was not so much an expression of joy and goodwill as one of vindication, the look of someone who had successfully taken a measure of revenge on his opponents—party adversaries or demons of other kinds—after endless years of struggle against them.

But it was a bittersweet triumph. The collapse of the constitutional accord on the same day had cast an ugly pall over the convention, “a spectre,” said Goldenberg, “which was haunting us.” Many Quebecers in the Calgary Saddledome greeted Chrétien wearing black arm bands. Jean Lapierre, the incendiary Quebec MP who was co-chair of Martin’s campaign, bolted the Liberal Party to sit as an independent with Lucien Bouchard. “I would not want to have an association of one minute with that individual who is now the shame of most Quebecers,” he said.

After Paul Martin, Sr., who had lost two leadership campaigns himself, kissed him on the lips and said, “Sorry, son,” the losing candidate proceeded to the podium to give a concession speech that was better than Chrétien’s winning one. “We can unite this party that we all love,” Martin said. He felt he had won the convention week itself. It was perhaps true, in that momentum seemed to be leaving Chrétien at the very time he took the prize.

On the convention floor, the new leader of the Liberal Party was caught by the cameras embracing Clyde Wells. The Newfoundland premier, along with Manitoba’s Elijah Harper, had blocked passage of the Meech Lake Accord, which Wells had initially appeared to support. Now Chrétien, who had been advised to stay as quiet as possible on Meech at the convention, was embracing its killer, hugging Clyde Wells in front of the nation. He would later say it was just to thank Wells for bringing delegates to him from his province, but few saw it that way. Many Meech supporters viewed it as Chrétien rubbing their noses in it. “We were extremely disappointed. Furious, furious,” said Liza Frulla, a leading Quebec provincial Liberal. “And the hug he gave to Clyde Wells the same night—this was a symbol. A terrible symbol.”

Eddie Goldenberg would still claim years later that it wasn’t a premeditated gesture, that Chrétien probably embraced 150 people that night. “I think if you were to have asked Mr. Chrétien that night, ‘Did you hug Clyde Wells tonight?’ he probably would have said no.”

Did you regret hugging Clyde Wells? Chrétien was asked in 2003. “But you know it had nothing to do with Meech,” he claimed. “It had everything to do with the vote I had received from Newfoundland. His son was organizing for me.” But as a shrewd, experienced politician, Chrétien must surely have known how such a gesture would be viewed. He must surely have known that people would think he was sending a message to Quebec nationalists, to Paul Martin, to Brian Mulroney, to those who had opposed him for so long. More than likely he was showing the defiance of which he had been capable since the age of ten, when he first started staring down anyone who got in his way.

The proof that this was no innocent gesture had come with his red-carpet treatment of Sharon Carstairs. The Manitoba legislature had defeated the Meech deal on Friday, June 22. Sharon Carstairs flew to Calgary for the convention on Saturday, and the first thing Chrétien did when he saw her was to invite her—one of the leading enemies of the accord—right into his open arms in his booth. Even Carstairs was stunned at this. “The last [person] he needed sitting next to him on national TV during the convention was me,” she would later explain. “After all, I, along with Clyde Wells, had just torpedoed Meech.”

Among the many who noticed was Iona Campagnolo. The former party president had stood on the podium at the close of the 1984 leadership race and delivered the oft-quoted line about Jean Chrétien’s being number one in everyone’s heart. She wasn’t so sure any more. As she viewed the divisions on the floor, her message at this convention stood in cold contrast. “I am uneasy, concerned, worried,” she said.

After the vote, Patrick Lavelle was walking with Chrétien outside the Saddledome and they came upon Martin. The two titans coldly sized up one another. They weren’t even capable of summoning up phony smiles and phony small talk—private rage, public duty—for the smallest moment. A tense and brief exchange ensued, with Lavelle noticing the chill beneath each man’s words.

Rarely had the party been less enthused about handing over the leadership prize. Jean Chrétien had come in as a figure out of the past, promising little, stirring no great dreams. He had come in in the crush of a searing debate that divided the party and the country, and that again had the effect of spurning Quebec. He had come in on the heels of a campaign that created deep divisions between him and the party’s man of the future. He had chased the prize for so long. He had won, and winning was always what mattered most to him. But this victory came with many doubts.

His era, the Chrétien era, had begun. But not many were excited about it—not even, it seemed, the winner himself.

“A lively, comprehensive, intelligent, and fair account … laced with frank, insightful quotes from informed insiders…”—The Globe and Mail

“Iron Man will survive the enduring test of time as the definitive biography of a prime minister Canadians love to loathe and can’t help but like.”—Calgary Herald

“Brimming with tantalizing new stories about the Prime Minister’s last thirteen years in politics…”—Hill Times