Thursday, November 06, 2003

CHRETIEN: HE ALWAYS WON

Looking back on Prime Minister Chretien's forty year career, the most obvious and incredible fact is that he never lost an election. His parliamentary profile exhibits that since 1963 he has faced the electorate as an MP twelve times and won every time. Most significantly he was re-elected to parliament in 1979 when the Liberals lost to the Conservatives under Joe Clark and even more impressively he won re-election in 1984 when the Conservatives won the largest majority in Canadian history under Brian Mulroney.

Michael Marzolini, Chairman and CEO of polling firm Pollara Inc. draws attention to several other notable aspects of Chretien's winning record. He notes that the Chretien government, "would have been re-elected on every single day of its ten-year mandate," and continues to assert that, "to hold the electoral support of between 37% and 50% of the Canadian public for an entire decade is unprecedented."

Marzolini acknowledges that a portion of Chretien's success is due to the fragmented of the opposition parties over the last ten years. However, he also argues that while, "there is some truth in this argument... it fails to award credit for these circumstances to the true source of the opposition's failure - the Prime Minister himself."

This is an important point. Chretien's best skill is that he knows how to play the game of politics better than anyone else. A winning record such as his is not a matter of luck or circumstance, it is a matter will and brilliance.

Marzolini draws attention to the way in which Chretien handled the attack ads that the Campbell Conservatives ran in 1993 - the ones that showed a close up of his paralyzed face and questioned whether this was the face of a prime minister. Marzolini maintains that Chretien's response to this ad more than the ad itself was what led to the crushing defeat of the Conservatives.

I would also draw attention to the 2000 campaign. It was Chretien who assured that just prior to the election the federal government reached a deal with the provinces on health-care transfer payments. Chretien then ran a campaign portraying Stockwell Day as the enemy of public health-care and other social services. Day ran a bad campaign but it was Chretien's campaign more than anything else that made Day look really awful.

There are many aspects of Jean Chretien's career that are debateable. What is not is that he knew how to win.

Posted by Matthew @ 1:45 a.m.