Canada: A Duel of Images

(3 of 4)

This is wrong for Canada.' " In contrast to Turner's earnestly wooden style, Mulroney appears poised and confident. The Conservative leader kicked off his campaign to exchange his parliamentary seat in Nova Scotia for a new one in the Manicouagan riding of Quebec by visiting his home town of Baie Comeau on the St. Lawrence River. As a pack of reporters tagged along, Mulroney enthusiastically greeted boyhood friends and even visited a nursing home to say hello to a woman who once looked after him as a child. "I've met half my home town," he quipped. "They'll vote twice, so that's everyone." Mulroney's easy manner and sonorous voice are so well suited to television campaigning, however, that he may suffer from what one Canadian commentator calls the "glib factor," a perception that he is too smooth and too vague on the issues.

Turner and Mulroney have mapped out complementary strategies to bridge the great East-West divide in Canadian politics. Turner launched his campaign in Vancouver, B.C., vowing to "lead Liberalism back to Western Canada"—a reference to the fact that in the 1980 general election the Liberals won only two seats west of Ontario. And it was because the Conservatives represent only one out of the 75 parliamentary constituencies in Quebec that Mulroney chose to run from his home town in that province. After the regional antagonism of the Trudeau years, with French-speaking Quebec at odds with the English-speaking sections of the country, Canadians have for the most part welcomed this attempt at national political unity. Indeed, it is now taken for granted that candidates of both major parties need to speak English and French fluently. Turner and Mulroney conducted their television debates in both languages.

Given the often prickly state of U.S.Canadian relations during the past decade, the Reagan Administration has been careful to appear evenhanded about the race. Mulroney may be somewhat closer to Reagan on defense and economic issues, but Turner has good friends in Washington, most notably U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who was president of Bechtel Corp. when Turner was a director of Bechtel Canada Ltd. After Reagan's highly publicized squabbles with Trudeau, the prevailing feeling in the Administration seems to be that "whoever wins, we win." U.S. officials contend that despite disputes over trade barriers, U.S. investment in Canada and environmental issues such as acid rain, relations between the two neighbors have taken a turn for the better. But the American economic upsurge has only just started to spill across the border into Canada. Economists in Ottawa fear that as Canadian interest rates climb ever higher to keep Space with American lending rates, the fragile Canadian recovery of the past 15 months could be choked off.