Canada: How to Track a Plummeting Star

Getting excited is a Canadian habit at budget time. So it was hardly surprising last week when people from Newfoundland to British Columbia stopped everything to discuss how the government's new $92 billion budget would affect their pocketbooks. In his budget message in Ottawa's Neo-Gothic House of Commons, Finance Minister Michael Wilson announced an 8.4% decrease in Canada's $24 billion national deficit, crowed about the country's improved economic outlook and promised a tax-reform program that would lower personal taxes. Wilson had barely finished announcing the good news when most Canadians yawned and turned their attention back to the question that has really preoccupied them lately: How much longer can Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his scandal-ridden Conservative government hold out?

In 1984 Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative party capitalized on public disillusionment with the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to score the greatest victory in Canadian political history, capturing 211 of Commons' 282 seats and sending the Liberals into opposition. Since then, Mulroney's star has plummeted steadily. Many Canadians now predict that the Prime Minister, who must call national elections by September 1989, will be swept from power in a defeat every bit as dramatic as his earlier triumph. "I don't doubt for a moment that we will be defeated in the next election," said a gloomy Tory backbencher last week. "My only concern is that we will be destroyed as a party."

After three years the Mulroney government has yet to demonstrate it can ! effectively lead the country, run the government or keep its promises to curb the kind of corruption that helped finish off the Liberals. Mulroney, 47, has surrounded himself with friends chosen for loyalty rather than expertise. He has never developed or articulated a national agenda for Canada or shown himself to have a tight grip on the reins of government. Although Canada's growth rate of 3.3% for the past two years is second only to that of Japan, the government has problems. Time after time, major decisions, like a highly publicized promise to restructure Canada's tax system, have been delayed.

Mulroney has been unable to convince Canadians, who are skeptical about U.S. intentions toward their country, that he enjoys a "special relationship" with President Reagan. The Prime Minister disappointed Canadians when he returned to Ottawa from the 1985 Shamrock Summit in Quebec City without a U.S. commitment to help clean up acid rain. Though he managed last spring to get American agreement to discuss a free-trade treaty between the two countries, many Canadians feel that both he and his government have been too quick to knuckle under to the U.S. on matters such as lumber and steel exports. In short, they question whether Reagan, who will meet the Prime Minister in Ottawa in April, takes Mulroney seriously.