Jean Chretien: Yesterday's Man Charts the Future

Only two days had passed since the Liberal Party's landslide victory, but Jean Chretien was raring to go into action. The man who will be Canada's 20th Prime Minister does not take office until this week, but at his first postelection press conference he plunged into a small torrent of pronouncements. "It's time to pull the country together, time to get to work," Chretien declared. He clearly meant it. So eager was he to get on with his busy schedule that he fled the planned 45-minute news conference after just 22 minutes -- only to find that the limousine taking him to his next meeting had not arrived yet.

Chretien could have used the spare time to savor the Liberals' stunning comeback to power after nine years in opposition. He had been derided by the ruling Progressive Conservatives as "yesterday's man" -- until voters handed the Tories the worst defeat in the history of any Canadian party. In Oct. 25 balloting, they reduced the party's House of Commons strength from 155 seats to a shockingly rock-bottom 2 and simultaneously gave Chretien a comfortable 177-seat majority. Prime Minister Kim Campbell lost her seat and soon, no doubt, will lose the leadership post she held for only three months. In the taunt of foes, it was only Kim's summer job after all.

Soaring into the vacuum left by the imploding Conservatives, two new regional parties gained substantial power -- dragging with them the perennial issue of Canada's political survival. For the first time, the official opposition party, the Bloc Quebecois, with 54 seats, is an organization dedicated to the country's dismemberment. The Bloc, led by Lucien Bouchard, 54, aims to take Canada's predominantly French-speaking province out of Confederation. In the west the conservative populist Reform Party won 52 seats. Its leader, Preston Manning, 51, has often declared himself unwilling to make further constitutional concessions as the price for Quebec's remaining in the union.

Pitted against these bipolar forces is one of the country's most experienced politicians -- the holder of nine Cabinet posts in previous Liberal governments -- and a vocal federalist. Chretien, 59, takes office with a clear, if daunting, mandate: to turn around the limp economy while preserving an expensive social-service network that 28.5 million Canadians -- and Chretien himself -- see as an inalienable right.

The task is not going to be easy. Canada has a $26 billion federal deficit and a foreign debt of $225 billion -- the largest, per capita, in the industrialized world. The country also has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the West, at 11.2%. During his campaign, Chretien promised to create 120,000 jobs in the public sector, most of them building and repairing Canada's eroding infrastructure. But, says John Clinkard, chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Toronto, "the fiscal cupboard is essentially bare. The Liberals can play around the edges with fiscal policy -- but they can have no significant increases in spending."