Juggernaut Paul Martin's Campaign for Chretien's Crown

OFF CENTRE During the Liberals' years in power after 1993, the seat of government authority and the still point of Prime Minister Jean Chretien's far-reaching control were known by a single moniker: the Centre. The Centre was a place and it was a state of mind; it was a cadre and it was an individual. It was where the buck stopped and started. It was both the maker and breaker of political careers. Cabinet ministers flagged vital instructions to aides with the warning, "This comes from the Centre." But in the early months of 2002, political spectators began to see a weakening of this omnipotence. As William Butler Yeats observed, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." The erosion was nearly painful to watch. Chretien had to shuffle his cabinet repeatedly to replace ministers touched by conflict-of-interest controversies. Every day in the House of Commons the opposition raised allegations of scandal over how the government had doled out federal advertising contracts in Quebec. The Liberals lost two traditionally safe ridings in spring by-elections, while the Canadian Alliance, under new leader Stephen Harper, was patching up old quarrels and pulling itself together. The prime minister, by contrast, seemed more easily rattled than before, his testy pronouncements in caucus shared with reporters by mischievous MPs. In public too, Chretien seemed perpetually irritated, defiantly barking back at his critics. In one of his more memorable lines that difficult spring, the prime minister appeared to be offering his resignation in return for a media truce: Leave me alone, maybe I'll go. It had come to this. The Centre's deeper rift was far more personal: it was about leadership, the L-word, the ambition that dare not speak its name. Chretien's most daunting challenge, which neither he nor anyone in his government would openly acknowledge, was the belief of many of his fellow Liberals that the prime minister, now sixty-eight years old, had passed his best-before date. The obvious heir apparent, Finance Minister Paul Martin, was waiting and waiting in the wings. Since his strong second-place showing in the 1990 Liberal leadership contest and during twelve years as the right hand of Jean Chretien, Martin, now sixty-three, had attracted a devoted following. And though levels of impatience varied in intensity among the "Martinites," for most the appetite for change had become a consuming hunger. At the beginning of the last week of May 2002, Parliament was in session, but the prime minister wasn't in the capital. He'd shuffled his cabinet on Sunday for the second time that year then flown to Italy for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders' summit meeting. So it was that Chretien found himself an ocean away when the final unravelling of his leadership began. A small group of representatives of the building-trades unions held a dinner on Monday, May 27, 2002, at Tosca, a cozy Italian restaurant on Metcalfe Street in Ottawa, not far from Parliament Hill. As the group settled in with pre-dinner drinks, two familiar members of Parliament announced their arrival with hearty hellos and handshakes. Joe Fontana, from London, Ontario, was a seasoned Liberal backbencher, a parliamentarian since 1988, and chairman of the government caucus from 1996 to 1999. He'd brought along another MP, his good friend Stan Keyes from Hamilton, Ontario, a former television reporter who was the current chair of the Liberal caucus. Beyond their common political experience on the backbench, Fontana and Keyes shared a number of pursuits: they both were keenly interested in transport issues, were members of the True Grits MP rock bandDelacourt, Susan is the author of 'Juggernaut Paul Martin's Campaign for Chretien's Crown' with ISBN 9780771026058 and ISBN 0771026056.