The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Canadian Elections

JOE CLARK: It`s been a long campaign; we have achieved, and we have achieved together, a victory for change in this country, and that is what we are together going to achieve. (Applause, cheering.)

ROBERT MacNEIL: Canada`a new prime minister-elect, Joe Clark, thirty-nine years old, prepares to lead a nation in crisis.

Good evening. Can a man who describes himself as unexceptional deal with Canada`s very exceptional problems? That is the question facing Canadians, who awoke this morning to discover they had made Joe Clark prime minister and swept out the elegant, controversial Pierre Trudeau after eleven years. Trudeau`s Liberal Party, which has ruled Canada for all but six of the last forty-four years, was reduced to second place in the 282-seat Canadian parliament, with only 114 seats. Joe Clark`s Progressive Conservatives emerged with 136 seats, the leader, but six seats short of an overall majority. This indecisive result left in question Mr. Clark`s ability to survive, let alone make important changes in taxation and economic policies. But the virtual disappearance of his winning party in the restive French-speaking province of Quebec leaves an even bigger question about his ability to hold Canada together as one nation. Tonight, the future for Canada under Joe Clark. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, Joe Clark was the butt of a lot of jokes during the campaign. They called him the no-personality kid from the boonies who likes junk food and Coca-Cola, mystery novels and gangster movies; who flunked French in college and couldn`t get into graduate school; who never really accomplished anything before he went into politics, winning a seat in parliament in 1972. They really laughed when he emerged from a confused Conservative Party convention in 1976 as the leader of the party. They called him Joe Who, everybody`s third choice. Everything about Joe Clark seemed in stark contrast to his opposite, the urbane, witty intellectual, Pierre Trudeau. They debated face to face only once during the campaign; that was on national television ten days ago.

(May 13, 1979.)

CLARK: The point is that every successful Canadian prime minister has been able to find a way to work with the premiers of this country. Unfortunately, even with premiers of your own party, you have been involved in a state of turmoil with premiers, which has, in my judgment, corroded any basis of trust, which can be the only way this nation works. And I`m convinced that a new national government, coming to office with a fresh mandate and with the friendship of the great majority of those premiers, will be able to work on their own desire to make the nation work and find agreement where, in eleven years -- partly, sir, because of your own style -- in eleven years you`ve not been able to find that kind of agreement.

PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU: It seems to me you`ve evaded Mr. Desbarats` question, which is what would you do about the Constitution?

CLARK: Well, I would certainly not act unilaterally to bring the Constitution...

TRUDEAU: What would you do, then? Would you wait another hundred years, or what?

CLARK: Of course not.

TRUDEAU: What would you do?

CLARK: Have a little more faith; have faith that some people other than you might be able...

TRUDEAU: Tell us what you`ll do, Mr. Clark. You always talk in generalities, and the degree of specificity seems to ...

CLARK: I`ll tell you quite...

TRUDEAU: ... to embarrass you.

CLARK: I`ll tell you quite specifically what we would do, to use your words. What we would do would be to bring together the premiers of Canada to get agreement on areas right now where there can be agreement found, as ...

TRUDEAU: As we did in February, right?

CLARK: As you did and failed. Now, you...

TRUDEAU: Failed?

CLARK: Well, you made some progress. You made progress where you adopted some of the proposals that had been put forward by the Conservative Party at the Kingston conference. Indeed, proposals that you ridiculed at the time, and then, in a dazzling display of consistency, adopted later on. The point is ...

TRUDEAU: You don`t seem to be very much on top of this dossier. Which proposals in Kingston did we adopt that hadn`t been...

CLARK: All right...

TRUDEAU: ...since 1969?

CLARK: Well, now, which -- perhaps the way to put the question is, which of those did you adopt that you ridiculed at the time? Which did you say at the time meant that I was selling out the shop...

TRUDEAU: You don`t remember what you even decided in Kingston.

CLARK: Oh, certainly. The question of equalization, a number of them we could go through. Equalization, that`s not...

TRUDEAU: In Kingston, Mr. St. Laurent continued

CLARK: (Laughing.) Sure. The point is ...

TRUDEAU: Joe...

CLARK: ...that -- the point is that you`ve been singularly unsuccessful at working with the premiers of Canada. I think there`s abundant evidence that a change of government would be able to work under good faith towards Canada...

TRUDEAU: Joe...

CLARK: ...that not only the prime minister of Canada is a good Canadian, but so are all the premiers, with the exception of one, who wants to rend the country. So are the rest of the partners in confederation good Canadians, and I`m convinced...

TRUDEAU: Let`s talk specifics, Joe.

CLARK: Sure.

TRUDEAU: Would you agree with Premier Lougheed when he wants to limit the federal trade and commerce power?

CLARK: I wouldn`t agree with him on that, but what I would do -- what I would do...

TRUDEAU: All right, you wouldn`t...

CLARK: Just a second...

TRUDEAU: And you`ve just said you`d have...

CLARK: ...disagreement. Of course you`d have disagreement.

TRUDEAU: Well, what`s different between you and me? You said you would -- just now you...

CLARK: Well, but...

TRUDEAU: ...change your position, you said you wouldn`t agree with Premier Buchanan on fisheries. You`d said the contrary down in Halifax, but now you`ve said...

CLARK: That, with respect, sir, is not correct. I didn`t say the contrary in Halifax.

TRUDEAU: So you wouldn`t transfer jurisdiction over fisheries to the provinces, is that right?

CLARK: No. What I...

TRUDEAU: You would not?

CLARK: Of course I would. For the...

TRUDEAU: You would.

CLARK: 700th time, I would not. But I...

TRUDEAU: You would not.

CLARK: But I would...

TRUDEAU: So you disagree with him, you`d be like me.

CLARK: (Laughs.) What I would do is recognize that both the provinces and the national government...

TRUDEAU: What about...

CLARK: ...have an interest in common fields.

TRUDEAU: ...culture?

CLARK: All right. Let me just quickly summarize. I think that we`ve had a quite remarkable period of failure, particularly recently, in your ability to get along with the premiers. I can`t blame all of them, because it`s been as much a problem with a liberal Jerry Regan as it has been with a conservative Bill Davis or Peter Lougheed. I have to suspect that the problem is with the constant participant, with the way that you have approached federal-provincial relations. And I think that is because there has been a determination on your part since you became prime minister, to concentrate power in Ottawa. So what I would do to start, with the premiers, is to return to the provinces power that had been there before your government centralized power away from them. The second thing I`d do is sit down in a new atmosphere of good will and try to find changes, probably in minor things, probably in the way people work together, rather than in the language of the law, changes that would demonstrate to anyone who doubted federalism that a new government in Ottawa meant new movement in federal-provincial relations.

LEHRER: Some of the journalists covering that debate and the entire campaign made light of Clark, his personality and his style. Charles Lynch was not one of them. As a columnist and chief of the Southham News Service in Canada, Mr. Lynch traveled extensively with Clark. It was the thirteenth Canadian election Mr. Lynch has covered. He is with us tonight in the studios of the Global Television Network in Ottawa. Mr. Lynch, in the broadest of terms, should this election result be seen more as a defeat for Pierre Trudeau than as a victory for Joe Clark?

CHARLES LYNCH: Well, it`s a bit of both, Jim. The fact is that in the public opinion polls Trudeau ran ahead of Clark on a personal basis -- which leader do you prefer -- Trudeau was away ahead in English speaking Canada, and in French-speaking Canada, and in French-speaking Canada of course he cleaned up in the election, so we`re talking about English- speaking Canada. I think it was the party, I think they`ve been in power for sixteen years, and English-speaking Canadians felt that that was long enough, they wanted something new; and the fact of Clark`s freshness -- you say people ridiculed him; I likened him to Gary Cooper in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" or Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." And in three years to come from nowhere to become prime minister, the youngest in our history, he had to have something going for him. I thought in that debate that we`ve just seen, for example, that Clark did himself a lot of good. But all my colleagues thought Trudeau wiped the floor with him.

LEHRER: What did Clark have going for him? I`m talking personally now, in terms of his campaign style or whatever.

LYNCH: Well, principally he had a proposal to make mortgage interest, payments on your mortgage interest, deductible from your income tax, something that you`ve had in the United States for a long time. That was a tremendous boost to him. I think that was the main plank in his platform. The other one was this decentralization that you heard the two men debating, which I think is the only way this country is going to survive. I think the idea of a strong central government, which Trudeau espoused, is unfashionable in Western Canada, where Clark cleaned up, and it appears to be unfashionable even in downtown Ontario, metro Toronto, where all the liberal cabinet ministers got their clocks cleaned. The other thing is that Trudeau, if he didn`t fail himself, his English-speaking ministers, who are traditionally supposed to provide balance in a government here when you have a French-speaking prime minister, let him down terribly. They were a bunch of -- non-entities is perhaps not too strong a word; and I think a lot of the punishment that the English speaking voters dished out was dished out straight to those English speaking cabinet ministers in Ontario and in Western Canada.

LEHRER: Was the Quebec issue a major factor in this result?

LYNCH: It had to be; it`s kind of like asking whether Margaret Trudeau was. It was debated...

LEHRER: I`ll ask you that one later.

LYNCH: It was debated in an oblique way, under the heading of national unity, and it was implied by the liberals that only they under Trudeau could keep Quebec in confederation, and certainly English-speakers resented this, I think; they resented the lack of input from the English majority in Canada to the whole debate on unity-- Trudeau the Quebecker debating with Rene Levesque, the Quebecker, over the fate of Canada; and I think there was a yearning on the part of English-speakers to have a stronger English- speaking voice. In Clark they have this, and Clark is going to be much more conciliatory and sympathetic to Quebec even than Trudeau was, so I don`t think there`s any great loss there. I`m not pessimistic.

LEHRER: All right; thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Let`s hear now from another experienced Canadian political reporter. Peter Desbarats is the Ottawa bureau chief for Global Television. He`s one of three journalists who questioned the candidates during that televised election debate we just saw a piece of. Mr. Desbarats, what`s your opinion? Did Clark win, or Trudeau lose?

PETER DESBARATS: Oh, I thought that Trudeau won the election, and I thought that Clark definitely lost. The subjects that you saw being debated a few minutes ago, of course, sound fairly esoteric, I suppose, to American viewers; they were familiar to Canadians. But I think you could probably sense the dynamics of the debate. You saw the part where the prime minister moved in on Clark suddenly. Clark became rattled, he got his facts wrong. I felt that in technical terms that the debate was a disaster for Clark, and most of the Canadian newspapers that surveyed their readers after the debate, that was the conclusion: Clark ranked either second or third and the prime minister ranked first. I think it did him a lot of harm, but it didn`t seem to swing all that many votes.

I think that convinced Conservatives resented the bulling of the prime minister.

MacNEIL: Why were so many voters, particularly in Ontario, where they lost so much, so disenchanted with Trudeau? He`s a world figure, a man of great talents, and so on. Why so disenchanted with him?

DESBARATS: Well, that disenchantment with Trudeau has been growing for a long time. It was very strong in 1972, when Trudeau only one by two ridings. He came back a bit in 1974, but Ontario, or certain elements in Ontario, have always disliked the prime minister; they don`t like him in rural Ontario because he`s an urban product; they don`t like him because he`s an intellectual, and they don`t like him because he`s a French Canadian. They particularly didn`t like him, I guess, in this campaign because he appropriated the whole campaign, as Charles Lynch said, to himself. His ministers disappeared; he campaigned as a one-man band, and on one issue, really, national unity. And that issue just didn`t go over in English Canada this time.

MacNEIL: Let me ask you the apparently trivial but a question that`s fascinating to so many Americans: did Margaret Trudeau`s antics have any influence on this result?

DESBARATS: That`s a difficult question. I think to an outside observer it would be astonishing that we went through a whole campaign with a best- seller on the newsstands written by the estranged wife of the prime minister, and it really was virtually never mentioned -- though it was mentioned, of course, before the campaign. I think that Canadians became fed up finally with the antics of Margaret Trudeau. I said on television at one point early in the campaign that getting rid of the prime minister might be viewed by some Canadians as a way of finally getting rid of Margaret Trudeau.I got violent reaction from my own viewers on that; they didn`t like me saying that. But I think that it might have been a small factor in the campaign, not a major one.

MacNEIL: Briefly, does this result make Quebec`s separation from the rest of Canada any more or less likely, in your view?

DESBARATS: I think that Quebec is in the process now of taking care of its own problems. Claude Ryan, the opposition leader in the National Assembly in Quebec, got a seat in the assembly in a bi-election during the federal campaign. Many people in English Canada, including myself, believe that he has a fairly good chance of defeating Levesque in the next Quebec election in a year or two. That feeling spread, I think, through English Canada after the bi-election and reduced the potency of Trudeau`s campaign for national unity. So I think Quebec first of all is going to digest Levesque himself, and that`s the most important development.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: The first item on Mr. Clark`s agenda, of course, is to form and maintain a new government. He said today at a press conference that he would attempt to rule as a minority government, not striking a coalition deal with a third party to get those six votes needed for a clear majority. The key to the workability of that plan could be a third figure in yesterday`s election. He`s Ed Broadbent, head of the socialist leaning New Democratic Party, which won twenty-six seats. During the campaign he had bad things to say about both Trudeau and Clark.

ED BROADBENT, Leader, New Democratic Party: In short, in terms of the real issues that bother Canadians, whether it`s prices or farm problems or particularly unemployment,

Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Clark -- we`ve just seen it -- ignored most of them in their so-called serious debate.

And the other point I want to make is, in virtually all the matters I`ve listed they`re in substantial if not identical agreement. But the one that stands out head and shoulders above all the others, for me, is that that Mr. Clark clearly wants to be prime minister; but I still have no perception of a different kind of Canada from Mr. Clark. Does it differ from Mr. Trudeau? He wants a little more financial control in parliament, he wants some parliamentary reforms, he says he`d be cooperative with the premiers -- but does that really make a Canada that`s more exciting, that`s more decent? And I have argued throughout this campaign that what`s fundamental to that, what`s essential to that, is the recognition of something that we really have and use it; and that is resources.

In Newfoundland, we export most of our iron ore. In my home province of Ontario, we`ve got nickel, we`ve got copper, we`ve got zinc. We`re exporting it. In the prairies, the government -- Mr. Trudeau wants to export their alleged surplus of natural gas. British Columbia has resources. And the central thrust of our campaign and my campaign, as prime minister of this country is that it`s time for a change. It is really time that we set about the serious task of controlling our own resources.

LEHRER: One of the leading experts on Canadian politics is John Porter, professor of sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He`s the author of a well-known book on the politics of Canada, Vertical Mozaic.

He`s also with us tonight from Ottawa. Mr. Porter, explain to us nonexperts how Mr. Clark can control the government without making peace with Ed Broadbent or somebody in order to ensure him of a majority in parliament.

JOHN PORTER: Well, of course he won`t have a majority, but he won`t necessarily now have to depend on Mr. Broadbent. I`m sure that Mr. Broadbent is disappointed that his party hasn`t done somewhat better so that he might be in the position of holding a so-called balance of power; though quite what he would have done with it is not very clear. I think Mr. Clark has a large enough minority that he can with confidence form a government and carry on governing the country for some considerable period of time, and the reason is that to defeat him would require some combination of the other parties, and that goes as much in his favor as it goes against him. Had his minority been much smaller and had Broadbent been a little stronger, then that would have been a different situation.

LEHRER: You mean you think at this stage of the game, at least, it`s unlikely that the Liberal Party under Trudeau and Broadbent and his people would come together on a no-confidence vote or something like that to destroy Clark almost at the very beginning.

PORTER: Well, I think the parliamentary system doesn`t quite work that way. The people who are in it try hard to make it work, and one of the features we have here in addition to the parliamentary system is, of course, we have a third party system which is strange to the United States So I think that he can quite easily carry on without the support of Mr. Broadbent.

LEHRER: Would Broadbent have any motivation, do you think, to try to foul up the works for Mr. Clark?

PORTER: No, I don`t think -- my point was, of course, that if you work in the parliamentary system and seek to make it work, that carries a sense of responsibility. After all, no parliamentary government can stand a diet of disillusions, according to one constitutional expert in Britain, and the country quite obviously couldn`t go on having election after election with perhaps the same type of slim minority that Mr. Clark now has. So I would think that all of these leaders would accept the fact that the electorate at the moment has given it a situation which they have to cope with as a group of political leaders, and I suspect, apart from that, parliamentary tradition, which can go on for a year or more until some issue that brings them together so that they jointly decide that it`s time to clarify the situation.

LEHRER: In other words, you think he`s going to be given a fair try, at least, to try to do what he can, without anybody trying to sabotage him.

PORTER: No, I don`t think there would be any sabotaging in that sense; no, I think he`ll be given a fair trial and that he`ll probably go on for a year and choose his own time. See, as prime minister he also has the power of advising the governor general when to dissolve parliament, and only he can do that now; at least, only he can do that if he takes over the government for some period of time. And I think that that power that`s given to him -- after all, these elections are expensive; parties -- and after the country itself, we have an extremely long election, for parliamentary systems, not long compared to you, of course. But I think the country would view as irresponsible an early bringing down of Mr. Clark without giving him a reasonable opportunity to see what he can do. After all, people are very curious as to what his capacities are, and I think that we will see him in office for some comfortable period of time, choosing when he will go to the country to try to get a majority. That has been the kind of tradition where minority governments have existed in this country.

LEHRER: Mr. Porter, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes; Charles Lynch, do you agree with Mr. Porter that we can have stable but minority government under Mr. Clark for a while?

LYNCH: Yes, I do. I would go beyond the year, year and a half. It wouldn`t surprise me if this government has a three- or four-year term and governs it; I can`t see the Liberals wanting a showdown, I can`t see the New Democrats wanting one, and Clark is going to settle in. He`s a colorless leader; he`s not charismatic, he`s not nearly as controversial or as sparky as Trudeau was, and colorless leaders have a record of being in office for a long time in Canada once they get in. The most colorless man we ever had was in for twenty-three years; he governed the country out of a crystal ball, as it turned out, but...

(Laughter.)

LYNCH: ...Clark could be a long-laster, including this first government of his.

MacNEIL: Do you quarrel with that, Peter Desbarats?

DESBARATS: No. I think I agree that it could go on -- I don`t know whether it could go on for three or four years. I think Professor Porter takes a high line and talks about responsibility of the parliamentarians; I take a more practical line, a little closer to Charles. I think it would be very dangerous for anybody to defeat him. He`s said that he`s going into parliament in the fall; he has this mortgage plan, which will be a big break for homeowners, taxpayers; he`s going to cut taxes by two billion dollars; he`ll present a beautiful package to parliament, and then he would really, I would think, practically beg the opposition parties to defeat him at that point, and that`s the last thing in the world they`ll do. So for practical reasons I think they`ll let him alone for a while and wait and see how he pans out.

MaCNEIL: We`ve had the British electorate recently returning Margaret Thatcher, a conservative; we now have the Canadian electorate returning conservatives. Is there a comparable swing to the right, ideologically, in Canada, as one could say there has been in Britain? Are we really going to notice a big difference in the way Canada`s run economically? Mr. Porter, do you think so?

PORTER: Well, I think the conservative trend that is worldwide has also reached Canada. In one of our provinces, Manitoba, a conservative government was elected precisely on the kind of conservative cost-cutting, bureaucracy-cutting platform that is typical of the new conservative, cutting back on the welfare state and so forth. I think we`re not in any way isolated from world currents of opinion. And so I think -- and even the recent election in B.C. was one in which a conservative-leaning government was returned to power -- so I think Canada is reflecting the same kind of conservativism that one finds in all Western societies that advanced very substantially along the lines of a welfare state with very large public expenditures and so forth.

MacNEIL: I see. Is this going to make a substantial difference, Charles Lynch, or is it going to be minor tinkering with taxation and fiscal policy and the direction of the economy?

LYNCH: Minor tinkering, I think. The thing I look for is a freshening of the whole scene after sixteen years of one party. You`re accustomed to changes of government in your country, we`re not. And I think our system had become encrusted and sort of infirm with one party. And so the mere change of characters will freshen things up, but the great difference in philosophy was the one about decentralizing power and more power to the provinces, which Clark believes in and which he`ll try to implement. That is a change from the Trudeau philosophy; Trudeau would say that he, too, had decentralized power. In fact, he preached strong central power, and Clark preaches diffusing power. That is going to make a difference. Other than that, I don`t think there`ll be a great philosophical difference, and I think Clark may be the first lucky conservative to come to power in this half century in that there are signs of an upbeat in the economy. So he may inherit a sufficiently strong economy that he doesn`t have to bring in punishing or harsh or unpopular economic measures.

MacNEIL: Can I ask you, Mr. Porter, do you agree with Peter Desbarats that this is not going to make a huge difference in the Quebec situation, even though Mr. Clark`s Conservative Party won only two seats in the Province of Quebec, dividing Canadians along language lines politically?

PORTER: I certainly think I would agree that the internal dynamics of Quebec politics as they`re now developing will probably not take care of the situation but at least create a situation in which Mr. Clark will be able to manage and negotiate through various kinds of diplomacy that he will obviously have to set up with the Quebec government. But the trends in Quebec itself are certainly emphasizing much less separatism. There was, as you may know, a resignation of an important cabinet minister of the PQ Party last week, and that does suggest there`s some cracking within the Quebec government with respect to the character of the referendum which they keep promising and the determination to pursue a policy toward separatism that initially brought the party to power.

MacNEIL: Finally -- we just have a minute or so -- we`re seeing, obviously, the passing of a considerable world figure in Mr. Trudeau. Charles Lynch, you`ve watched many of them come and go; what would you make Mr. Trudeau`s political epitaph?

LYNCH: Most unusual man I`ve ever seen in any country in power, a kind of man that hardly ever comes to power combining sex and intellect and political savvy. His accomplishments, we`re too close to them to measure, but I`ve never seen the like. We should all pay him royalties for writing about him, he was so fascinating.

MacNEIL: Peter Desbarats, what`s your opinion?

DESBARATS: He was a great subject for journalists, but I think I`d make my epitaph very brief. I think I would just say that he kept us together for another few years, and that`s a considerable accomplishment for any Canadian prime minister, these days.

MacNEIL: Would you add to that, Mr. Porter?

PORTER: Well, I`d take a somewhat different tack and say he was disappointing to many, particularly the intellectuals of the country, who believed he had the capacity to lead us out of the difficulties we`re in. But that`s too long for an epitaph.

(Laughter.)

MacNEIL: Well, all right. Thank you all, Charles Lynch, Peter Desbarats and John Porter, for joining us from Ottawa this evening. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. We`ll be back tomorrow night. I Robert MacNeil. Good night.