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Canada in 1993

Canada is a federal parliamentary state and member of the Commonwealth covering North America north of conterminous United States and east of Alaska. Area: 9,970,610 sq km (3,849,674 sq mi). Pop. (1993 est.): 28,149,000. Cap.: Ottawa. Monetary unit: Canadian dollar, with (Oct. 4, 1993) a free rate of Can$1.34 to U.S. $1 (Can$2.03 = £1 sterling). Queen, Elizabeth II; governor-general in 1993, Ramon Hnatyshyn; prime ministers, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell from June 25, and, from November 4, Jean Chrétien.

Domestic Affairs

Canada changed its government in a national election on Oct. 25, 1993. The Liberal Party swept into power, capturing 177 of the 295 seats in the House of Commons, more than twice the number it had held at the dissolution of Parliament. More extraordinary was the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party, which had governed Canada since 1984. From 155 members in the Commons, it was reduced to a corporal’s guard of only 2 members, one from New Brunswick and one from Quebec. A party dedicated to securing the independence of Quebec, the Bloc Québécois, captured 54 of the French-speaking ridings in the province to become the official opposition in Parliament. The Reform Party, a protest movement coming from the western provinces, won almost as many seats as the Bloc, having drawn away support from the Conservatives in Ontario and the western provinces. Although the Canadian political scene was left in a confused state by the election, it was significant that a party strongly committed to maintaining the country’s federal structure had won a solid victory at the polls.

Preparations for the election were set in motion when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, leader of the Progressive Conservatives, announced his retirement on February 24. In the search for a successor, a 46-year-old Vancouver lawyer, Kim Campbell (see BIOGRAPHIES), soon became the front-runner. Campbell was a new face on the Canadian political scene: a woman from the West, who was intelligent and articulate in both English and French. Although her federal political experience dated only from 1988, she had risen rapidly in Mulroney’s Cabinet, having served as minister of justice and, briefly, as minister of national defense. Public opinion polls suggested that her prospects of leading the party to a third election victory were good. Deterred by Campbell’s sudden popularity, more experienced ministers in the Mulroney Cabinet decided not to challenge her for the leadership. In the end one principal rival emerged: Minister of the Environment Jean Charest, a bilingual, 34-year-old lawyer from Sherbrooke, south of Montreal. The five candidates who eventually entered the race crisscrossed the country seeking delegate support before the leadership convention in Ottawa on June 9-13. At the convention Campbell won a narrow victory on the second ballot, gathering 1,817 votes to Charest’s 1,630. She became the second woman to lead a national political party in Canada, the first being Audrey McLaughlin, who had been chosen leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1989. Campbell was sworn in as Canada’s first woman prime minister on June 25.

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The new prime minister’s first move was to reduce the size of the 35-member Mulroney Cabinet to 25 through eliminating or merging departments. Her Cabinet consisted of 18 holdovers from the Mulroney government and 7 new faces. The new administration went to the people with a blunt message: the annual national deficit of $35 billion threatened to undercut all the operations of government; if social and economic programs were to be continued, the deficit had to be drastically reduced. Campbell pledged to eliminate the operating deficit in five years but offered few hints of how she would deal with Canada’s worrisome unemployment rate, which stood at more than 11% of the labour force. The Campbell administration was burdened by the unpopularity of Mulroney and the government he had led for nine years. The Mulroney policy of free trade with the U.S. and the sweeping tax on goods and services he instituted were unpopular with many Canadians. Campbell defended these measures while claiming that her government would be more accountable to the popular will. She wished, as a commentator put it, to change the face of the Mulroney government without changing the governing party. In the event, her attempt proved futile.

The real danger to the Progressive Conservatives came from two regional parties that threatened to cut into traditional bases of support. Mulroney had enlisted the backing of nationalists from Quebec in constructing a nationally based party and leading it to victory in 1984. In 1993 the nationalists were being drawn to a new political movement, the Bloc Québécois, founded in 1990 by a lieutenant of Mulroney’s. Lucien Bouchard had broken with the Conservatives over the Mulroney government’s constitutional proposals. As the election approached, the Bloc consisted of eight members of Parliament, most of them disgruntled Conservative MPs whom Bouchard had persuaded to leave the party. The Bloc promised to speak out for Quebec’s interests in the federal Parliament and to promote the long-term goal of a separate state for Quebec. Early in the campaign, polls showed it eroding Conservative support in the province’s French-speaking constituencies, a shift in allegiance that Campbell and Charest tried vainly to prevent.

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The other challenge to the Progressive Conservatives came from the Reform Party, which attracted considerable interest in Alberta and British Columbia. Founded in 1987 by Preston Manning, an evangelical Christian from Alberta, Reform sought to mobilize those Canadians who felt that the old-line parties had let them down. It campaigned for a leaner government and questioned the constant attention that it believed Ottawa lavished on Quebec. The Reform Party claimed that there should be no "special status" for Quebec; instead, Canada should be maintained on its original model of 10 equal provinces. In its worries over immigration and crime in society, Reform echoed some of the themes of the populist movement led by H. Ross Perot in the U.S. Early in the campaign the Reform Party threatened to become a "spoiler" in the national election.

The Liberals, the official opposition when Parliament was dissolved, saw their chance in 1993. Their leader, Jean Chrétien (see BIOGRAPHIES), was an experienced political figure who had first entered Parliament in 1963 and had held a number of senior Cabinet posts under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. A committed federalist, Chrétien had campaigned hard against the sovereignty option in the Quebec referendum in 1980. Although he promised a government that would be fiscally responsible, he emphasized the creation of jobs as his highest priority. In contrast to the Conservatives, the Liberals presented a full statement of proposals to meet Canada’s economic and social problems.

The third national party, the social-democratic NDP, faced a bleak prospect in the 1993 campaign. Although they held 43 seats in Parliament, their image was tarnished by the unpopularity of NDP governments in the two large provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. McLaughlin, the party leader, had failed to arouse enthusiasm among voters, even within the traditionally friendly trade-union movement.

On October 25 the Liberal wave began in the Maritime Provinces, where the party captured all but one of the region’s 32 seats. Liberals went on to take 19 of the 75 seats in Quebec, all but one of Ontario’s 99 seats (unprecedented in the province’s history), and 12 of Manitoba’s 14 seats, but it did less well in the three provinces to the west. Chrétien won his seat in a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. Altogether the Liberals’ 177 seats gave them a solid majority in the new Parliament. Campbell lost her seat in Vancouver, as did all the members of the Cabinet except Charest, who retained one of the party’s only two seats. Under Campbell’s brief leadership the party had suffered the most humiliating defeat for a governing party in Canada’s political history. The Conservatives won only 16.1% of the popular vote, compared with 43% they had won in the previous election five years before. The Liberals’ popular vote amounted to 41.6%, almost 10 points higher than their showing in 1988.

In Quebec the Bloc captured more than 50% of the popular vote, winning a total of 54 seats. This was the second highest standing recorded by a party in the election and gave Lucien Bouchard the official position of leader of the opposition. Reform was not far behind, winning 22 seats in Alberta and 24 in British Columbia, which, with scattered other seats, gave it a contingent of 52 members in the new House. The NDP won only 9 ridings, all in the West and in the Yukon, where McLaughlin held on to her seat.

It was doubtful whether any Conservative leader could have avoided defeat in the 1993 election. The Mulroney government had sunk to less than a 20% approval rating in the polls, and Campbell was unable to project a new image for the party. She conducted a weak campaign, at one point saying that the 47 days leading up to the vote were insufficient to discuss serious issues such as social policy. Her party’s message lacked substance, and her political judgment was frequently called into question during the campaign. In contrast, the veteran Chrétien conducted a shrewd campaign that touched on the questions, such as unemployment, that were of concern to the average voter. On December 13, Campbell stepped down as party leader.

Chrétien was sworn in as Canada’s 20th prime minister on November 4. He appointed 22 members to his Cabinet to represent the regions of the country. Ten members came from Ontario and five were from Quebec. Five members of the Cabinet had served under Trudeau before 1984, and there were five others who had first been elected in the recent election. The most important economic portfolios went to moderate figures who were respected in the business community: finance to Montreal businessman Paul Martin and international trade to Toronto magazine publisher Roy MacLaren. Chrétien’s partner in opposition, Sheila Copps from Hamilton, Ont., became deputy prime minister and minister of the environment. The external affairs portfolio (renamed foreign affairs) went to André Ouellet, a veteran Quebec minister. Chrétien also appointed eight junior ministers, called secretaries of state, with responsibility for specific areas such as training and youth, Asia-Pacific affairs, and science, research, and development. The secretaries of state would not sit at the Cabinet table but would be responsible to the senior minister appointed in their field of interest. In a move that stunned Canada’s defense establishment, in mid-December Chrétien abruptly removed the chief of defense staff, Adm. John Anderson, who had been involved in two major scandals during the Campbell government, and replaced him with Gen. John de Chastelain, the ambassador to the U.S., who had himself held the defense job until January 1993.

Chrétien’s task in governing with a deeply divided House of Commons was formidable. He would have to balance his government’s initiatives against the opposition of two parties that held radically different views of the destiny of Canada. Reform was impatient with the attention paid to Quebec, yet the Bloc’s role was to press forward Quebec’s interests. Chrétien’s standing as a spokesman for French Canada was weakened by the failure of his party to win any seats in French-speaking ridings.

Four provinces also held elections in 1993. In Prince Edward Island, a Liberal government under Premier Catherine Callbeck won all but one of the 32 seats in the legislature in an election on March 29. Premier Clyde Wells and a Liberal government were returned in Newfoundland on May 3. Nova Scotia swung to the Liberals on May 25, when a new administration under John Savage replaced the Progressive Conservatives, who had held power for 15 years. Thus, all four provinces in the Atlantic region were controlled by Liberal governments. The Conservatives held on to power in Alberta on June 15, when a new leader, Ralph Klein, was successful in bringing a new image to a party that had been in office for 22 years.

The Economy

The first six months of 1993 saw Canada slowly emerging from the recession that had begun in 1990. The annual growth rate in the economy, based on first-quarter performance, was estimated at 3.8%, a rate that was not sustained in later months. Gross domestic product (GDP), on a seasonally adjusted annual basis, was estimated at $709.2 billion in market prices at the end of June. GDP had climbed above the level it had attained on the eve of the recession. Exports to the United States were strong, helped by a reviving U.S. economy, a Canadian dollar that had fallen 12% against its American counterpart in the year and a half before May, and a more competitive Canadian export sector. Unemployment still remained distressingly high. In December 1,565,000 Canadians were out of work, a figure representing some 11.2% of the labour force. Inflation remained under control, the consumer price index standing at 1.9% in October. Under these conditions commercial lending rates dropped to their lowest level in almost 20 years.

Finance Minister Donald Mazankowski presented a pre-election stand-pat budget on April 26. There were no new taxes and only marginal decreases in spending. Total federal expenditures for 1993-94 would reach $159.5 billion. The deficit was estimated at $32.6 billion, about $3 billion less than that reached in the previous fiscal year. Slower revenues later forced the minister to revise his deficit figure upward. Mazankowski announced a shrinking of the public service, with 16,500 jobs to be eliminated over the next five years. Grants to organizations and interest groups would be cut, as would subsidies to the rail passenger network, VIA Rail, and to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Defense spending would be held to a growth of only 1.6% a year for the next five years.

Foreign Affairs

Peacekeeping constituted a major theme in Canada’s foreign policy in 1993. The amount of money Canada had spent on peacekeeping activities in the former Yugoslavia approached $1 billion in 1993, or almost 20 times the amount spent on humanitarian aid. The 1,200 troops the country had sent to Croatia in March 1992 were transferred to central Bosnia in February to escort relief supplies past Serbian lines to Muslim communities. In Somalia the 900 men of the Airborne Regiment helped in the distribution of emergency relief and attempted to restore law and order in the capital, Mogadishu. In February and March the deaths of four Somali civilians cast a shadow on Canada’s image as a leading peacekeeper. Four Canadian soldiers were later charged with torture and negligence and two with second-degree murder in connection with the deaths. Questions were also raised in late December when 11 Canadian "blue helmets" were captured and mock-executed by drunken Serbs in Bosnia. In June, 415 Canadian troops left Cyprus after 29 years of patrolling the buffer zone between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Former prime minister Joe Clark, retired from the federal Cabinet, was appointed a UN mediator to attempt to resolve the long-standing confrontation.

Canada approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on June 23, the first of the three countries (U.S., Mexico, and Canada) to ratify the arrangement. The implementing measure, passed after an all-night debate in the House of Commons, amended 22 Canadian statutes dealing with trade. Appropriately, the approval came during the final week of Mulroney’s tenure in office. Mulroney had been responsible for Canada’s joining the NAFTA negotiations in 1991. The Liberal Party threatened to look carefully at NAFTA’s terms after it came to power, and year-end negotiations with Mexico and the U.S. brought three small concessions to Chrétien and put the pact back on track.

Canada in 1993
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