One afternoon in February, 1992, then Opposition Leader Jean Chr\u00e9tien was having a coffee at the Four Seasons Hotel bar in Washington, DC, accompanied by his communications director, Peter Donolo, and a journalist\u2014 me. He had just finished a \u201ccordial and productive\u201d meeting in the Oval Office of the White House with President George Bush (the first). Now, he was reflecting on Canada-US relations\u2014 and how his approach differed from that of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Unlike Mulroney, Chr\u00e9tien had no desire to be \u201cpals\u201d with the American president. In fact, he thought such a relationship was counterproductive. As he warmed to this theme, he pointed to Donolo. Peter, he said, is someone he liked and worked closely with. But, he continued with forceful emphasis, Donolo \u201cis not my friend\u201d\u2014 and neither, for that matter, were most other people with whom he worked\u2014 because \u201cin politics, there is no room for friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his new memoir, My Years as Prime Minister<\/em>, Chr\u00e9tien makes clear his feelings on the subject haven’t changed. \u201cAs I had seen with [Lester] Pearson and [Pierre] Trudeau, and as I was to discover through my own share of disillusionment,\u201d he writes, \u201ca prime minister has little room for friendship.\u201d That’s vintage Chr\u00e9tien\u2014 a man who built his career around the populist clich\u00e9 of being a selfdescribed \u201clittle guy from Shawinigan\u201d\u2014 but who proved to be a far more hard-edged and complex figure than that.<\/p>\n Given that, no one should have expected Chr\u00e9tien to unburden his feelings in his memoirs. And he doesn’t\u2014 at least not, by way of inevitable comparison, to the same degree as did Brian Mulroney in his recent book, the 1100-pages-and-counting Memoirs: 1939-1993<\/em>. Mulroney is the classic Irishman who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and his big ambitions for himself and his country plain for all to see, while Chr\u00e9tien keeps his emotions buttoned-down, prefers problem-solving to grand visions, and delights in being under-estimated, as he was for much of his career.<\/p>\n But Chr\u00e9tien delivers readers more insights into his thinking than might have been expected (and much more, according to insiders, than he did in earlier drafts.) One is his assertion that if Mulroney hadn’t reopened the constitutional debate with the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, he might have won election a third time\u2014 over the Chr\u00e9tien-led Liberals. That’s a remarkable admission from a politician who has never liked to acknowledge the possibility of defeat. And one of the more revealing memories in the book is his description of the time when he met with his caucus on the eve of the 1995 Quebec referendum, when the \u201cYes\u201d side seemed poised to win. He recalls that he \u201cchoked up\u201d when he \u201creflected on the indecency of being called a traitor to my people, especially by someone like [Lucien] Bouchard, who had changed parties four or five times in his life.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of people whose behavior he considers traitorous, there’s Paul Martin. Like Mulroney, Chr\u00e9tien has forgiven and forgotten none of the offences perpetuated by his nemesis, and recounts them in precise and outraged detail. Another similarity is that both men recount how they rejected advice from their advisers to fire the person in question\u2014 Martin in Chr\u00e9tien’s case, and Bouchard (from cabinet) in Mulroney’s, and ultimately regretted their decisions.<\/p>\n Chr\u00e9tien credits Martin properly for taming Canada’s annual deficits as finance minister. He underplays his own commendable willingness to back his minister in tough times\u2014 a lesson Chr\u00e9tien learned the hard way years earlier, when he held the portfolio himself and Trudeau didn’t always keep him in the policy loop. So Chr\u00e9tien’s anger at the impatience and scheming of Martin’s people to replace him is understandable. But a friend or editor should have talked Chr\u00e9tien out of softening and rewriting a controversial sentence in which he asserts that because of Martin’s dithering \u201cabout whether Canada should extend our term with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, our soldiers were moved out of Kabul and sent south again to battle the Taliban in the killing fields around Kandahar.\u201d That version of events has been refuted by others close to the situation. More to the point, I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that Chr\u00e9tien didn’t really mean to imply that Martin has blood on his hands as a result. And, in fact, that was likely not<\/em> Chr\u00e9tien’s intent: for better and sometimes worse, he has always been blunt\u2014 and if he meant to level an accusation that serious, would he have fudged his language at all?<\/p>\n Much has been made of the fact that Mulroney did his own writing, while Chr\u00e9tien worked with Ron Graham (who co-wrote the 1985 book Straight From the Heart<\/em>). Both men made good decisions. Mulroney’s memoirs fully reflect his voice, while Chr\u00e9tien\u2014 whose dodgy relationship with verbs and nouns has kept journalists busy cleaning up his remarks for years\u2014 benefits from Graham’s clear prose. What matters most is that the sentiments and philosophies in this book are unmistakably those of Chr\u00e9tien.<\/p>\n One of the most impressive qualities made clear in this book is Chr\u00e9tien’s formidable understanding of how government functions. By the time he became prime minister, he had held so many portfolios and served under, alongside or across from so many politicians of so many different stripes, styles and beliefs that he had distilled his approach to a minimalist essence: hence, his preference for briefing notes in bullet form of no more than a page, and for a paper-free desk at the end of every day. To keep staff on their toes, he writes, he would occasionally seize on \u201can obscure fact or incidental statistic buried in one of the annexes. \u201c\u201d\u02dcTest me’, I often said, \u201d\u02dcjust for the sport of it.’\u201d<\/p>\n Chr\u00e9tien is too dismissive of some controversies that surfaced during his tenure\u2014 although he offers an admission that he didn’t do himself any favours with his pre-1993 election promise to \u201cscrap\u201d the Goods and Services Tax. He is unrepentant about the creation of the federal unity program in Quebec that led to the abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars and also to Martin’s creation of the Gomery Inquiry. Chr\u00e9tien contends that the program was \u201cwell executed on the whole by honest, professional public servants.\u201d He suggests that if Martin had let the police investigations run their course and had not created the inquiry, the affair would have blown over by now. We’ll never know\u2014 but instead of finding something else for which to blame Martin, a more productive approach might have been to reassess the way his government mishandled the unity file between 1993 and 1995 to the extent that the referendum outcome was that close.<\/p>\n Overall, there are many positive reminders of why Chr\u00e9tien flourished for so long in public life. One or two of those are unintentionally amusing. Like many politicians, he purports to have paid little attention to the media\u2014 even as the evidence shows otherwise. When I met him shortly after the 1996 release of Double Vision<\/em>, his first gruff comment was that he hadn’t read the book (though he let us interview him for it). He went on to specifically take exception with several sections of the book\u2014 thereby, of course, demonstrating his keen awareness of its contents.<\/p>\n That said, he didn’t take criticism personally, and made a point of keeping his relationship with journalists civil. On the second Team Canada trip to Asia in the mid-1990s, I was crossing the hotel lobby in Islamabad, Pakistan late one afternoon, when I heard someone call my name. The PM, having coffee alone, motioned for me to join him, and we spent the next half hour talking about hockey, his frustrations with his golf game, and the highlights of the cities we were visiting. A few years later, after I left the press gallery to move to Toronto, I saw him at an event one night. The next day, my cell phone buzzed, and a voice said it was the Prime Minister’s Office. Seconds later, that familiar voice came on the line, \u201cWe didn’t have a chance to talk last night,\u201d he said, then added, jokingly, \u201cYou must be missing me.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings us back to Donolo, who vividly recalls that incident in Washington\u2014 and a night almost a decade later when he was leaving his job after one of the most successful tenures of any prime ministerial communications director. The Chr\u00e9tiens hosted a dinner for him at 24 Sussex, and when it came time to pay tribute, Chr\u00e9tien arose, looked at Donolo, and said that while he was sad to be losing him from his office, there was also a good side to that: \u201cNow I can call you my friend.\u201d That’s not in the book\u2014 but it makes for a telling reminder of how leaders must distinguish between personal and professional considerations, and how they govern their thinking accordingly. Regardless of where you sit politically, Canadians owe Mulroney and Chr\u00e9tien a debt for two books that describe in an upclose and personal manner what it takes to get to the top\u2014 and how hard it is to stay there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One afternoon in February, 1992, then Opposition Leader Jean Chr\u00e9tien was having a coffee at the Four Seasons Hotel bar in Washington, DC, accompanied by his communications director, Peter Donolo, and a journalist\u2014 me. He had just finished a \u201ccordial and productive\u201d meeting in the Oval Office of the White House with President George Bush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-08-30T02:47:50Z","apple_news_api_id":"fda3a0ca-e8e8-43d1-b689-f5035f63b26c","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-08-30T02:47:50Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A_aOgyujoQ9G2ifUDX2OybA","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9346],"tags":[],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-262465","issues","type-issues","status-publish","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n