Chrtien’s departure comes not a day too soon The long, long goodbye

Gentlemen, those are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others. — Barney Barnato, famed magnate of the South African rand, to a meeting of shareholders.

Even if they were assorted and adjustable, at least Barnato had some principles. Not so our Liberal Party, which has for eight decades pursued political power just for the unalloyed fun of wielding it.

And what sterling characters they have thrown up in the process: William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrtien. It would not be easy to name three other leaders in any democracy who had so thoroughly compounded malignancy with political success — even, in King’s case, making the two into a seamless whole.

Well, two of them are dead, and the third has announced he will resign as Prime Minister on Dec. 12. He makes way for Paul Martin, who last week was crowned (and when it comes to the Liberals, there’s no other word) as party leader.

What, then, of the Chrtien legacy? You in the back, there — stop giggling. We don’t mean the fortune he will leave to his offspring when he shuffles off this mortal fairway into the Grand-Mre of all luxury resorts. We’re talking about what he left to the country through all his years of Public Service.

Well, anyone listening to morning talk radio while they waited to cross the Lion’s Gate Bridge or inched into Hogtown on the Gardiner will have heard the “streeter” interviews. Most people collared on the street by smiling radio journalists asking them to name Chrtien’s great achievements were stumped. So, frankly, were we.

Nobody is sure just whom to credit with the recovery of Canadian public finances since the beginning of the 1990s, but nobody names Chrtien. Some credit Martin, either because of a residual credulity about what finance ministers can do, or because they think he so beggared the Canadian dollar that deficits shrank to nothing.

Nor can Chrtien take credit for the recovery of the economy, which had a lot of things go right for it in the past ten years. One of those things was the liberalization of trade, which has helped us as a nation dependent on access to foreign markets. Chrtien opposed free trade. Another was demographics, which we cannot suppose Chrtien managed, at least not single-handed.

It would be hard to list the decline of Quebecois nationalism to Chrtien either, considering the job Jacques Parizeau and Bernard Landry did on it. Even the supposed triumph of the Clarity Act was a debacle. We started with a country whose constitution did not extend the right of secession to any province; we finished with a legal framework to dismantle the country. Yes, it’s hard to do; but hard is a step down from illegal we need never have made.

Abroad, we are diminished. Chrtien once gave a touching speech about how “I learned my politics from Mike Pearson” — but as Prime Minister, he turned a muscular (if often wrongheaded) Pearsonian internationalism into a foreign policy full of carping anti-Americanism and soft on third-world tyrants. Even the vilified Brian Mulroney made his contributions to bringing South Africa from a pariah state back into polite international society; all Chrtien has done is make us the darling of European poseurs and self-hating American liberals. (And no, their affection is not very durable.)

His party remained loyal, at least in the grand old Liberal fashion: it lined up behind Paul Martin to force him out, but maintained him in the Premiership. He was a leader that had to go, but it was fine if he stayed on to run the country. The lesson: when Liberals face a choice between Party and Canada, the party wins.

Yet there is a neat little twist to the plot that even Aeschylus would applaud: Conrad Black, the newspaper baron whose elevation to Britain’s House of Lords Chrtien managed to block, resigned as chief executive officer of Hollinger International the day before Chrtien announced his own resignation. Put the two to the test: Black did the honourable thing after improprieties in billing emerged at his company, but Chrtien remained in office long after conflicts of interest emerged in the Shawinigan hotel scandal.

Personally vindictive, dictatorial, as contemptuous of Parliament and people as he was of law and custom — traits he shared with predecessors like King and Trudeau — the Little Guy leaves us nothing much. But at least he is leaving us.