Adrift on a sea of discord / Friday, August 16, 2002

Over at Foreign Affairs, the bureaucrats are complaining that nothing is getting done. Or

rather, that even less is getting done than usual. "The long-promised foreign policy review has bogged down," the Ottawa Citizen reports, quoting an unnamed department official, "because the Prime Minister's Office is unable to focus on issues other than the leadership challenge." In the official's own words, "there seems to be a certain constipation at the centre." Get used to it. The blockage in the capital's colon is not limited to Foreign Affairs. Every department, every policy is now in the grips of the same gastrointestinal seizure; whatever does emerge, you may be sure, has been thoroughly strained for whatever impact it might have on the Prime Minister's political prospects. Again, I mean more so than usual. And the worst of it is, this is not likely to change any time soon. The catastrophe that has befallen the Liberal party has also left the nation's government adrift: not just for the next few months, but the next few years.

Mr. Chretien is not going anywhere, for starters. The "news" that his adviser and confidant, Mitchell Sharp, believes he will probably step down before the next election, and that therefore the coming leadership review need not be taken as anything more than an opportunity to say thanks for a job well done, is precisely the line the Chretien team has been putting about for weeks. It is, indeed, the same line used to preserve him in power in 1998, and in 2000. Don't think they won't try it again.

I sometimes think these stories about how hopeless the Prime Minister's situation is have been planted by Mr. Chretien's people themselves. It is, after all, quite a feat to make the same trick work three times. Picture Mr. Chretien as Lucy, and party members, many of them Martin supporters, as Charlie Brown. How do you fool them into running at the football yet again? By putting it about that Mr. Chretien hasn't got a chance. The old man knows he's licked, so the story goes. Only don't make him say it out loud. Just let him get past this review and he'll go. There's no need to humiliate him.

So I think this is going all the way to the convention. There will be no "bargain", because there is no bargain that could be struck. Either Mr. Chretien goes, or Mr. Martin does. (Or both, as I suspect may prove to be the case.) That's the next six months done for. Then what?

Suppose Mr. Chretien loses the vote. Presumably he would then step down as leader, though there's no actual requirement for that in the Liberal constitution, at least until the ensuing leadership convention. And whether or not he tried to carry on as party leader in the face of this rebuke, there is nothing legally requiring him to resign as Prime Minister, merely because the members of some private club to which he belonged voted to blackball him.

But suppose, for the moment, he did step down. The popular assumption is that Mr.

Martin would simply assume his place, both as leader and Prime Minister. That is not true, certainly in the first case and probably in the second. This is, remember, a leadership review, not a leadership convention. If Mr. Chretien were to resign, the party constitution calls for the National Executive to appoint an interim leader while the leadership campaign is under way, a period that could last as long as a year. As Mr. Martin would be a candidate in that race, he is hardly likely to be chosen as interim leader.

But then who's left to run the country? Does the interim leader become the caretaker prime minister, while his divided party tries to agree on a leader? There's more months of drift. Or, as some have mooted, does Mr. Martin try to take power, by informing the Governor General that he commands the confidence of the House? Legally, he could do so -- again, there's no requirement that the Prime Minister also be party leader -- but would his own party stand for it? Not only would it give him an unfair advantage over his opponents in the leadership race, but it would put party members in the position, for the second time in the space of a year, of having to vote for or against a sitting prime minister. Moreover, unless he defeats Mr. Chretien very handily, he may be too damaged by the previous struggle.

It gets even more complicated if Mr. Chretien tries to stay on, perhaps by calling a snap election. The Governor General would be forced to choose between her Prime Minister's advice to dissolve Parliament and her own judgment that someone else could assemble a majority in the Commons. But leave that aside. Suppose Mr. Martin does, by one means or another, become Prime Minister. He immediately becomes a lame duck. At the age of 65, it would be obvious that he would not be more than a one-term leader. So the jockeying to replace him would begin at once.

It is, in short, unlikely that we will have any sort of stable, functioning government in Ottawa until at least the next election, and possibly beyond. Far from assuring "an orderly succession," as Mr. Martin's supporters claim, the challenge to Mr. Chretien's leadership seems almost certain to produce the opposite.