TABLE OF CONTENTS THE CHRETIEN LEGACY Introduction .................................................. i The Chr6tien Legacy R eg W hitaker ........................................... 1 Jean Chr6tien's Quebec Legacy: Coasting Then Stickhandling Hard Robert Y oung .......................................... 31 The Urban Legacy of Jean Chr6tien Caroline Andrew ....................................... 53 Chr6tien and North America: Between Integration and Autonomy Christina Gabriel and Laura Macdonald ..................... 71 Jean Chr6tien's Continental Legacy: From Commitment to Confusion Stephen Clarkson and Erick Lachapelle ..................... 93 A Passive Internationalist: Jean Chr6tien and Canadian Foreign Policy Tom K eating ......................................... 115 Prime Minister Jean Chr6tien's Immigration Legacy: Continuity and Transformation Yasmeen Abu-Laban ................................... 133 Renewing the Relationship With Aboriginal Peoples? M ichael M urphy ....................................... 151 The Chr~tien Legacy and Women: Changing Policy Priorities With Little Cause for Celebration Alexandra Dobrowolsky ................................ 171 Le Petit Vision, Les Grands Decisions: Chr~tien's Paradoxical Record in Social Policy M ichael J. Prince ...................................... 199 The Chr~tien Non-Legacy: The Federal Role in Health Care Ten Years On ... 1993-2003 Gerard W . Boychuk .................................... 221 The Chr~tien Ethics Legacy Ian G reene ........................................... 241 The Devil's in the Detail: The Chr~tien Legacy for the Third Sector K athy Brock .......................................... 263 Could the Rebels Find a Cause? House of Commons Reform in the Chr~tien Era D avid Docherty ....................................... 283 Jean Chr~tien and a Decade of Party System Change Steve Patten .......................................... 303 INTRODUCTION: THE CHRETIEN LEGACY As guest editors for this special issue on the Chr~tien Legacy we have greatly appreciated the opportunity to reflect on the last decade of Canadian politics and to solicit and collect articles that canvas a wide terrain of public policy. We were delighted by the response to our invitation to contribute and with the superlative quality of the submissions we received. And while this collection is not comprehensive, we are confident that readers will be impressed with the breadth of the coverage. We wish to thank all of the contributors, the anonymous reviewers and the board, the staff and volunteers at the Centre for Constitutional Studies, particularly Tsvi Kahana and Matthew Woodley, for their efforts in compiling this volume. The articles in this issue of the Review make it clear that assessing Jean Chr~tien's prime ministerial legacy is a complex task, and increasingly so as time passes. The sponsorship scandal and the subsequent cloud of uncertainty surrounding the Liberal Party's electoral prospects will require further assessment as their consequences are played out, but the authors in this volume did not have the benefit of this knowledge in formulating their contributions. What they do bring to their analyses are considerable experience and expertise as policy observers and critical thinkers. We are confident that readers will find the reflections in these pages to be provocative, insightful and informative. Among the challenges in assessing the Chr6tien legacy is determining which of the Liberal government's post-1993 initiatives reflect responses to broad domestic and international political forces, which initiatives might be ascribed to the specific impetus ofChr~tien's leadership, and how the general and specific might come together in any particular policy field. Reg Whitaker, in his overview of the Chrrtien decade, reminds us of the constitutional fatigue that gripped the nation in the period immediately preceding the Liberal's 1993 election victory. In response to this fatigue, Chr&ien felt it would be imprudent to pursue "mega constitutional" politics. The result, Robert Young asserts, was a nearly disastrous unwillingness to contemplate the possibility of a "yes" victory in the 1995 Quebec referendum. So while the terrain of domestic politics may have lead any prime minister to avoid grandiose constitutional gestures, Chr~ien's reading of the Qu6bec situation, his federalist proclivities and his experience during the 1980 referendum, lead to a peculiarly Chr6tien-esque (lack of) response. Another example of the conflation of the general and the specific can be found in the context of the Canada-U.S. relationship. Stephen Clarkson 2004 Revue d'9tudes constitutionnelles Introduction and Eric Lachapelle argue that assessing the Chr~tien legacy necessarily requires attention to the objectives and actions of the U.S. administration. But as Macdonald and Gabriel demonstrate, even in the face of the overwhelming force of our hyper-power neighbor, and even in the security-conscious, post-September 11 world, it was still possible for Chr~tien to approach continental integration with "calculated and pragmatic ambivalence." Many of the contributors to this volume remark on the paradoxes of Chr~tien's governing style. Yasmeen Abu-Laban describes the last ten years of immigration policy in terms of continuity and transformation, integration and exclusion. On ethics, Ian Greene observes the juxtaposition of the 1993 Red Book promise to govern with integrity with an old-style politician who believed in using influence as part of the game of politics. Tom Keating draws our attention to Chr~tien's rhetorical support for the United Nations, but Canada's declining military commitments to U.N. actions, as well as rhetorical support for human rights, but a willingness to pursue trade agreements with China and Indonesia. Paradox and contradiction are, of course, the lifeblood of political analysis. Chr~tien's particularly ardent attachment to pragmatic governance provided fertile soil for such antinomies. "Incrementalist," "pragmatist," "agent of history," "as visionary as possible under the circumstances" - all of these assessments of Jean Chr6tien's prime ministerial legacy can be found on the following pages. Perhaps this range of views reflects the precipitateness of the task, or perhaps the range ofjudgments is a testament to the nature of the legacy itself. In any event, we hope that the collection will provide fodder for your own determinations. Vol. 9, No. 1 & 2 Review of ConstitutionalStudies JEAN CHRE'TIEN AND A DECADE OF PARTY SYSTEM CHANGE Steve Patten* I. INTRODUCTION When Jean Chrrtien assumed the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in June, 1990, the Canadian party system was entering a period of turmoil. The pan-Canadian, two-party plus system of partisan competition that had matured under Pearson, Trudeau and Mulroney was in tatters as constitutional politics, regionalism, ideological debates and public cynicism undermined the Mulroney coalition of the 1980s. The Reform Party, which was less than a year away from making its decision to "go national," was represented in Parliament by its first elected MP, Deborah Grey. Popular federal Cabinet minister, Lucien Bouchard, was about to break from the government to establish himself as leader of the newly formed Bloc Qu~bcois. And the popularity of the Mulroney Conservatives was on a downward trajectory that would eventually devastate the "Party of Confederation." Indeed, the 1993 election that brought Jean Chr~tien to power and saw the Progressive Conservatives reduced to just two seats in the House of Commons, also established the fledgling Bloc qu~b~cois and Reform Party as Canada's principal opposition parties. It's small wonder, then, that this tumultuous election has been characterized as a classical example of a "critical election" - that is, an election in which both popular support for parties and the terms of political debate are dramatically altered.' The Chr~tien Liberals replaced the governing Conservatives at a fundamental turning point in Canadian party politics. The three-decade-old "system" of partisan politics to which Canadians had grown accustomed was unraveling. Not surprisingly, then, the ensuing years were to be a period of uncertainty, experimentation, and change. The Chr~tien Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta. A. Brian Tanguay, "Canada's Party System in the 1990s," in James Bickerton & Alain-G. Gagnon, eds., CanadianPolitics, 3d ed. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999) 325. On "critical elections" see Walter Dean Bernham, CriticalElections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970); Walter Dean Bernham, "Great Britain: The Death of the Collectivist Consensus?" in Louis Maisel & Joseph Cooper, eds., Political Parties:Development and Decay (London: Sage Publications, 1978) 267. 2004 Revue d'etudes constitutionnelles 304 Jean Chrrtien and Party System Chan~e era party system was a system in transition.2 Thus, the character and practice of partisan politics during the Chrrtien years will, one day, seem out of step with the party system as it existed before and after Jean Chrrtien's tenure as Prime Minister. Of course, the task of examining Chr~ien's role in a decade of party system change requires some clarity regarding what is meant by the term "party system." At bottom, electoral competition between party organizations produces competitive patterns and interrelationships that constitute the core of what is meant by the party system.