Jean Chretien
Jean Chretien kept Quebec in Canada by fifty-four thousand votes and kept Canada out of Iraq. He was the eighteenth of nineteen children from a paper-mill town in Quebec, deaf in one ear and with a partly paralysed face from a childhood illness, and he made the plain-spoken little guy from Shawinigan into a political identity. He had been in cabinet under Pearson and Trudeau and was justice minister during the patriation of the constitution, which Quebec never signed. He won in 1993 against a governing party that fell from a majority to two seats. His first term was fiscal. His finance minister cut federal transfers and program spending hard enough to turn a forty-two billion dollar deficit into a surplus by 1998, and Canada then ran surpluses for the rest of his time. The referendum of October 1995 was the closest the country has come to breaking. Quebec voted to stay by fifty point six per cent against forty-nine point four. Chretien had been told he was comfortably ahead until the last fortnight. Afterwards he referred the question of unilateral secession to the Supreme Court and legislated the Clarity Act, which requires a clear question and a clear majority before Ottawa will negotiate. He signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 and ratified it in 2002 over the objections of Alberta and much of his own cabinet. In March 2003 he stood in the Commons and said Canada would not join the invasion of Iraq without a Security Council resolution, which cost him nothing at home and a good deal in Washington. He retired that December after three consecutive majorities.
- Lived: 1934 CE – ?
- Nationality: Canadian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
