Will the real Joe Clark please stand up?

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONT.—It was clear from the moment they handed out the “Budget in Brief” in the media lock-up for the Progressive Conservatives’ 1979 budget that Joe Clark’s minority government was done for. “Part of the reason for our disappointing economic performance during the past decade has been the failure of governments, particularly the federal government, to face up to economic reality and to make the most of the country's opportunities,” finance minister John Crosbie said in his Dec. 11, 1979 budget speech. “This I and my colleagues are determined to do even if it means risking some unpopularity, hopefully short-term,” Crosbie continued. That may have sounded somewhat reasonable, but it was obvious Canadians weren’t about to swallow an 18-cent-a-gallon tax hike at the gas pump. As is pointed out in 1979, the innovative, three-actor play by Michael Healey running at the Shaw Festival here, Clark never understood this. Of course, the kicker was that Pierre Trudeau had resigned, leaving the Liberals facing the possibility of precipitating an election without a leader. Only those who were listening closely to the Liberals in Ottawa realized it could happen anyway. Clark is depicted in Healey’s play as among the last of Canada’s principled politicians, an honourable fellow clinging to the idea that his minority government should be afforded the right to govern for a reasonable amount of time. In reality, Clark, though a decent-enough person, was an obdurate, haughty politician who lacked the suppleness of thought needed by the leader of a minority government. Still, the single-minded manner in which Clark blundered into the Commons confidence vote that famously ousted his government after only nine months can be partly excused by the fact that it happened before politics in Western democracies became so polarized. At the time Clark landed in the prime minister’s office in June 1979, Margaret Thatcher had just taken power in Britain, ending decades of “consensus” thinking there. Before long, she was spearheading the free-market revolution that, with the help of Ronald Reagan, is still shaping socio-economic thinking in the West nearly four decades later. The mission of balancing the budget has occupied an outsize role in Canada’s public affairs. Via the huge proposed gas tax increase, it sunk the Progressive Conservatives in 1979. But five years later, the “tax-and-spend” label attached to the Liberals helped Brian Mulroney win a landslide. Mulroney always talked about cutting the deficit but, lacking a helpful economic upsurge, ended up $40-billion-a-year in the hole. The Liberals’ Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were arguably the only real beneficiaries of the fixation with Ottawa’s finances popularized (ironically) by conservative thinkers like Preston Manning. Aided by revenues from Mulroney’s GST and an expanding economy, Chrétien and Martin were able to balance Ottawa’s flabby books within four years of taking power. That the damage to education, infrastructure, and health care is still being felt from the finance minister’s ham-fisted 1995 budget is another matter, but slaying the deficit put Martin on the road to becoming prime minister. More recently, Stephen Harper, though a deficit hawk, ran big budget shortfalls for most of his tenure. And by 2015, with voters fed up with Conservative talk of austerity after six years of continued weak economic recovery, Harper’s fiscal probity gave his rivals a huge opening. Playing it conservatively, as it were, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair squandered his substantial advantage heading into the election by insisting that if elected the NDP would stick to the balance-the-books mantra. Meanwhile, the Liberals under the untested Justin Trudeau took advantage of Canadians’ desire for a proactive government unafraid to challenge the gods of fiscal righteousness if it meant helping average voters. So we have another Trudeau in the PMO. One way or another, Healey’s play traces a lot of this history. If there’s a central message, it can be argued that it’s not that Clark was a principled figure whose decency has been trampled and left behind in a more cynical political age. It’s that balance, as defined in economically realistic strategies that don’t neglect the needs of average people, is the most likely key to success, at least in the Canadian context. Les Whittington is an Ottawa journalist and a regular contributor to The Hill Times. The Hill Times