“She didn’t sleep for three days before,” Chrétien tells me a few days after his wife’s September 14 public debut. For Chrétien, of course, after forty-one years in national politics, the last ten on centre stage, being under public scrutiny is old hat. But, for his wife, who has always shunned the limelight, it was nerve-wracking. As she anxiously waited her turn backstage, a fellow performer began commiserating with her.
“He was very nervous,” Chrétien explained. “My wife was nervous too, obviously, and he was offering cognac to my wife. He was drinking cognac so he was a bit high, and he didn’t know she was my wife. So, after it was all over, he was talking with great familiarity with Aline, and his wife arrives and says, ‘Do you know who this is?’” Informed that he’d been chattering casually to the wife of the prime minister, the man turned and blurted, “Oh, Aline, I’m a separatist, but I love you anyway.”
“You see the mood,” Chrétien says insistently, leaning toward me for emphasis. “It’s why the level of support at this moment in Quebec is very satisfying for me because there was a time when I was almost below zero in popularity because I was too much of a Canadian at that time. And now, it’s extremely pleasant. People are extremely nice.”
An aide tells me later that one of the numbers Madame Chrétien played that night was “Vive la Canadienne,” a traditional Quebec folk song (from an era when it was not impolitic for a proud Quebecer to also be a proud Canadian)—a fitting choice for the life-mate of a man whose trademark rallying cry is “Vive le Canada!” The crowd of 1,200 seniors clapped, sang along, and spontaneously rose to their feet in applause as she wrapped up her performance.
It’s debatable whether Chrétien himself could garner an equally heart-felt ovation from Canada’s governing-party faithful as he wraps up his thirteen-year stint at the Liberal helm. Even though his archrival Paul Martin’s ascension to the throne is now assured, Martin’s backbench supporters, impatient for their turn at the cabinet table, continue to boo and catcall, still trying to rush Chrétien off the stage well before his planned February, 2004, departure.
It’s not the triumphant exit Chrétien undoubtedly feels he deserves. But it’s evident during the course of our chat that he is drawing consolation from having finally achieved something infinitely more important to him: respect in his own province.
A central figure in all the national unity crises of the past four decades, Chrétien has often joked that there is no room left on his body for more battle scars. But, as the sixty-nine-year-old lounges on the couch in the stately living room of the prime minister’s official residence, casually dressed in navy slacks and an open-necked, blue-striped shirt, it strikes me that he has weathered decades of political combat better than most.
The lines etching his familiar, lobsided features are deeper, his eyes puffier, but somehow his rumpled face—once famously described by Dalton Camp as the visage of “the driver of the getaway car”—suits the little-guy-from-Shawinigan persona he has assiduously nurtured even while hob-nobbing with the world’s cognoscenti. The smiling faces of world leaders are scattered around the room, nestled amid an array of Inuit sculptures (not including the most famous—a soap-stone loon Chrétien once wielded as a club when an intruder broke into 24 Sussex—which now graces the dining-room table).
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