The constitutional defeat terminated Brian Mulroney’s usefulness. After a farewell tour of world capitals reminiscent of Trudeau’s in 1984, he quit on February 24,1993. Only two junior ministers, Vancouver’s Kim Campbell and Sherbrooke’s Jean Charest, sought the succession. Though some delegates had second thoughts, prior deals guaranteed Campbell’s victory when the Progressive Conservatives met in Ottawa on June 11. A former minister of justice and of national defence, Campbell became Canada’s first woman prime minister on June 25,1993. Clever and well educated, with a sense of humour, she attracted support and then repelled it with her brittle temper and evident inexperience. Like John Turner in 1984, she inherited a demoralized party and a political staff that aggravated her gaffes. There would be no Campbell miracle. When the votes were counted in the federal election of October 25, she and all but two Tory candidates (Charest was one of the exceptions) had lost their seats. Never had a national party been so humiliated. The ndp almost shared the same fate. Robbed of official party status after winning only 9 seats, the party fell below its worst standing in its CCF phase. Seventy per cent of the seats in the House of Commons changed hands.
The winner was Trudeau’s protege, Jean Chretien. He had sat out most of the Mul-roney years, taken the Liberal leadership at Calgary in 1990, and built a victory from the Tory ruins. The Liberals held 177 seats, 99 of them from Ontario, a mere 19 from Quebec. There had been no such Parliament before, not even in 1921. The real upset came from the West and East. From British Columbia to Manitoba, Preston Manning had inherited most of the old Conservative strength for his untried Reform Party—52 MPs, only one from Ontario, and not even a candidate in Quebec. Quebecers had given Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Quebecois all but 21 of their 75 seats. Canada now had a Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition who insisted that Parliament would be no more than a new forum to struggle for Quebec sovereignty.
World History
