1958-63 - Lawyer, Chretien, Landry, Deschenes, Trudel, and Normand
1962-63 - Director of the Bar of Trois-Rivieres
1986-90 - Counsel, Lang, Mitchener, Lawrence and Shaw
1986-90 - Senior Advisor, Gordon Capital Corporation
Author
Marital status:
Married, 1957, Aline Chaine (b.1936)
One daughter, two sons
Jean Chretien was born in La Baie Shawinigan, Quebec. He was the 18th of 19 children, nine of whom survived. He was a Rouge like Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and like his father and grandfather before him. As a child he handed out Liberal Party leaflets to people of the town. Later on in 1963, as a young lawyer, he handed out his own election literature in the same town. He won the St.Maurice riding and went to Ottawa for the Liberals.
Chretien got his first cabinet post in 1967 when he was made Minister of State attached to the Minister of Finance. Over the subsequent 17 years, he held nine senior cabinet positions in the Governments of Lester Pearson (1963-68) and Pierre Trudeau (1968-84). One of his more prominent positions was as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and Minister responsible for constitutional negotiations (1980-1982). During this period Chretien entrenched the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the Constitution Act (1982), repatriated the Constitution, and appointed the first woman justice, Bertha Wilson, to the Supreme Court.
When Trudeau retired from politics in 1984, Chretien ran for the Party Leadership and lost to John Turner. He left politics, returned to law and wrote a best selling autobiography, Straight from the Heart (1985). When John Turner resigned as Party Leader in 1990, Chretien again ran for the leadership. This time he won. He sought a seat in the House through a by-election in Beausejour, New Brunswick. He was victorious and went to the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition. Jean Chretien became Prime Minister in October 1993. It had been thirty years since he was first elected to the House of Commons.
In October 1993, Jean Chretien faced a House of Commons drastically different from that of recent years. The Progressive Conservatives and New Democratic Party had been decimated in the 1993 election, and although these "traditional parties" were still represented in the House, the Official Opposition was formed by the Bloc Quebecois, a group of MPs from Quebec committed to taking Quebec out of Confederation. As well there was a considerable block of MP's from the Reform Party, whose support base rested in the provinces of western Canada.
Unlike Brian Mulroney, who believed government should stay out of the economy, Jean Chretien was elected on the mandate of creating jobs, which would increase the tax base and therefore reduce the deficit. By 1996, the Chretien Government had put money into cost-shared infrastructure programs, and taken trade delegations, called "Team Canada", to Asia and India so that Canadian companies could better market their products internationally.
During the 1993 campaign, the Liberal Party also promised that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) would be replaced. When by 1996 it was reported that this would not happen, Sheila Copps, the Deputy Prime Minister, felt duty bound to resign her seat, as she promised she would if the GST were not replaced. She was re-elected in a by-election. Negotiations have proceeded with the provinces to harmonize the GST with their own provincial sales taxes.
The Chretien Government also attempted to reduce the deficit by reducing government spending. In 1994, the Government produced a White Paper on Defence, which suggested further cuts to the National Defence budget. The Chretien Government has also made cuts to the public service and has changed the unemployment insurance program.
Prompted, in part, by the Montreal Massacre (1989) in which 14 university students were killed, the Government had also enacted more stringent gun control legislation(1996).
Reading: M. Lawrence (1995) Chretien; J. Chretien (1984) Straight from the Heart.
