picard102
Senior Member
I would like to think so, but my wife tells me otherwise. This will be my 8th PM.
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- Thread starter King of Kensington
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81-717
Active Member
You can still think so if you're not old enough to have ridden a G-car, as you said before.
gabe
Senior Member
I have to agree with you on this one. . I'm nearing 40, i also think he is the best PM in my lifetime . Funny seeing the Cons criticize Trudeau for bringing in foreign labour, when the Conservatives have been abuseding our immigration system to allow their lobbyists to exploit foreign workers for decades!
evandyk
Senior Member
Chrétien is obviously the best PM of the last few decades.
Richard White
Senior Member
I'd vote for him if he ran again
picard102
Senior Member
He governed well through a period of prosperity, but a lot of the problems we're having today can be traced back to his government.
So concerned with the deficit that they abdicated their responsibility on the housing and infrastructure files and it's never recovered.
evandyk
Senior Member
Unfortunately everybody abdicated responsibility on the housing file, so that can’t be the criterion.
picard102
Senior Member
It absolutely can, and is.
lenaitch
Senior Member
I challenge anybody to find reference to housing being a seen as a federal issue prior to about 12 or 15 years ago.
PL1
Senior Member
Well, CMHC used to fund building housing co-operatives. For example, the one I lived in from 1999-2010 was built in 1983 with CMHC funding/guarantee. I'm not sure when they stopped
lenaitch
Senior Member
True. I poorly worded my post. That federal agency has always back-stopped some development as well as mortgages under certain conditions, but at the political level, the 'housing crisis' was not seen as a platform issue. It was barely seen as a provincial issue; it was primarily a local and free market issue.
kEiThZ
Superstar
The early 90s saw the worst recession since the Great Depression, until that point. They faced a financial crisis threatening to force the country into an IMF bailout when Canadian bonds weren't rolling over. And then faced a unity crisis with a separatist vote. Unemployment was substantially higher than today for all of the 90s. Almost double at some points. You've forgotten all of that. And to some extent, that speaks to Chretien's competence, that he made it look easier than it actually was.
Though I do agree that a lot of the problems we have today arose from that era.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Mihairokov
Active Member
I'd have to agree, not necessarily because he was outstanding but because his competition is limited.
Mulroney -> No.
Martin -> No, very limited timeframe to do much of anything as PM. Combined with constant in-fighting with Chretien.
Harper -> No. Much of our recovery from the 2008 recession was from financial levers implemented through the 90s under Chretien and Martin, which Harper tried to remove the guardrails for entirely.
Trudeau -> Probably the closest competition, particularly guiding the country through COVID.
I'd actually argue that Chretien's work during the 1980 referendum was more impactful than his work as PM, but that's a big sidebar. There's a great miniseries of NFB movies called The Champions which chronicles Pierre Trudeau v Rene Levesque over nearly two decades - Chretien plays a pretty large role in the background throughout, particularly in his lobbying for the No side.
Richard White
Senior Member
Despite all his issues and double speak, he did do many good things for Canada. In 1995, he somehow managed to keep Canada together while still keeping us out of Iraq in 2003.
Say what you will but Canada would be far different without him than it is with him.
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