My Years as Prime Minister by Jean Chretien

Author:Jean Chretien [Chrétien, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36872-0
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2007-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

In the aftermath of the 1997 election, with the economy booming, the deficit shrinking, and employment on the rise, the opposition parties found themselves with no important issues with which to undermine the Liberals’ steady popularity, so they had to settle for a small scandal. Boy, was it ever small. In fact, it would have been completely trivial, hardly worth recounting, if it hadn’t hijacked Question Period for months, wasted time and energy that could have been put to better use debating and tackling much more substantive problems in Parliament, and threatened to reverse all the successful efforts we had made to restore the confidence of Canadians in the integrity of their democratic institutions.

In 1988, when I was out of politics, presumably forever, I had heard that the Grand-Mère Golf Club was for sale and I managed to persuade two well-to-do friends, Louis Michaud and Jacques Marcotte, to join me in buying it, more for my love of the game than for any profit. It was a beautiful course, built in 1910 for the anglophone owners and managers of the local mills and frequently described as the most Scottish of all the golf courses in Quebec. It amused me to think of it now belonging to three French Canadians. We even kept on the English-speaking pro and found ourselves the proprietors of the Protestant cemetery. Down the road from the club was an old, rather dilapidated hotel, Auberge Grand-Mère, which was owned by Consolidated Bathurst. The company asked us if we would be interested in taking over the operation of the hotel, not as a purchase but as a lease. How much? A dollar a year. Since none of us had the time to manage a hotel, we spent about $200,000 on new furnishings to bring it up to date and then subleased it to others. And so, as I was to repeat hundreds of times to no effect, I never, ever owned even one share of the Auberge Grand-Mère.

Five years later, in 1993, before becoming prime minister, I sold my interest in the golf course to a Toronto real-estate developer, and my partners and I gave over the lease on the hotel to a local businessman, Yvon Duhaime—no relation to my political opponent Yves Duhaime—who repaid us for the furnishings in cash. Subsequently he was able to purchase the Auberge from Consolidated Bathurst, and he made plans to renovate and expand it, creating about twenty new jobs in the process. For that, he needed money. One thing that many Canadians can’t appreciate is how difficult it was for many Quebec businesses to borrow money in the early 1990s. The big banks and insurance companies would never admit it publicly—they always had some fancy excuse or other—but the threat of separation made them extremely reluctant to lend to small ventures outside the Montreal area. Though Canada as a whole has been well served by its six major banks over the years, Shawinigan was not.

That’s one good reason, if I may digress, why I was opposed to bank mergers and didn’t believe that bigger was necessarily better.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.