Year 2000 - Top Stories

The Election – On November 27, 2000, Canadians went to the polls for the third time in seven years. Although Prime Minister Jean Chretien was soundly criticized for calling an election only three and a half years into his mandate, the decision turned out to be a wise one. Voters rewarded Chretien with his third straight majority government. (For more election results, see my December 8th article).

The “Billion Dollar Boondoggle” This has not been a good year for Human Resources Minister Jane Stewart. It began with daily attacks by Opposition MPs over the Department’s alleged mismanagement of up to a billion dollars of taxpayer’s money, given out by the department in government grants. The HRDC’s own internal audit found a number of problems in the monitoring (or lack thereof) of the programs, and in the general administration and tracking of the funds. The Alliance quickly dubbed the entire affair the “Billion Dollar Boondoggle” and demanded Stewart’s resignation, despite the fact that Stewart was not the HRDC Minister during the period that the grants were handed out. While Stewart is still in her post, there has been some concern expressed over her ability to handle the political fallout from the audit. It will be interesting to see where she winds up after the Prime Minister’s next cabinet shuffle.

A famous statesman dies: Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 1919 - 2000 On September 28th, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau passed away at the age of eighty years. Trudeau, who never really recovered from the death of his son Michel in an avalanche two years earlier, was suffering from prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Trudeau’s accomplishments are so numerous it is impossible to do more than gloss over the highlights. Born to wealth, he obtained a law degree from the University of Montreal, and went on to further studies at London School of Economics, Harvard, and the Ecole des sciences politiques in Paris. In the 1950’s he helped found Cite Libre, a review devoted to exposing the corruption in the Union Nationale government of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis. After a stint as a law professor, he came to Ottawa as one of the “three wise men” from Quebec in Lester Pearson’s Liberal government. In 1967 he became Minister of Justice, and gained publicity for his reform of Canada’s laws on abortion, divorce, and homosexuality (it was during this time he made the famous quote that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”).

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