Wipe-Out

Trudeau loses a mini-election

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau celebrated his 59th birthday last week, with many unhappy returns. In a record-breaking 15 by-elections across the country--"mini-elections" in which nearly 1 million voters were involved--Trudeau's Liberals suffered a brutal whipping. The real target of the voters' wrath, clearly, was Trudeau himself.

Rarely, if ever, has a Canadian leader received such a repudiation outside of a general election. The Liberals, who had held seven of the seats that were speckled across seven of the country's ten provinces, managed to hold only two--both in the party's French-speaking redoubt of Quebec. Trudeau's party was completely wiped out in seven by-elections in English-speaking Ontario, where the next general election must be won. The country's chief opposition party, the Conservatives, won ten seats--including all but one of the Ontario constituencies. The Liberals' share of the popular vote dropped to 30.5%, vs. 43% in the 1974 national election. The opposition Conservatives, meanwhile, zoomed to 48.7%, from 35% in 1974.

"It was a protest vote, but not only that," said one back-room Liberal pol. "It was a personal defeat for Trudeau." Canadians are hopping mad at the state of their economy after ten years of his party's rule. Inflation is running at a rate of 8.6% annually; unemployment, at 8.5%, is at the highest level since 1940; and the value of the Canadian dollar has plummeted from $1.03 U.S. to a spindly 840 in the past 23 months. The federal government is running a deficit that is expected to reach at least $11.8 billion this year, and Canadians, like many Americans, are worried about a bloated, overpaid federal bureaucracy.

After ten years in power, Trudeau also suffers from chronic overexposure. In 1976 his popularity soared, following the election of Separatist Premier Rene Levesque in predominantly French-speaking Quebec. Anglophone Canadians then felt that Trudeau, a bilingual Quebecois from Montreal, was uniquely qualified to fight the breakaway movement in the country's largest province (pop. 6 million). Since then, Levesque has cannily soft-pedaled his political line. As a result, the urgency of the separatist threat to Canada's 111-year-old confederation has worn off outside Quebec.

Canadians are increasingly conscious, however, of the Conservatives' Alberta-born leader, Joseph Clark, 39, as an acceptable alternative to Trudeau. Ridiculed by one Toronto paper as "Joe Who?" when he won the Tory leadership in 1976, Clark has a shrewd ability to capitalize on popular concerns. During the by-election campaign he proposed new Canadian tax laws allowing partial deductions for property taxes and mortgage interest from federal income taxes. Despite his party's traditional inability to win votes in Quebec, Clark confidently declared last week: "The Conservatives alone can form a national government. The Liberals have lost any capacity to regain ground in English Canada."

The day after the by-elections, Clark appealed to Quebecois sensibilities by arranging for three Tory M.P.s from Canada's western provinces to address questions to Parliament in French. But, if the by-election results are any index, Canada could divide politically along linguistic lines, with the Liberals increasingly confined to Quebec while English-speaking Canada leans toward the Tories. Terrified by that prospect, some Liberal politicians have already begun to discuss the previously unthinkable prospect of replacing Trudeau. The most plausible alternative is Toronto's John Turner, 49, who served as Trudeau's Finance Minister until 1975, when he resigned over the Prime Minister's highly centralized style of government management.

Trudeau loyalists argue that a switch to Turner would lead to bitter, destructive feuds within the party. Beyond that, they suggest, the defectors fail to consider that the Prime Minister is at his combative best when cornered. Those reflexes were on display soon after Trudeau heard the by-election returns. Over lunch the next day, he firmly told a meeting of his party's national campaign committee that he had no intention whatsoever of stepping down while any threat of Quebec separatism remained.

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