The Present
To say that the rest of Canada has become exasperated by the interminable discussions over the future of Quebec would be an understatement - and was never more so than during the Meech Lake conference of 1990, which conspicuously failed to agree on a new decentralized constitution. The conference was convened by the Conservative Brian Mulroney , who became the country's premier in 1984. Mulroney had other pressing problems, too, though nothing as fractious as Quebec. To begin with, the free trade agreement (NAFTA) between the US and Canada, which Mulroney pushed through parliament, came into effect in 1989, destroying the country's protective tariffs and thereby exposing its industries to undercutting and causing thousands of redundancies. There was also the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery, which brought Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to the brink of economic ruin, whilst falls in wheat prices hurt the Prairies. Efforts were made to deal with these issues, but few were satisfied and during Mulroney's second term (1988-93), the premier became a byword for incompetence, his party commonly accused of large-scale corruption. As a result, the federal elections of November 1993 almost wiped out the Conservatives and, equipped with a huge majority, the new Liberal administration, under Jean Chretien , once Trudeau's Minister of Finance, set about rebuilding federal prestige. A cautious politician, Chretien has had some success, his pragmatic approach to politics proving sufficiently popular to see him re-elected for a second term in 1997 and a third in 2000, albeit with reduced majorities. However, much of Chretien's electoral success is down to the balkanization of the Canadian political scene. The Liberals are currently the only party with any claim to a national presence - with the right-wing Canadian Alliance (formerly the Reform Party), for instance, dominating much of the west, but simply failing to show in the east. The long-term consequences of this political reconfiguration are hard to predict, but certainly don't bode well. The future is wide open to the prospect of further political turbulence.
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