Time and Chance

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa and the editor of Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Kim Campbell has been criticized for loading the blame for the
Progressive Conservative calamity in the 1993 election (and there was
plenty to load) on everyone but herself. This is not fair. A careful
reading of Time and Chance shows Campbell personally shouldering
responsibility for some important things that went wrong during that
fateful autumn. For example, the worst of many gaffes during the
contest, when Campbell is supposed to have said that an election
campaign is not the time to discuss important questions such as
reforming social programs, was her own contribution to the disaster.

This political memoir is at its best in recounting the 47 days of the
election, when it takes on something of the character of a Greek
tragedy. Here was an inexperienced but determined politician, a woman,
battling against a wilier opponent while continually beset by elements
within her own party whose loyalty she could not count on—her top
campaign organizers, Jean Charest supporters, a former prime minister
who manipulated the party’s participation in the election to enhance
his own image. For the final weeks of the campaign, Campbell knew that
she was going to lose, and yet she had to carry on, lonely, harassed,
and utterly exhausted. One should not overdo the Greek-tragedy metaphor,
but it is impossible not to read the book’s last 75 pages without
experiencing genuine sympathy for her. She may have been an inadequate
campaigner, but she was also a doomed one.

Time and Chance contains useful reflections on some of the larger
issues in the 1993 election. The party Brian Mulroney had put together
had, as its twin pillars, Quebec and the West. It could also be seen as
an unlikely alliance between francophones and francophobes. Free trade
with the United States had kept the two constituencies together in 1988;
there was no “overarching issue” to take its place in 1993.
Throughout the campaign, Campbell and her team were not given the
benefit of the doubt, which Chrétien and the Liberals often received
from the press. For journalists covering a campaign, an election is seen
as a game, Campbell says, quoting an American professor, T.E. Patterson.
There are winners; there are losers. For the candidates, an election is
related to the tasks of government, to issues, policies, the delivery of
services. Campbell wanted to focus her campaign on improving the
processes of government. This is a subject that is difficult enough to
explain to an electorate during a government’s mandate. In the
election, it was an ill-advised topic that damaged her prospects from
the start.

Time and Chance is not a great political memoir, but it reads as a
compelling account of an intelligent woman’s short venture into the
world of high politics. History will see Campbell as it sees John Turner
and the four men who followed John A. Macdonald, as appendages to
significant administrations led by dominant political personalities. It
is good to have recorded in this book the recollections of an erstwhile
prime minister, whether she was an appendage or not.