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In an interview with a longevity YouTuber, 91-year-old former prime minister Jean Chrétien advised young people to get married, dress better, work hard and stop trying to be “something you’re not.”
Speaking to Canadian interviewer William Rossy, Chrétien said he never would have become prime minister without his late wife Aline to temper his juvenile delinquency.
“When I was a kid I was a terrible kid, always excited all the time. My mother used to say, ‘There will be a black sheep in the family and Jean will be the black sheep,’” said Chrétien.
Aline was Chrétien’s first girlfriend, and he credited his mother, Marie, with engineering the relationship.
“My mother realized that (Aline) had the calming influence on me, so she did everything for me to meet her. And she had decided that she was the woman for me, and she was right,” he said.
Aline died in 2020 at age 84.
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Chrétien also said to “watch the way you dress.”
“Still to this day I never come to the office without a tie,” he said, before indicating Rossy’s sneakers and saying, “I’m not comfortable having shoes like you when I go in public.”
Rossy is the founder of Sprouht Media, a “self improvement” consultancy whose YouTube channel often features life advice from seniors.
In prior videos, Rossy has interviewed 93-year-old billionaire developer Larry Silverstein and 103-year-old physician Gladys McGarey, among others.
At 91, Chrétien ranks as the oldest living former Canadian prime minister, and is currently in fifth place for total longevity; Charles Tupper, Mackenzie Bowell, Louis St. Laurent and John Turner were all older at their death
Chrétien revealed that he comes from a family known for its longevity. Of eight siblings who survived infancy, all of them lived into their 80s or 90s, with one sister making it to 100.
The video drops just as another Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is entering the final throes of his leadership.
Chrétien made no mention of contemporary politics in the interview, although he noted at multiple points that he “never lost an election” and is Canada’s only prime minister to win three consecutive majority governments.
Chrétien is also the last prime minister who enjoyed positive approval ratings throughout nearly his entire term.
At the eight-year mark of his premiership, 54 per cent of Canadians approved of his performance, according to the Angus Reid Institute — the only prime minister since the dawn of modern polling that maintained a positive approval rating so late in his tenure.
Trudeau’s approval at that same point, by contrast, stood at just 40 per cent, and has now dropped to 22 per cent.
Chrétien credited his success to being “not provocative too much” and never attempting to pretend he was something he was not. “I don’t try to transform myself to be like the gang,” he said.
The ex-leader also stressed his policy of never making decisions in front of a group, which he said inoculated him against being swayed by arguments that were wrong, but persuasive.
“Some are very good at presenting things. Some are shy and not very articulate, and they might be the ones who are right,” he said.
But in a potential clue as to why the Liberal Party has such entrenched leadership, Chrétien referred to fellow caucus members as “the enemy.” Chrétien was famously ousted in a slow-motion caucus revolt led by his finance minister, Paul Martin.
“In politics, the opposition … are your adversary. Your enemies are the guys behind you who want to replace you,” he told Rossy.
Chrétien still makes a point of going to the office every day; he’s said in prior interviews that four days a week he leaves home by 9 a.m. for his Dentons law office. He repeatedly emphasized the importance of work, saying he came from a family where working “is a pleasure.” “For a lot of people, working is a burden,” he said.
Chrétien also claimed to be one of the few prime ministers who enjoyed question period, the regular House of Commons ritual of prime ministers fending off questions from the opposition.
“Most of the prime ministers hate question period; I loved it,” he said, adding that he always gauged his success after the fact by putting his hand to his armpit. “If it was dry I’d done well, and if it was wet, it’s because I’d had problems,” he said.
IN OTHER NEWS
As the Liberals begin the process of choosing a new leader, Canada may be edging towards a situation in which a G7 leader is selected via the equivalent of an internet poll. The Liberal Party constitution has incredibly low barriers to party membership; you don’t have to pay any money, you don’t have to be a citizen and you only have to be 14 years old. While the Liberals may end up changing these terms in picking Trudeau’s successor, the current rules state that basically anyone with an internet connection can vote in the next leadership election. As the National Post’s Jesse Kline points out in a column, for a country ostensibly worried about foreign interference, the replacement of Trudeau is on course to become the all-time Holy Grail of foreign political interference.
The National Post approached eight consultant and professor-y types to weigh in on Trudeau’s legacy. They’re all pretty bleak, with the most pro-Trudeau take arguably falling to Scott Reid, a former comms director for Paul Martin. Reid liked the Canada Child Benefit, and said the Trudeau government was good at “meeting unanticipated challenges” like the COVID-19 pandemic or the renegotiation of free trade with the U.S. But he suspects that everything else Trudeau did is going to be hastily reversed. “Justin Trudeau faces a very real risk of impermanence,” he wrote.
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