Kim Campbell, Canada's WORST prime minister

so the other day I did a video about Wilfrid Laurier who many people would argue was the greatest and most consequential prime minister in Canadian history and today I want to swing way over to the other side of the spectrum and talk to a bhoot Kim Campbell who many people say was the single worst most irrelevant prime minister in Canadian history but you don't need to take my word for it this book right here published in 1999 asked a bunch of Canadian historians who were the best and worst Prime Minister's in Canadian history and they ranked Kim Campbell dead last the low regard in which Kim Campbell's prime ministership is held is interesting because in some ways she was actually quite a historically relevant figure for Canada as you might have noticed she is a woman and the only female Prime Minister Canada has ever had she was also the only Prime Minister from British Columbia the first Prime Minister to be born after the Second World War and the only Prime Minister to have had some political history in Canada's long forgotten Social Credit Party she was also the Prime Minister with the shortest career in Canadian national politics and I think this is the thing that most people remember her for today she only served a single four-year term in Parliament and was only Prime Minister for a measly four months in 1993 yet at the same time her failed prime ministership in some ways triggered the beginning of the modern era of Canadian politics in the sense that so much of the way that Canadian politics works today was shaped by forces that were unleashed by Kim Campbell's fall from grace but before I begin I would just like to acknowledge that today's video is brought to you by skill share the awesome teach you how to do anything website the first 500 viewers who sign up to skill share using the link in the thing below will get access to a free two-month trial we shall talk marbeth scale share in a bit but first Kim Campbell [Music] as I said Kim Campbell was our only prime minister to be born right here in British Columbia she worked briefly as a Vancouver lawyer and then got involved in the British Columbia political scene which in those days was very much dominated by the BC Social Credit Party Social Credit was sort of a strange Canadian political movement that would take too long to describe right now but here in British Columbia it had evolved into a sort of broad-based coalition political party containing some people who were more conservative and some people who were more liberal Kim Campbell served as a Social Credit member of the British Columbia Parliament and for a time was an adviser to B C's Social Credit premier bill Bennett at one point she even tried to run to become head of the BC Social Credit Party but gotten clobbered in 1988 Kim Campbell resigned from the BC legislature to run for a seat in the Canadian Parliament switching her party label from Social Credit to progressive conservative the Progressive Conservative Party was the party that was running Canada at the time under the leadership of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Campbell watt beginning what would become a very brief but very eventful career in national Canadian politics so Kim Campbell had a number of good things going for her when she arrived in Ottawa one she was a woman this seems very quaint today but as recently as 1988 it was still considered a big deal that women were getting elected to the Canadian Parliament in any sizable number during the 1970s Canada had never elected more than ten women to a parliament of over 300 - Campbell was from British Columbia BC is a big and important province in this country and Kim Campbell had some connection to the ruling establishment there and three she was considered very politically moderate Campbell had been part of the liberal wing of the Social Credit Party and now she was very much part of the liberal wing of the Progressive Conservative Party - so shortly after being reelected Prime Minister Mulrooney was like aha this Kim Campbell person seems like real cabinet material checks a lot of boxes in 1989 Prime Minister Mulrooney made Kim Campbell assistant minister of Indian Affairs and then in 1990 she got a big upgrade when she was made Attorney General of Canada it was the very first time a woman had ever been made Attorney General she even did this saucy photo shoot with a judge's robe to celebrate so as I say Kim Campbell was very much on the progressive end of the Progressive Conservative Party she was pro-choice and considered herself an ardent feminist and was very determined to ensure that the Mulrooney government would not be too right-wing in her memoir time and chance Campbell basically takes credit for all of the liberal things that the Mulrooney administration did during its time in power including helping craft canada's strict gun control laws broadening canada's anti-discrimination statutes to include protections for gays and lesbians allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the canadian military and liberalizing canada's abortion laws although that last part didn't wind up being that relevant because the Mulroney government's abortion reforms never wound up actually passing and today Canada enjoys the even more liberal status quo of having no abortion laws at all but that is another story for various reasons we won't fully get into here by the early 1990s Prime Minister maroon II had become incredibly unpopular it was pretty clear from the polls that if he attempted to run for a third term he would go down to Mexico feet so on February 24th 1993 Mulroney announced that he would resign the prime ministership and that his party the Progressive Conservatives would install a new prime minister to contest the 1993 election and Kim Campbell became the establishment favorite to replace him almost immediately not because she was necessarily the highest profile member of his administration but rather because she wasn't in contrast to all of Mulrooney's other tired old cabinet ministers Kim Campbell was still considered a relatively fresh and novel figure on the Canadian political scene she was thus viewed as someone who could inject a jolt of life into this lagging unpopular party so she was very much the front-runner for the job but early on there was already starting to be some ominous omens I will read you a little passage from this book here called dynasties and interludes which by the way is a very very good book on Canadian political history as if to signal what was to come Campbell ran a poor leadership campaign and frittered away her early lead it became evident she was not fully informed to boot the way the party operated and she had not developed of what her prime ministership might achieve thus instead of a coronation Kim Campbell won the leadership on a close second ballot it was also clear that little thought had been given to the post convention period and to the election campaign that would shortly follow Kim Campbell was inaugurated as Prime Minister of Canada on June 25th 1993 but there was really no time for her to do anything with the job because it was already Canadian election time now partially as a result of Brian Mulrooney's incredible unpopularity in the early 1990s Canada was starting to develop some new political parties these were founded by people that had previously supported the Progressive Conservative Party but had now concluded that the whole party was basically a lost cause in Western Canada to right-wing guys named Preston Manning and Stephen Harper created a new party called the Reform Party of Canada it was basically a populist party for conservative voters who had grown disillusioned with wishy-washy progressive conservative politicians like well Kim Campbell and then in Quebec a guy named Lucien Bouchard who had previously worked for the mall Rooney administration created a new party called the bloc québécois devoted to Quebec separatism his argument was that Mulroney had betrayed Quebec so badly there was basically no reason to even try to make things work in Canada anymore now a lot of people would argue that the emergence of these new parties basically guaranteed that Canada would experience a lot of vote splitting in the 1993 election which means that it's not really Kim Campbell's fault that she lost as badly as she did but even if that is indeed the case Kim Campbell herself certainly didn't make things much better I will try to be delicate about this but basically Kim Campbell was not a good campaigner nor was she terribly likeable she had a sort of condescending personality and was often characterized as being sort of broadly out of touch with a lot of the anger and pain that voters across the country were feeling at that time for example Canada in the 1990s was in the midst of a rather severe recession with unemployment over 10% and Campbell was asked to boot at once and she gave this very aloof answer that wound up being one of the defining moments of the campaign and I would like to see certainly you know by the turn of the century a country where unemployment is way down you know and and we're we're paying down our national debt and there's a whole new vision of the future opening up for Canadians but it requires us to use the resources that we have and the first thing that we have to do is recognize what extraordinary resources we have as a country and then there was this other gaffe still very widely remembered today when a reporter was trying to ask her for specifics about something and Campbell sort of snob Lee responded that an election is no time to discuss serious issues now in fairness to Campbell that comment was taken out of context but it nevertheless helped reinforce a dominant image that a lot of people had of her and then there was the thing sound so Campbell's main opponent at least in her own mind was the leader of the Liberal Party Jean chrétien pret Sharon had this very particular way of talking partially because he had a very thick french-canadian accent and partially because he had this facial deformity that paralyzed part of his mouth anyway the Campbell campaign ran this ad is this a prime minister does he understand that his plan to allow a deficit each year would increase our debt how can he believe that you can kick-start a modern economy by fixing some roads why does the answer the questions he's asked doesn't he understand the questions or the answers or both Jean Craighead a prime minister think twice a lot of people thought this was very offensive but it was also a major strategic blunder in that it gave crotch an an opportunity to deliver the political zinger that he had been clearly waiting his entire life to give God gave me a physical defect and I've accepted that since I'm a kid it's true that I speak on one side of my mouth I'm not a Tory I don't speak on both sides but apart from all the gaffes in a bigger sense Campbell's campaign was doomed by the fact that she really had no obvious base the right hated her the left hated her Quebec hated her and by the end the media really hated her as a result when voting day finally came the Progressive Conservative Party went down to the biggest electoral defeat in Canadian history Campbell's party which had won 169 seats under Bryan Mulrooney in the last election plummeted to - yeah yes to the popular vote was a little bit better she went from 43% to 16% so you know only a 27 point drop prime minister Campbell even lost her own seat which is a pretty remarkable thing to happen in a parliamentary system given that the Prime Minister's seat is supposed to be like in the safest of safe areas the disastrous nature of Kim Campbell's 1993 loss cast a long shadow on Canadian politics that were still sort of dealing with the aftermath of for one it basically permanently destroyed her party the Progressive Conservative Party and allowed the reform party to displace it as like the dominant party of the Canadian Centre right after trudging along in zombified form for a few more years in 2004 the Progressive Conservative Party officially merged with the Reform Party which was then led by future Prime Minister Stephen Harper this represented a major victory for Harper and people like him who had wanted Canada to have a more aggressive and ideological conservative party as I mentioned only two Progressive Conservatives were able to hang on to seats in parliament in the 1993 election this wound up doing good things for their political careers out of sheer process of elimination one of the two lingerie became the new head of the party and he deserves some credit for keeping the Progressive Conservatives on life support for the next decade in 1998 sureiy left national politics and in 2003 he was elected prime minister of Quebec the only left office in 2012 but perhaps the most surprising success story was Kim Campbell's former campaign manager John Tory he has somehow managed to remain a viable figure in Canadian politics despite you know presiding over the worst defeat in Canadian history after serving a stint as head of the Ontario Conservative Party in 2014 he was elected mayor of Toronto a job he holds to this day but what you asked became of Kim Campbell herself shortly after her defeat new Prime Minister Jean chrétien took pity on her and appointed her to a diplomatic post not something good like an ambassador mind you she was just made an adjunct diplomat at the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles and when that ran its course she needed to figure out something else to do with herself she hadn't been in politics long enough to qualify for a pension and in the end basically what she decided to do was just milk her former prime minister status for all that it was worth which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it being a former leader of a well-known country is something that seems very impressive even if you don't know a lot of the details about the person who held the job like say if you met the former president of Brazil you'd probably be pretty impressed by that even if you didn't really know anything else about him the fact is most of us are pretty ignorant about the politics of other countries and this seems to be the principle that Kim Campbell's post prime ministerial career has been based around so in the over 25 years since she left office Kim Campbell has toured the world as a motivational speaker and advisor and consultant always leaning very heavily into this idea that she is a former prime minister of Canada her agent famously even once got her on an episode of Bill Maher show with George Carlin once in a while the Canadian media even likes to wheel her out when she's got something to say about various things she's gotten even more liberal as she's gotten older so most of those things she has to say are not very nice to other conservatives I actually don't even know if she still self identifies as a conservative she's certainly quite consumed with hatred for Donald Trump at the moment and tweets about him constantly she's made headlines in Canada with some of her more vulgar tweets of the man including a recent one where she called them a mother overall I would say the Kim Campbell is mostly an awkward uncomfortable figure in Canadian political history to understand why it is important to appreciate the degree that Canadians really treat the prime ministership as like a very important symbol of their country you always learn about the Prime Minister's in school their pictures are on the money they have all these statues and things named after them and so on when I was going to school there would always be pictures of all the different Prime Minister's in the classroom this is apparently such a common practice and even got a mention in a song by that supposedly most iconic of Canadian bands The Tragically Hip [Music] fun fact with that song by the way it is the story of a supposedly wrongly convicted man whose case became this big media sensation when Kim Campbell was Attorney General anyway the weirdness of Kim Campbell's prime ministership rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and still does to this day she was the first female Prime Minister of Canada which should be a big deal but she was also never elected to the job by the Canadian people held the job for an extremely short period of time and was thrown out of that job in the biggest landslide in Canadian history so if you believe the prime ministership of Canada is like this very sacred important thing then it's very easy to see Kim Campbell as somebody who sort of cheapened and made mockery of the office in a whole bunch of ways and yet we can never escape her she will have always been our former prime minister with a grand oil portrait in the Canadian Parliament and all arrests certainly she's put a lot of effort into ensuring that nobody else forgets her brief moment of glory now in fairness during the 1980s Canada had two other prime ministers who served incredibly brief terms as well Joe Clark and John Turner but while their prime ministership swear obviously jokes in the same way Kim Campbell's was they did redeem themselves somewhat by staying involved in Canadian politics for a long time after so even if they didn't do much as prime ministers when people speak about former prime minister Turner or former prime minister Clarke today there is a lot more respect there is a sense that their subsequent political work helped validate their claim to be a legitimate former prime minister if that makes sense because they proved themselves to be undoubtedly important political figures in Canadian history not so with Kim Campbell she was just sort of this odd figure who floated into Canadian politics for a few years and then floated out just as quickly and now I hope you will indulge me as I float into some words aboot today's video sponsor Skillshare now as you guys surely know 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Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 666,853

Keywords: Kim Campbell, Brian Mulroney, Canada, Canadian, politics, prime minister, government, 90s, 80s, social credit, election, 1993, Bloc Quebecois, Reform Party, Progressive Conservative, Jean Chretien, face ad, campaign, female, woman, first, history, educational, world leader

Id: WMS3ErIW9Og

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019