AHC/WI: Chrétien doesn't resign, fights 2004 election

So this revolves around the idea that Jean Chrétien doesn't step down in 2003, to be replaced by Paul Martin, but rather he stays on and fights at least the 2004 election.

Would he win the 2004 election? How would the dynamic between him and Harper be? You can push any scandals into the future for this POD.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
Chretien probably like Martin is able to win in 2004 against the brand new Conservative Party, but I think that he has a better chance in 2006 because he wasn't quite as, I guess, evil, as Martin, at least in the eyes of some. Martin basically bulldozed over his party to settle personal scores and tried to paint Harper as some sort of American puppet with a hidden agenda. This was a failure of a tactic and nobody was buying it.

Chretien had a decent record to run on and was personally popular. In fact, he was regarded highly enough that Harper was known to ask "what would Chretien have done?" when he first became prime minister.

The Sponsorship scandal is the big wrench here. How much of it can be directly pinned to Chretien in this scenario might determine how well he does. I think it could have gotten really ugly for him, but he was personally popular enough that it might in some ways be like a Lewinsky moment for him where he doesn't lose popularity and people largely shrug. That was hard to do with someone as obviously ambitious as Paul Martin.
 
The best Chretian could have done was fire Martin and blame him for the sponsorship scandal.
The sponsorship scandal was one of the reasons that Martin had such a short term in office.
Few voters believed that Paul Martin was an innocent stander during the lead-up to the sponsorship scandal. Martin was finance minister, so he should have known where money's were being channeled. OTOH if Chretian had already side-line, Martin then that points to serious flaws in cabinet.
Either way, the press painted Martin as incompetent or guilty.
 
My guess is that he wins a majority, or at the very least a stronger minority than Martin won IOTL.

For starters, Chretien (and his government), despite the interparty tensions with the Martinites, were generally approved of by Canadians - Martin did far worse than he really should've. More importantly, though, Chretien had much better political instincts. Not only is he likely to call the election earlier than Martin did IOTL (probably near the beginning of the year, when the Conservatives were leaderless), but he would've referred the sponsorship scandal to the RCMP instead of holding a public inquiry (and while this might hurt him a bit in the short-term, in the long-term it would kind of silence the scandal instead of having every single detail about it revealed in a public forum, sparing the party of the long-term difficulties it caused IOTL). That, and Chretien was just a much better campaigner overall than Martin ever was.
 
My gut tells me it would end with a Liberal minority, but much like TG said it would probably be stronger than OTL.

In this scenario the odds of Harper stepping down as leader might be better, or the party could give him a second chance considering he was running against Chrétien. Hard to tell.

What is clear that Chrétien would most likely spend his remaining time as PM, probably a year or so, securing the Liberal leadership for his preferred successor, whoever that is.
 
Most likely a Liberal minority, but less stable than Martin's government. Martin was a major reason for Chretien winning in 1997 & 2000, as the hand on the financial tiller of the nation, not Chretien's leadership. Its highly unlikely that Martin would have stayed in cabinet for this campaign.

The sponsorship scandal would start to unravel sooner not later as in the case of delay caused by the change in leadership from Chretien to Martin, and becomes a key issue of the campaign. And with Martin on the outside looking in, the leaks to the press from the Martin supporters would have been devastating.
 
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