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Sometime soon -- maybe as early as this week, maybe as late as December -- Jean Chrétien will throw in the towel, prorogue the House of Commons and effectively bring an end to his decade as prime minister. He will still have the job title. He may keep it until February, or he may hand it abruptly to Paul Martin after next week's Liberal leadership convention. The distance between an "early" and a "late" retirement is shrinking so rapidly it now obsesses only the two men concerned, a few bored press gallery hacks, and the odd Liberal backbencher with dreams of a ministerial promotion.
What matters is not the precise date of change so much as the simple fact of it. Ottawa's parliamentary precincts have been a change-free zone for much of the last decade. The locals can barely hide their impatience for a new chapter to begin.
Political staffers who were too closely identified with the Chrétien regime have been clearing out of town. So-and-so is off to study in London. Someone else has moved to Toronto to work for Dalton McGuinty, Ontario's new Liberal premier. Still others are preparing to run for Parliament, preferring the mercy of the electorate to that of Martin's chief of staff, whoever that will be.
This is what happens every time a new regime sets up shop on the banks of the Rideau. One of the first things a cub reporter notices on Parliament Hill is that even an organization as large as a ministry or a government takes its personality from the person at the top. Call it the auteur theory of public administration. Many film critics believe a film represents the director's vision, no matter how big the cast and crew or who wrote the script. In just the same way, a minister -- and all the more so a prime minister -- determines not only the priorities of a department or a government, but its personality, its quirks and its flaws.
Brian Mulroney's Ottawa was flamboyant, chummy, a who-do-you-know town in which cronyism and connections determined advancement. (Well, everyone's Ottawa is like that, but Mulroney's was an extreme case.) Pierre Trudeau's capital, especially in his first mandate, was an endless policy seminar at some Jesuit boarding school of the mind. Technocrats and policy experts refined their planning grids while the real world, ungrateful in its messiness, declined to perform as the charts and the binders said it should.
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