Do we like Jean Chrétien?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Good calls on LGBTQ+ marriage, climate and Iraq, and a stand against Trump, held back by the 2021 residential school comments and a scandal-heavy second act.
Jean Chrétien is the bloke who won three majority governments in a row and ran Canada from 1993 to 2003, after more than 60 years in public life. In his own birthday interviews he lists balanced budgets, keeping Canada out of the Iraq war and the Clarity Act (the rules for any future Quebec referendum) as his proudest efforts. He is a populist street-fighter type, and Canadians either love that or wince at it.
The scandals dogged his last years in office: the Shawinigate affair and the sponsorship scandal both hit his popularity. The Gomery inquiry made adverse findings about him and his chief of staff Jean Pelletier, but in 2008 the Federal Court voided those sections after finding Gomery's media comments showed he had prejudged issues. The Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the government's appeal in 2010. The ruling was about fairness, not about whether the sponsorship program was well run, so it clears his name only so far.
On LGBTQ+ rights, his record is mixed in tone but good in outcome. In 2003 his government chose not to appeal court rulings in BC and Ontario, and sent its marriage bill to the Supreme Court. His office said church and state should be separate when a Catholic bishop attacked him. Years later he admitted he was caught by surprise by the rulings and that the word “marriage” rubbed him up the wrong way, so he's no early crusader, but he did not fight it.
On the planet and the world, he's on the right side of history. His government marked Canada's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in December 2002, and he later called refusing to join the Iraq invasion an important decision. I couldn't check how well Canada actually met its Kyoto targets, so take the climate credit as being for the decision, not the results.
Nothing very new lately, though he's been active. In March 2025 he told a Liberal crowd, “From one old guy to another old guy, stop this nonsense,” and said Canada will never join the United States. In February 2026 he and Stephen Harper did a fireside chat on national unity. On the good-person side, critics accused him of misleading voters over his 1993 GST promise, and he brushed it off. I found no sign of mistreating people and not much on charity, so that's honestly the whole list.
Overall he's a decent old pol who made several calls we'd cheer, from marriage to Kyoto to saying no to a war, and who did not lean into culture-war grievance. Not a saint, and the residential school remarks should make you pause. At 92 he got another honorary degree in 2025 and is still turning up to defend Canada, which counts for something.