The spring election was a blessing in some respects because at that time, CFIB was undergoing significant internal changes and conflict. One week after Joe Clarke's PCs won the spring 1979 election with a minority of seats in the House of Commons, I received a call to come to Ottawa and join a private meeting with the PM and his senior ministers to discuss what was happening in the economy, with suggestions for action.
Mary and I were in our room at the Chateau Laurier resting before the meeting. We were planning to fly on to Atlantic Canada where I had a major speaking engagement. The phone rang. It was Jean Chretien trying to find jobs for his staff now that he was out of government. He said his senior policy adviser named Jim Bennett was looking for work and would be an excellent legislative person at CFIB. I met Jim the following week and after serious consideration, hired him as our Director of National Affairs.
At this first meeting with Prime Minister Clarke, there were representatives from all the major corporations, but the only difference between this meeting and similar meetings with Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau was that the CEOs were all members or sympathizers of the PC party. At the Trudeau meetings, the CEOs were all Liberals. There was no difference between the kind of advice they received.
What struck me at both the Clarke meetings and the Trudeau meetings was that the CEOs all argued from the particular to the general, which was the opposite of the way policy people think. Certainly different than the way CFIB leaders or union leaders think. A CEO would declare that his firm was having this kind of problem and wanted Ottawa to fix it by making amendments to legislation. Governments instead make policy changes to meet broad political or economic objectives then hold meetings to see how it will impact all the different segments of the economy.
Follow-up meetings with the PM were necessary to bring him up to speed on where small business stood on the major issues. He tried to give me a sense of what his government's priorities were. The attached photo was taken in 1979, during the short period Joe Clarke was PM.
We had pre-budget consultations with Finance Minister Crosbie. In the meeting, we discussed everything but his plan to impose an 18 cents per gallon tax on gasoline which brought down the minority government.
Joe Clarke created a Ministry of State for Small Business and appointed BC member Ron Huntington to fill the post. As always we spent all of our time together providing an update on our member's positions on all the significant issues.
It was a lot of work getting to know all the new members of the Clarke government, but after only seven months, they lost the confidence of the House, and we were into a 1980 general election where the Trudeau government returned to power with a majority government. Round and round we go.
The election of a Clarke government even though the Liberals received over 400,000 additional votes, started the debate about a new electoral system that is proportional to the vote. The big lesson for CFIB was the importance of spending as much time with the opposition as the government, because who knows when your lowly Opposition MP will be a Cabinet Minister.