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Let me ask, which conservative prime minister said this? “We have to break that mentality in which people work long enough to qualify for social assistance, then quit. It’s better to have them at 50-per-cent productivity than to be sitting at home drinking beer. It’s not the government that’s complaining, it’s the wives of the unemployed, who were upset about their husbands hanging around the house.”

While it was instinctive for Chrétien to support those who were down on their luck or who had become disabled, he had no sympathy for the lazy. In Jean Chrétien’s small-town Shawinigan way of thinking, it was disrespectful to live off the hard work of others. When a Saskatchewan woman with three university degrees confronted Chrétien at a townhall meeting about her lack of job opportunities, he replied that some people were lucky and some were unlucky. “If you can’t find a job,” Chrétien said, “you should move.”

Can you imagine a Conservative prime minister saying any of these things?

Former Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest said Chrétien’s conservative values were a constant. Indeed, when Chrétien became President of the Treasury Board in the 1970s, his Liberal colleagues called him Dr. No, a nickname he took pride in.

Former Liberal cabinet minister and Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin told me that Chrétien knew what the clear majority of working families go through every day looking for ways to save money while stretching their budget from paycheque to paycheque. “Chrétien understands that before a dollar could be spent, it had to be earned.”