So forget Clinton and go back to the Blair quote. That gets closer to the truth. "I deliberately chose," Chrétien says, "to undersell and outperform rather than outsell and underperform" -- unlike certain leadership rivals one can mention. But behind the scenes Chrétien is a shrewd guy, with perhaps the most finely calibrated political antennae in the land. He judged brilliantly what post-Mulroney Canada would wear and what it wouldn't. And almost a decade later he grasped, within a few hours of the events of Sept. 11, that, while(most)Canadians regretted the large mound of corpses, they did not regard it as Canada's fight. At the time, the offhandedness of Chrétien's statements -- the perfunctory invocation of "our humanity and our common goodness" -- seemed glibly offensive compared to John Howard's robust declaration Down Under that this was "no time to be an 80 per cent ally." Up north, M. Chrétien ran the numbers and concluded Canadians were willing to be maybe a 23 per cent ally, and that's how he played it.

Political savvy unmoored from any fully formed world view is limiting. Sometimes a leader has to lead: he has to stake his ground, and call the people to it. But that's not Ti-Jean's style. The most "controversial" passage in the book occurs when M. Chrétien blames "my successor" for Canadian troops' present predicament in southern Afghanistan. "Mr. Dithers"(as The Economist dubbed Paul Martin: I believe he's the first Canadian prime minister the British press have ever bothered to invent a dismissive nickname for)took so long twittering over whether our troops should retain command over ISAF(the International Force in Kabul)that ISAF looked elsewhere and the Canucks found themselves, in Chrétien's words, "sent south again to battle the Taliban in the killing fields around Kandahar." It's worth inspecting this a little. In 2002, Canada took the unusual step of negotiating its way into a war -- in this case, Afghanistan. With Iraq looming, the prime minister felt a need for a pre-emptive sidestep in case he needed to say, "What's that? Iraq? Oh, I'm afraid our boys are all over in the Hindu Kush. Won't be back for months." It was a combat mission, hunting down Taliban diehards, and there was much braggadocio round Ottawa about how, oh, sure, the Brits had accepted some nancy-boy peacekeeping gig around Kabul but Canada had been there, done that, and was looking for something a little livelier this time round. When it proved a little too lively, M. Chrétien was happy to ship the boys to Kabul, where "their assignment was closer to traditional peacekeeping." They're now back in the hellhole of Kandahar thanks to Martin's indecisiveness: Canada has the highest per capita casualties of any military in Afghanistan, and Chrétien comes close to saying they're dying not for Queen and country but for Dithers and his dithering.

But the larger point is that every calculation made by either man was purely political. The notion of a national interest, or strategic goals, or even(for Pearsonian nostalgics)a moral foreign policy, all are absent. That brave Canadian warriors(to use a word M. Chrétien never would)are performing heroically in Afghanistan is an entirely accidental by-product of the Liberals' shrivelled political calculus. For all his talk about "values," the great survivor of Canadian politics is closer to Oscar Wilde's man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. On, say, gay marriage, what does M. Chrétien actually believe? He might be for it, but reckoned the Canadian public weren't ready to be sold it. He might be against it, but figures he's got no choice but to string along with the court decision. He might have no view either way, but discerned an opportunity to tar the opposition as intolerant and bigoted. Who knows? And, given(as he says)"how few gay couples actually bothered to tie the knot," who cares? "While homosexuality, multiple divorces, and babies born before the honeymoon may be upsetting for many traditional people, they are the modern realities we have to recognize." And M. Chrétien's great skill is in recognizing modern realities without being encumbered by principle.

Reading this book you detect an undercurrent of hostility toward "Bay Street" and "Wall Street," but no great sense of what Chrétien's for -- other than "tolerance" and the other hollow cobwebbed buzzwords that boil down to little more than a passionate belief in not believing passionately in anything. The Iraq chapter is headlined "No To War," as if M. Chrétien is an elderly student on the march with Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow. In fact, under the cover of various "liaison" programs, Canada had more men in Iraq than many full-throated paid-up members of the "coalition of the willing." It was happy to be a unilateral coalition of the unwilling as long as it didn't have to march in the victory parade. But the author strains credibility when he claims to have told Bush, six months before the invasion, "I've been reading all my briefings about the weapons of mass destruction, and I'm not convinced. I think the evidence is very shaky." My Beltway pals scoffed when I relayed this snippet to them, and I'm inclined to agree. Even Chrétien's chum Chirac, who opposed the war, never disputed the fact that Saddam had WMDs, if only because he had a big bunch of the relevant receipts.

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