‘Friend’ Bush is no moron, says Canadian prime minister
“He’s not a moron at all,” Mr Chrétien told the press, trying to defuse the controversy. “He is a friend.”
But opposition leaders in Canada are now calling for a head over the insult.
Joe Clarke, the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and no stranger to controversy during his brief tenure as prime minister in 1982, has demanded the government account for the remark.
“If such a statement was made, that person should be on the plane home right now,” Mr Clarke said. “There should be an apology to the government of the US.”
A White House spokesman for President Bush, made light of the remark in Prague. But it is no secret relations have been distinctly cool between President Bush and Mr Chrétien, who had enjoyed a warm relationship with President Bill Clinton.
The latest spat is hauntingly reminiscent of an earlier spat between President John F Kennedy and Canada’s Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. But the shoe was on the other foot then.
Knowlton Nash, the long time correspondent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, sparked a comparatively similar controversy over remarks allegedly made during President Kennedy’s visit to Ottawa in January 1961.
Nash, who regarded Kennedy the most charming man he had ever met, noted none of this charm rubbed off on his Canadian host.
Diefenbaker was a great champion of English-speaking Canada and a vociferous opponent of the French English dualism that has marked Canadian politics ever since. President Kennedy joked in Ottawa he was less reluctant to try a few words in French after listening to the prime minister.
Afterwards Diefenbaker complained to Nash that he had been told that President Kennedy went on to call him as a son-of-a-bitch during a private conversation with aides.
“Diefenbaker was quite upset about that and wondered if I had heard anything about it,” Nash recalled.
“I happened to be in Washington a few weeks later and was with Kennedy in the Oval Office with a half-a-dozen other reporters and I asked him if he had, in fact, said that,” Nash continued.
“No, I couldn’t have possibly have said that,” President Kennedy replied. “At the time I didn’t realise that Mr Diefenbaker was a son-of-a-bitch.”
The Canadian prime minister threatened to make it a public issue.
“Just let him try it,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t get here by taking that kind of stuff from anybody.”
