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This is an excerpt from Ash and Honor: The Untold 368 Minutes of 9/11, by American author Jeffrey Robinson. The book tells the story of the official response to 9/11 by North American authorities. This excerpt, drawn from multiple chapters, focuses on senior Canadian officials.
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Jean Chrétien, the 67-year-old Canadian prime minister who’d led his Liberal Party to a parliamentary victory in 1993, lived at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, Canada’s equivalent of the White House. Built in 1866, the 35-room mansion was set on four acres in the fashionable New Edinburgh neighborhood, overlooking the Ottawa River.
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With Parliament in recess, and all of his ministers out of town, he was working from home that morning.
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Having suffered Bell’s palsy at the age of 12, making the left side of his face weaker than the right side, Chrétien spoke in a very distinct lopsided way out of the left side of his mouth, with a heavy accent in both French and English. It gave him a quality of being authentic, a tough, straightforward yet self-deprecating man who didn’t put on the airs of the intellectual lawyer and avid reader that he actually was.
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He was also a man with deep political instincts. For example, he dealt with President Clinton by playing golf. And he dealt with President Bush by talking about baseball.
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Coming downstairs from the residence just before 8:30 a.m., he walked into the ground-floor living room to greet the new premier of Saskatchewan, Lorne Calvert. They’d never met and were scheduled to talk about farm aid. But after the usual pleasantries, their meeting was cut short by an aide coming into the room to tell Chrétien that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
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Like so many people that morning, Chrétien thought, it must have been a small plane flown by a pilot who didn’t know what he was doing.
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Then the second plane hit.
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Calvert made his exit and Chrétien went to his ground-floor office to assess the situation. He and his aides sat and watched CNN, until he decided he was going to phone George Bush to express Canada’s sympathy and support.
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His aides talked him out of it.
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They convinced Chrétien there would be time for that tomorrow.
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Right now, they said, the president is busy. Your call will only get in the way.
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Chrétien agreed and, instead, tried to reach the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci. He’d been governor of Massachusetts when George Bush sent him to Ottawa. But that morning, Cellucci was on a plane heading back to Ottawa from Winnipeg.
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The prime minister eventually got the deputy chief of mission on the phone and assured him that Canada was prepared to do whatever needed to be done.
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The American diplomat was grateful.
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When they hung up, Chrétien admitted that while the offer stood, there actually wasn’t much Canada could do.