“I think Canadians want honest talk from politicians,” she said recently on the campaign trail in Halifax. “I think they want to know who we are.” But the more they get to know Campbell, the more reservations they seem to have about her. This week her ruling Progressive Conservative Party holds a convention to choose a successor to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who leaves office after nearly nine years with the lowest ratings in the history of Canadian polling. Campbell, his defense minister and protegee, has lined up more delegates than any of the five male candidates in the leadership race. But her momentum has stalled as her verbal indiscretions pile up (a Protestant who attended a Roman Catholic convent as a girl, she set off one recent controversy by referring ironically to “the evil demons of the papacy”). Environment Minister Jean Charest, more telegenic than she and even younger at 34, is gaining ground rapidly. In a deadlocked convention, Charest–or some even darker political horse-still could steal the Tory leadership, and the prime minister’s job, away from Campbell.
She grew up in Vancouver, far from the center of Canadian politics. Her mother named her Avril Phaedra; after the mother abruptly walked out of her marriage, the 12-year-old girl renamed herself Kim. Her father married again, to a much younger woman; Kim eventually married and divorced two men who were considerably older than herself. After an academic career went nowhere, she entered law school and as a first-year student got herself elected to the Vancouver school board. She earned a reputation for outspokenness. In one political battle, she zinged a rival by observing that “charisma without substance is a dangerous thing”-a remark that haunts her now, when critics see more ambition than substance in her own record. In 1988 Campbell vaulted onto the national scene when she won a seat in Parliament, defeating another woman by only 269 votes.
Mulroney took a shine to her (she had supported him on free trade) and almost immediately made her a junior minister. She became Canada’s first female justice minister and attorney general in 1990, only seven years after graduating from law school. That’s when the picture was taken. Enigmatic and vaguely sexy, the black-and-white photograph showed her bare-shouldered, holding her robes of office before her. The suggestive look, it turned out, had been Campbell’s idea; she told the photographer the pose “only works if my shoulders are bare.”
Too busy: Image matters a great deal to Kim Campbell. She plays the cello and claims to speak several languages fluently (though her French, which is crucial to a good showing in Quebec, is far from eloquent). Just before she announced her candidacy, she attended Canada’s popular-music awards ceremony with George Fox, a 33-year-old country star. On television later, Campbell boasted about their date, claiming that beneath her own “cool, arrogant, intellectual, urbane exterior,” there “beats the heart of a Texas line dancer. " But when Fox tried to see her again, her office said she was too busy. “Seems like her dance card is filled up for the moment,” says Fox.
If Campbell can hold off Charest and become prime minister, she will have only a few months in which to define herself, a national election must be held by next fall. She has been deliberately vague on how she would govern. She says she wants to balance the budget in five years but declines to specify spending cuts. “I’m not running for minister of finance,” she told one group, “I’m running to be leader.” Recent polling suggests that with Charest at the helm, the Tories could win the election, but that with Campbell as party leader, the opposition Liberals might attract enough votes to form a coalition. Campbell still believes in her own destiny. “I’ve grown,” she said last week. “I bring a mature, serene, mellowed persona that in fact I think is rather well suited to the job I’m seeking to do.” That has a fine, Thatcherite ring to it-but do Canadians want their own Iron Lady?
