The Ottawa Citizen
March 18, 2000

Why Chretien confidant Pat Lavelle owes his career to the prime minister; Export Development Corporation chairman used to oppose free trade

(Excerpt)

TORONTO — The chairman of Canada’s secretive Export Development Corporation is a charming Liberal who often brags that he was the first to tell Jean Chretien that he had the right stuff to be prime minister.

Sixty-year-old executive Patrick Lavelle and several of the agency’s board members give the EDC the decided look of a Grit-controlled corporation.

He and EDC president A. Ian Gillespie — the son of a former cabinet minister under Pierre Trudeau — sit at the top of the federal body, which quietly shells out billions of dollars in loans around the world each year, often to the benefit of Liberal-friendly corporations.

While it is true that Mr. Chretien doled out patronage appointments to most of the political friends who helped get him to 24 Sussex Drive, few have done as well as Mr. Lavelle.

It was in the late 1960s when Mr. Lavelle first told an ambitious Mr. Chretien that he had a bright future in politics. And 30 years later, the former lobbyist is still being rewarded.

“I say that I am the first, but let’s say, to be more humble, I’m among the first,” says Mr. Lavelle, who worked for former Liberal senator and cabinet minister Allan MacEachen. “But I knew Jean Chretien when he became member of parliament (in 1963). His office was across from me.

“So I’ve known Jean Chretien a long time and always found him to be a very attractive political guy.”

(On the question of whether Mr. Chretien should run again, Mr. Lavelle is cagey and says it’s “the PM’s call.”)

In 1995, Mr. Lavelle was named chairman of the Federal Business Development Bank, another Crown corporation that hands out billions in loans, now known as the Business Development Bank of Canada — in this case to small Canadian businesses. Then in 1998, he accomplished a rare back-to-back patronage feat with his EDC appointment.

In an interview at his EDC office in Toronto this week, Mr. Lavelle explained that the EDC chairmanship was his first choice when Mr. Chretien asked him what he would like to do for the government after the Liberal victory in 1993.