At one time or another, all -- save one -- were humbled. All the towering figures, all the grand men of Liberal Party history suffered electoral defeat. Pierre Trudeau was beaten. So were Wilfrid Laurier and Lester Pearson and Louis St. Laurent. Mackenzie King, the country's longest-serving prime minister, lost elections twice. The unlikely exception is Jean Chrétien. The Iron Man of Canadian politics has never lost a popular vote. Having won 12 straight constituency elections, as well as three straight majority victories as Liberal leader, he could be said to be the most successful Liberal vote-getter in history.

That such an ordinary, small-town guy can occupy such an echelon is galling to some. Like a worn-down Chevy without the muffler, like a 1950s Habs hockey player without the front teeth, Mr. Chrétien hardly fits the image of ultimate winner. A terror in both languages -- we won't even mention his reference to UN Secretary-General "Goofy Annan" -- he was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but a cement mixer.

This week marks his eighth anniversary in the big chair. Eight years and counting since his 1993 rout of Kim Campbell. With his lead over all opponents still commanding, give Iron Man, 67, another can of Bardahl and who knows how long he might last. "I know what keeps a man young," Winston Churchill told Richard Nixon. "It's power."

But what has the unbeatable guy from Shawinigan accomplished? Is the seeming invincibility a reward for astute performance or a fluke -- the abiding combination of a divided opposition and a smiling economy? Such unrelenting fine fortune has not blessed other prime ministers. And who can forget 1995? With just one more ounce of votes, the Quebec secessionists win the referendum, J. Chrétien loses the country -- and goes down as the biggest bum in Canadian history.

It is said that caution has been his hallmark, that he is a man without mission. His success is a triumph of inertia, critics allege, a safe slumber in the mushy middle of the political spectrum, where passions idle and dreams are stilled.

Of course, Iron Man and friends would beg to differ.

Was it not he -- and Paul Martin -- who erased a $40-billion annual deficit and restored health to the nation's fiscal ledger?

After taking Canada to the brink in 1995, was it not he and Stéphane Dion, with their Supreme Court challenge and clarity legislation, who drove back the secessionist forces to one of their historic low points?

With agreements with provinces on a social-union accord, on health-care spending, with the building of bridges to unlikely allies such as Alberta's Ralph Klein, has not Mr. Chrétien built a relative peace with the provinces rare under other leaders?

In fending off the neocon insurgency of Reform and the Alliance, he has reinvigorated the primacy of Ottawa and traditional federalism. The devolutionist thrusts of the Mulroney years have been pushed back. Few still talk about the need for constitutional reform and more power to the provinces. For better or for worse, Mr. Chrétien has reanchored Canada to its old centrist pillars.

He frequently talks about his "balanced approach" as being the Canadian way. On American relations, while more accommodating than the prickly Mr. Trudeau, he has slowed Mr. Mulroney's integrationist charge.

Castigated at first for not jumping through hoops for the Americans in response to the terrorist crisis, Mr. Chrétien has understood well that the Sept. 11 security-intelligence breakdown was America's, not Canada's -- and that the sensationalizing of the anthrax scare is mainly America's doing.

Though vintage in outlook, Mr. Chrétien boasts of having readied the country for the New Economy. He cites his government's tax cuts, investments in learning and education, such as the millennium scholarship fund, and taking the lead on the information highway, connecting his country to the Internet faster than the United States.

Iron Man's record starts to sound good -- until the critics take the floor. The Chrétien years, they say, have featured visionless, overcentralized, retrograde governance that has allowed Canadian living standards to tumble, ravaged health care and entrenched a corrupt, top-down, spoils system in Ottawa.

Some studies put Canada's income per person at 25 per cent below the U.S. level, with much of the plunge coming in the last decade. For more evidence of decline, critics point to the dollar, mired at less than 65 cents U.S. The health-care system, once a prized Canadian product, has fallen into disrepair -- as even Liberals would acknowledge -- in the Chrétien years.

The gap between rich and poor expands. A promised frontal assault on child poverty has failed to materialize, there being only some modest measures. The immigration system is a mess, the nation's defences are in a sorry state (though, until now, Canadians never demanded otherwise). And while progress has been made toward stilling the discontent of the second solitude in Quebec, that of the third, the aboriginal peoples, is a growing cancer.

Instead of aggressively addressing problems, the Liberals, say the detractors, have opted for couch-potato caution. A strong indictment of the Chrétien years has been the concentration and abuse of power. The Somalia inquiry was shut down, protesters were muzzled at APEC, grants and loans were politicized and mismanaged at the Human Resources department, attempts to open up the system through parliamentary reform were stifled, allegations of conflict of interest and feathering friends' nests beat at the Prime Minister's door on the Shawinigate file.

If there was an incriminating moment for the governing party that encapsulated it all, it came early this year when the Liberals rose red-faced to vote down their own promise to create an independent ethics counsellor.

The list of failings is long. But Canadians, bereft of an attractive alternative, have never seemed overly angered. They keep rewarding Iron Man with good ratings. And while the elites continue to look down on Mr. Chrétien's bricklayer pragmatism, it is this very aspect of him -- and his utter lack of artifice -- that plays well with ordinary Canadians.

Times were bleak when he came into office. There was the bad odour of the Mulroney years. The country's fiscal sheet was a fierce red. Quebec was mounting an independence surge. With shrewd political instincts and unprecedented luck, Mr. Chrétien was able to bring relief from those times to the point where, as he celebrates eight years in power, the only undefeated Liberal of the past century can challenge the critics with the big bottom-line American question: "Is the country better off today than it was eight years ago?"

His detractors -- while hastening to add they were damning him with faint praise -- might even say yes.
Lawrence Martin, author of the first volume of Chrétien: The Will to Win, is at work on the second.

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