On that occasion, appalled, I tried to rush her to St. Michael’s Hospital, just down Bond Street from the Macmillan office, but, no, she insisted on bravely continuing our meeting. My wastebasket remained in pristine condition.
The only time we got into a fight was over the book’s title. She wanted to call the book Confessions of a Fascist Bitch, or simply Fascist Bitch! Showing unusual restraint (maybe unwisely), I insisted on toning this down, and the compromise was a book entitled Confessions, with flap copy that began: “Before cooler heads prevailed, this book was going to be entitled Fascist Bitch!” Most reviewers, I must note, gleefully took their cue from this line.
Down through the years, from my neutral position I have happily published authors from all over the political spectrum. Signing up David Lewis for his memoirs, The Good Fight, over lunch one day, I mentioned that we would pay royalty rates of X and Y. The old NDP leader asked if these terms were absolutely standard, and would he get the same from any other publisher?
“Yes, yes!” we assured him.
This led him to muse aloud about how the much-touted free-enterprise system in practice seemed to produce much less actual competition than advertised. We had no good response. But we did get a good book, and I did enjoy publishing books by his daughter-in-law, the ebullient Michele Landsberg, the wife of another NDP leader.
On the dark-blue side of the political spectrum, I enjoyed publishing Preston Manning, the leader of the Reform Party that turned Canadian politics upside down when he brought his grassroots party out of nowhere to become the official Opposition in Parliament. Preston proved to be a thoughtful man, and Think Big proved to be a thoughtful book. His essential decency was shown by his decision to throw a little party (hey, starting parties was what he did) at the University of Toronto residence where he and Sandra were staying for a term. This informal affair was for all of my M&S colleagues (from the editor, Jonathan Webb, onward) who had played a role in the production and the publication of the book. This was a gesture unique in my experience. People really liked it, and really liked the Mannings.
Before my time as publisher (when Adrienne Clarkson was in charge), to show that “political correctness” had no role in their publishing decisions, M&S had released the memoirs of the man who had planned to break up Canada, René Lévesque. I recall that when he toured the office at the time his book was launched, I was hard at work in my Douglas Gibson Books area, accompanied by twelve-year-old Meg, who was spending a PD day at her dad’s office, reading and drawing. René interrupted his tour to sit down with her, discussing her drawings with a genuine interest that you can’t fake with kids, and resisting urgent calls to resume his office tour. Meg enjoyed their talk, and remembered him so warmly that she was distressed when she learned of his death. He was a French-Canadian mensch.
To round out the roster of political parties that we published — and I’ve already mentioned Red Tories like John C. Crosbie, me son — I’d add Elizabeth May, who was not yet the leader of the Green Party when we published her Paradise Won in 1990, but her green colouration was already dyed-in-the-wool. As, to be fair, was ours, when we published The Canadian Green Consumer Guide, back in 1989, selling 150,000 consciousness-raising copies. I still feel guilty when I use paper towels in the kitchen.
Paul Martin, I’m sure, was unaware of all this background when he approached me through his lawyer, Bill Ross (the son, in this very small world, of the Hudson Bay trader in Inukjuak who had confirmed to James Houston that, yes, the local Inuit were still producing sculptures that were so traditional they looked as if they belonged in a museum). But I’m sure that Paul was aware of my experience working with Pierre Trudeau, an iconic figure with all Liberals. He may have beaten Paul Martin Sr. in the 1968 Leadership Convention — a major disappointment for both father and son — but thereafter he had treated the older man with great respect. So despite the policy disagreements that businessman Paul Martin may have had with him, my association with Trudeau must have been an advantage to me.
So was my work with Brian Mulroney. It may surprise outsiders to learn that Conservatives and Liberals can be friends, but that was the case here. Old Paul Martin had even got to know young Brian Mulroney during his student politics days at St. F.X., and had pulled him aside (one Irish-Canadian talking to another) to wonder aloud what “a good Catholic boy” was doing with the Tories. In the late 1960s (this time as one rising young Montreal business star talking to another), Mulroney advised Martin not to leave Paul Desmarais’s Power Corporation, giving him strong advice “to stay put and see what happened.” It worked out well, and Martin later hired Mulroney as his labour lawyer.
In his Memoirs Mulroney recalled a fishing trip in the late 1970s to Anticosti Island, courtesy of Paul Desmarais: “Paul Martin and I once spent a sunny day there fishing, chatting and speculating about the political future. Paul was then President of CSL (Canadian Shipping Lines) and I was then President of IOC (Iron Ore Company of Canada) and both of us wanted to become prime minister one day, but neither of us was straightforward enough to admit it. We knew our ambition would have strained credulity.”
Much later, when Paul Martin had gained a seat in the House, Mulroney’s continuing friendship took a tack that was unexpected for a Conservative prime minister dealing with a Liberal Opposition MP. His personal journal for April 17, 1989, reads:
Paul [Martin] has not done well in his brief time here, in large measure I believe because expectations were so unrealistically high about him. He is a nice, quite gentle individual who may turn out to be a wonderful neighbour but an unsuccessful politician. Perhaps his parliamentary performance will improve and for his sake, I hope so. And I have sent messages to him via Brian Gallery to loosen up in the House; avoid mixing it up with people like Crosbie, who will kill him; and remember that, if he is seeking the Liberal leadership, his enemies are in the Liberal caucus . . .
An entire Ph.D. thesis could be written about this passage. I’ll restrict myself to noting that Brian Gallery, the former mayor of Westmount, was a Tory friend and neighbour of the Martins at their farm in Knowlton, in the Eastern Townships, where Paul spent many happy hours driving the tractor and doing weekend jobs for fun — and, no doubt, being a wonderful neighbour.
As for Paul Martin’s own memories, in Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics (2008), he records that “Pierre Trudeau treated my father very well after the 1968 convention.” He appointed him to the Senate, then when it became clear that the Senate reform that the old man favoured was not on the cards, he sent him to represent Canada in London, a post that he and his wife, Nell, both loved.
John Gray (son of the publisher) wrote a thoughtful biography entitled Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition. It appeared in 2003, before Paul rose to the heights his ambition had dictated. Gray calls him “an enigma” suggesting that he was torn between his businessman’s financial caution, and the social activism instilled by his father, with whom he talked by phone several times a day.
Paul Martin (Senior) was such a tireless, hand-shaking politician that Gray tells the legendary story of a campaign when he met a line-up of local Liberals early in the day. Seeing a half-remembered face he greeted the man warmly, saying, “Hello, how are you?”
“Good to see you again, Mr. Martin.”
“Good to be here. And how’s your mother?”
“Actually, she died just before Christmas.”
“I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I was always very fond of her.”
Unfortunately, the same man was in a later hand-shaking line-up. And the same conversation ensued. Word for word.
In the evening, it happened again. This time, the man allowed his irritation to show. Asked how his mother was, he replied, “Still dead, Mr. Martin.”
A word about the formidable Nell, a loving mother who also helped to shape her son’s career. As a young political wife in Ottawa she was primed by her anxiou
s husband to make a good impression on his boss, Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Obediently, at their first meeting, as her son’s book records, she began according to the prepared plan:
“My husband thinks you’re a very great man,’’ she told Mackenzie King as they arrived.
“And what do you think, Mrs. Martin?” Mackenzie King asked.
“I’m going to take some convincing,” my mother replied — not exactly the response Dad had coached her to give before they left home.
Amazingly, the next day King dropped by the Martins’ apartment, and invited Nell to join him on his afternoon stroll.
She was always a political force, and this remained the case, even on her deathbed. When she fell gravely ill, her son had just accepted the post of minister of finance, and had rushed from Ottawa to be with her. As the old lady recovered consciousness, she looked up at the family faces gathered around her bed and said only one word, “Why?” The family explained that her health had taken a bad turn, so they were there to support her as she recovered, and she slipped off to sleep. The book continues:
She woke up and asked again, “Why?”
I told her, “Mother, we’ve explained to you. You’ve been sick and we’re all here to make sure you get better.” And then she said, “No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean, why Finance? Why would you want to be minister of finance?”
Clearly, politics flowed in Paul Martin’s veins. Yet he resists the interpretation that he was always bound for a political career. His book states, “From the time my father left politics, my active interest in the Liberal party waned.” He concludes, “But if I thought about government at all, it was from the perspective of a businessman.”
One of his book’s great strengths is that he writes with such infectious excitement about his years as a “corporate fire-fighter” for Power Corporation, dashing to the rescue of failing companies. Even better, we feel the thrill of the boy who loved ships acquiring Canada Steamship Lines, in what was at the time Canada’s largest-ever leveraged buyout, then running the growing company for many years.
The thrill continued. In August 2008, a few months after leaving office, he happened to be in Vancouver when he learned that a newly commissioned ship was in the harbour — the Baldock, half-owned by CSL. At 10 that night, he and his trusty executive assistant, Jim Pimblett, took a water taxi out into the harbour, “with the glimmering lights of Vancouver around us. The Mounties didn’t like it, but I stood outside the cabin of the water taxi on the flat stern section, supporting myself by grasping the metal pole, and took in the sea air. They liked it less when I raced up the Baldock’s ladder, maybe four stories in height.”
What follows is an exciting tour through the huge ship — well over two football fields in length — including scrambling “over the enormous boilers and the propeller shaft, on catwalks suspended above.” And there we get a glimpse not only of the wild Paul Martin, who spent a night in jail after a student altercation with Toronto police, and lost a summer job in Alberta for crashing a company truck on a freelance mission, but, more important, the man of enormous enthusiasm.
But do you remember the fishing with Brian Mulroney story? Paul Martin remembers it differently, in two ways, both revealing. First, he recalls no political conversation, but he does remember that the Anticosti day was so hot that “we both stripped down to what God gave us and plunged into the water to cool off — something that is absolutely forbidden in a salmon pool.” (Presumably a salmon-fishing equivalent of the line “I don’t care what they do, as long as they don’t frighten the horses.”) “Then we sunned ourselves on a rock. Someone snapped a picture: two future prime ministers in this exposed state. (Insert your own joke about ‘naked ambition’ here).”
Yet the subject of his own political ambition gave Paul Martin great trouble. I saw this the first time we met to discuss the book, a breakfast also involving M&S President Doug Pepper and Bill Ross. I suggested that his father’s diaries contained the ideal opening line for his own memoirs; discussing his son’s political interest in 1977, his father had written in his diary, “He has the bug, I am afraid.”
At this, across the table Paul Martin’s big body (he’s a surprisingly strong man, with a football player’s width and depth to his torso) writhed in obvious discomfort. In fact that discomfort was only matched when I told him that Stephen Harper was almost certain to win the next election (which he did, defeating Paul’s successor, Stéphane Dion).
As the book took shape, with Paul working with the experienced Ottawa-based political writer Paul Adams, it became clear that he had established a personal narrative that he was a simple businessman who late in his life had sort of backed into politics. This meant, of course, that his father’s diary was wrong, and Mulroney’s memory was at fault. In fact, the way Paul remembered their conversation was that it happened at a restaurant atop Place Ville Marie, where
Brian calmly told me of his plans to become Prime Minister one day . . . I remember thinking that he must be smoking something to imagine that a Quebec Tory was going to become Prime Minister any time soon. Nor did it occur to me that our career paths might intersect or even clash. If Brian had asked me that day what my ultimate ambition might be — which he did not — I probably would have replied that I would like to be president of the World Bank or the head of the United Nations environmental program.
As things played out, of course, his successful business career allowed him to leave CSL with the company on an even keel and enter politics as a Liberal MP in 1988, at the age of fifty. Two years later he ran for the party’s leadership in a vigorous campaign that left, let’s say, “a gulf” between his workers and the victorious Chrétien team. Three years after that, however, he became Chrétien’s minister of finance — to his mother’s horror, since she knew the post as a career-killer.
It’s worth recalling that our financial situation looked terrible at the time. In fact, in January 1993, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial announcing that Canada had become “an honorary member of the Third World” because of our crushing debt load. Paul famously promised to fix this “come hell or high water,” and set about doing so. How he and his team at Finance turned things around makes a fascinating story.
How he arrived at the precise blow-by-blow account of these years is also fascinating. Knowing that he was at work on his memoirs, the National Archivist, Ian Wilson, arranged for sessions — carefully taped — that were led by Sean Conway, a former politician, now an academic at Queen’s. He would assemble small groups of, for example, the top people involved in creating the budget of 1995 inside the department of finance. Sitting with Paul they would compare their memories, arguing and recollecting and correcting until they had all hammered out an agreed version of what had really happened.
This system later came under fire from an Ottawa journalist as a waste of public money. I said then, and say here, that I can think of few more important activities for an institution devoted to preserving our country’s history to undertake, and I hope that this effective system — which bequeaths all of the tapes to the National Library — will be repeated for all future prime ministers.
In retrospect, in the lurid light of the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, Paul Martin’s years at Finance look very good indeed. His memoirs remind us that he took terrible heat from Canada’s banks when he flatly refused to allow any bank mergers. Perhaps the bankers liked the sound of the phrase “too big to fail” that became familiar at the time of big bailouts of banks in other countries after the Crash. And in his championing of the G20, as opposed to the G8, in international vision he was clearly far ahead of his time.
So what went wrong? What turned the man whom many would hail as the country’s best minister of finance into a disappointing prime minister? What occurs to me is the two-word answer . . . Jean Chrétien. First, we should recognize that the long, secret, underground war with the Chrétienites was an amazing succe
ss. History affords few examples of a sitting prime minister with a winning record, a comfortable majority in the House, and a good standing in the polls, being forced out by a palace coup from inside his own party. And all without stilettos or machine guns.
Here, an outsider might speculate, perhaps lies an explanation for Paul Martin’s discomfort with the word “ambition,” applied to his own career. The same outsider might even go on to observe that a team assembled to produce such a successful political assassination might not be the ideal group to go on and run the country.
Then there is the case of what even the most unromantic journalists call “the poisoned chalice.” The Quebec sponsorship scandal was a tar baby dumped in his lap by Chrétien on his way out the door, and the tar clung to poor Paul. He was the minister of finance, he was from Quebec, surely he must have known what was going on. Even his eloquent protests that the closed Chrétien Quebec circle would have been more likely to inform “The Little Sisters of the Poor” than their enemies, the Martinites, failed to register widely. To many voters the Liberals were now the party of corruption, end of story.
My friend Eddie Goldenberg would say — hell, did say, in his book — that Martin handled the whole thing badly; he should simply have let the scandal play itself out, with the police arresting the guilty people who made ill-gotten gains, and the Liberal Party and the government moving on. What Martin chose to do was to go on a national “mad as hell” tour, telling all Canadians how outraged he was by what had gone on, and appointing the Gomery Commission to reveal the whole truth. What the Gomery Commission did, of course, was keep the issue on the front pages month after month, reminding Canadians daily of this great Liberal corruption-fest in Quebec.
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