I think that there may be a reason for the “mad as hell” tour that lies beyond political tactics. Maybe Paul Martin really was mad as hell. Mad that the wily Chrétien had dumped this sticky mess in his lap. Mad that the money had all gone out behind his back, when he was trying to mind the dollars and cents. Mad that the revelations had set the rest of the country against the “corrupt” province of Quebec. And above all mad that he was now stuck trying to defend a Liberal “brand” that had been hopelessly stained by the whole thing. At another level, I’d suggest that maybe Paul Martin, although he was a grown-up well aware that politics can be a rough game, was personally disgusted by the corruption.
In the end — as Eddie Goldenberg would have warned him — the fact that Gomery exonerated him personally from any complicity in the affair simply didn’t matter. The Sponsorship Scandal thundercloud hung over his whole term in office. Eventually, with a mysterious assist from the then–RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli, it burst, and swept him out of office, with most of his ideas still waiting to be enshrined in law.
Ken Dryden is perhaps the best person to demonstrate how frustrating Paul Martin’s defeat was — frustrating in that it prevented a major national agreement making it into law. Ken was sworn into the Martin Cabinet as minister for social development in 2004, but he and I go back a long way before that. Like the rest of the country, I used to watch him in his glory days as the Montreal Canadiens’ star goalie, in the years when they routinely won the Stanley Cup. I knew that Ken, a Cornell graduate in history who left the Canadiens for a while to complete his law degree at McGill, had a unique set of talents. Some day, I guessed, he might produce a great book from inside the world of hockey at the very top.
I approached him, signed him up, and encouraged him to stick at the project for many years, until in 1983 I was able to publish The Game. Trent Frayne, the wise old sportswriter at the Globe (who was also married to the wonderful June Callwood), liked Ken’s book so much that he described it as “the sports book of the century.” How can I argue? It sold accordingly.
Ken and I became close friends as his daughter, Sarah, and my girls, Meg and Katie, played on the same University of Toronto Schools high school field hockey team. Often Ken and I were the only two dads in attendance, punching each other’s shoulders in delight as the UTS girls triumphed. Later I teamed Ken up with our friend Roy MacGregor (the man I turned loose on The Screech Owls series of hockey books for kids, joking that it would be his pension plan; with over a million copies of the series sold, Roy and Ellen’s pension plan is coming along nicely). Together Ken and Roy wrote Home Game (1989), a look at hockey’s role in Canadian life, based on Ken’s TV series with the same name. It sold very well, as you would expect.
Later, I was glad to publish In School (1996), Ken’s bold idea for a book about what really goes on inside our schools each day. I found it hard to believe that he could fold his massive six-foot-four inch frame into a school desk at the back of the room in a way that allowed the teacher and the kids to carry on as if he weren’t there. So he arranged for me to come along on a typical day (“No coat or tie, Doug, or they’ll think you’re a cop”), and I found that, amazingly, being with Ken meant that his magic cloak of invisibility somehow extended over me, too. The only bad moment was when Ken drove me back to the subway, dropping me off at the “Kiss and Ride” section. Not part of the deal, I protested.
We were such good friends that I was able to play a practical joke on him. Our M&S publicist, the lively Kelly Hechler, came into my office one day to say that Preston Manning (then leader of the Reform Party) had just called, to get in touch with (the author and apolitical civilian) Ken Dryden. I felt a shiver of possibility. Had she given the number, and did Ken know that Preston was going to call him? Yes and Yes.
Aha! Most Canadian males of a certain age believe that they can imitate Preston’s scratchy, very distinctive voice. This was too good to miss. I dialled Ken’s number, muffling my voice slightly with a handkerchief. Ken answered.
“Is that Ken Dryyyden?”
“Yes.”
“This is Preston Maaanning. Did you know that I was likely to call?”
Ken, earnestly: “Yes. Yes, I did.”
I punched the air. I had him going.
“Well, Mr, Dryyyden — or can I call you Ken? Good, good, please call me Preston. Ken, I’ve followed your career with interest, and I wanted to call you up and say this.” (And now, no doubt, Ken was expecting an invitation to run as a Reform MP.) “What I want to say is . . . why don’t you go and just . . .”
And here “Preston” said something very, very rude, meaning that Ken should go away.
I discovered at that moment that it is possible, on the other end of a phone, to hear a jaw drop. Ken had just been sworn at by the saintly Preston Manning, the least foul-mouthed man in Canadian public life, and he was struck dumb.
I resumed the conversation, in my own voice, “Actually, Ken, it’s not Preston, it’s Doug Gibson, but he will be calling you in due course.” I hope that Ken was polite to the real Preston Manning when he called. He took a little time to be polite to me.
When Ken left the world of books to run as an MP, I wished him well, and watched benevolently as he won a seat in the House, and a place in Paul Martin’s cabinet. There he performed a miracle. Anyone who remembers Meech Lake knows that for any federal plan to be accepted by every single province is nothing short of miraculous. The odds are heavily against any group of provincial representatives being able to look out of the window and agree as to whether the sun was shining or not. Yet Ken pulled it off with his plan to create a national child-care program.
As Paul’s memoirs say: “Ken is quite simply a star, and not only because of his hockey career. His low-key seriousness and obvious goodwill meant that he was extremely effective in building relationships with his provincial counterparts.”
Tenaciously and patiently he put together a national daycare strategy, first with Manitoba, “then with the other provinces one by one, until we had a truly national agreement.”
Like the Kelowna Accord, which offered a new deal to Canada’s aboriginal peoples, whose very disparate leaders all signed on to the accord in good faith, it was one of the Martin Government’s great achievements. And, like the Kelowna Accord, it died when the Harper Government took over.
Ken Dryden ran for the party leadership when Paul stepped down. As a friend I attended a couple of his fundraisers where he talked about the child-care agreement that had been trashed. Ken is a thoughtful, soft-spoken, low-key guy, who rarely gets angry (I suspect that there are times when only his wife Lynda and their kids are aware that he is angry). Yet it was striking how passionate he was — in a slow burn sort of way — as he talked about what had been achieved, and then thrown away. We can only imagine how Ken’s frustration over just one program must have been multiplied many times for Paul Martin as he looked across the whole range of unfulfilled ideas.
The word “ideas” brings me to an important point, another reason that, I suspect, led to his failure to achieve the results he wanted while in office. Working with him, I found that he was a man of great enthusiasms. No surprise there. I suggest that a large part of his problem as head of government (summed up in the hostile description “Mr. Dithers”) was that he was an intellectual.
Let me explain that. He was an intellectual in the sense that he really liked ideas. I have worked with bright people of all sorts, often with strings of publications and degrees to their name. But I have rarely encountered anyone who was so genuinely excited by ideas.
Three examples. The national daycare program really started years earlier, in 1996, when a research paper from “the social policy expert Ken Battle at the Caledon Institute” happened to reach Paul’s office. The Martin book recalls, “I thought the scheme was ingenious, and I phoned Ken up one Sunday morning to talk about it. We didn’t know each other at the time,
and he was plainly a little startled at being peppered with questions from the minister of finance . . .” No kidding.
Second, Michael Decter’s 2010 memoir, Tales from the Back Room, tells of a meeting that Paul, then minister of finance, arranged in order to pick Michael’s brains about health care. “I remember it as an unusual experience. Often when someone in political life asks you your opinion after a very short period of time they will tell you their opinion, often at great length. Paul Martin did exactly the opposite. For over two hours at lunch he sought my views, in meticulous detail. I was both intrigued and flattered. Martin proved to be that rare creature, a politician who could really listen.”
In a similar vein, Martin cabinet colleague John Godfrey has told me of an incident when he put some thoughts on paper and sent them along to Paul. He received a phone call on Christmas morning from Paul, eager to discuss what he had written, tossing around his own ideas.
All of this would have been fine if as head of government Paul had had an experienced team (or maybe a Goldenberg figure) to make sure his trains ran on time, concentrating on this issue, and leaving that one, and that other one, for later attention. I’m sure that his staff tried. It is an ironic theory that this very successful businessman, and the former effective head of an immensely complex finance department, should have failed to achieve as much as he wanted as prime minister, because ideas set him afire with excitement.
The first time I met Paul was at a “Politics and the Pen” dinner in Ottawa. This annual fundraiser for the Writers’ Trust, dear to Sheila Martin’s heart, features a dinner at the Château Laurier, where members of the public share a convivial table with a politician and a writer. One year I found myself at the central table with Sheila and the prime minister. I was told that I had been selected for the table because an organizer had said, “Oh, Doug can talk with anyone” (which was a compliment that pleased my mother, Jenny, a woman who knows something about talking, and is still notably articulate at ninety-seven). The onstage entertainment after dinner was provided by “Bowser and Blue,” and their act consisted largely of doing Paul Martin imitations, as PM the PM talked excitedly about one “priority” after another. All good clean fun. Except it went on and on. This was happening at a time when Paul Martin was being hammered daily in the House, and as the onstage attacks continued, I caught his eye across the table. I tried to convey the message “I know there are lots of things you’d rather be doing in the evening, instead of sitting here in your bow tie, smiling gamely as the folks onstage get into their tenth minute of attacking you.” He smiled, and shrugged slightly, inclining his head to one side. What can you do?
He is a nice man. Journalists recall that you could have a real conversation with him, rather than receiving an oration from on high. I’m struck that Mulroney suggested that he might be a good neighbour, but too “gentle” for politics. Certainly any stranger who greets him will find how rewarding an airport corridor encounter with him is likely to be. And he was great, touring the office with me and thanking the M&S staff.
As for his own staff, in his book he makes no secret of his explosive temper, but seemed genuinely surprised when people were unable to shrug it off as just a temporary outburst, over in a moment. His former staff — many of whom were very helpful to me in my task of extracting the final version of the book — are fiercely loyal, always a good sign. And the delightful Sheila is not only the perfect political wife, she is also an admirer of Alice Munro!
As you would expect, he has a good sense of humour, and his funniest stories are often at his own expense. Once Paul accompanied his distinguished father to China, where the interpreter was baffled by the task of introducing two Western dignitaries named Paul Martin. Eventually, in English the father became “Paul Martin, The Great,” while our man became “Paul Martin, The Not-So-Great.” In the same spirit, the strange sequence of events that led to his being fired or resigning from Chrétien’s cabinet is described in a chapter wryly entitled “Getting Quit.”
Relations between a ghost writer and the author of record are always confidential, but neither Paul (Martin or Adams) would object to my saying that I sometimes found myself in the role of referee, although problems never reached the level experienced by the stars of the movie The Ghost Writer, and nobody was drowned. As for me, my main problem with this nice man was that he could not stop rewriting his book. (Sheila’s favourite author, Alice Munro, follows the same practice, but to greater effect.) I would edit what I thought was a final version of a chapter, as agreed by him and Paul Adams, back it would go to him, and then it would come back to me, largely rewritten. And so on.
When I remonstrated with him, protesting that he had been spoiled by teams of assistants helping him to make last-minute changes to speeches, a very different matter from rewriting a whole book, he would respond by asking when was the absolute, drop-dead, last date for making any changes if the book was to come out at the promised time. I would hedge, suspecting what was coming. Sure enough, when he got me to name a date, he would say “Impossible!” and we’d argue some more, with me perhaps grudgingly allowing him an extra couple of days.
I notice that in the book’s acknowledgements he describes me as “he of the merciless edit, graceful pen, and lack of tolerance for last-minute changes.” He is a mischievous fellow. During some of this editorial to-and-fro he began one phone call to me with the grim words “Hello, Mr. Stalin.” As you might expect, we had fun together on the promotional trail. When we launched the book at a noisy party at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, it became clear that many of his former staffers were there. When in my speech of welcome I spoke about how his insistence on getting his text exactly right “reflected great credit on him, but was a great trial for me,” Martin veterans were loudly amused.
For his part, Paul tore me into little bits. “If Gibson had edited Shakespeare,” he declaimed angrily, “There would be no Shakespeare!” And so on. He was very good at it, and at the end we agreed that taking our show on the road was a good idea.
A week later, at the Granite Club in Toronto, I scandalized the audience by reminding them of what I called “Canada’s Banana Republic Moment.” By that I meant the moment in the middle of Paul Martin’s last election campaign, when, with the election evenly poised, the police stepped in to tilt the balance. The then-respected Commissioner of the RCMP Guiliano Zaccardelli intervened personally to accuse Liberal Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale of wrongdoing. He did so in what the Kennedy Report into the matter later called “the absence of a rational or justifiable basis for such disclosure.” Because, incredibly, Zaccardelli refused to testify (then or since), about this stain on our electoral history, he got away with it — arguably swinging the election, and keeping Paul Martin from achieving his aims as prime minister.
Paul continues, in so-called retirement, to be in demand in the world’s capitals as a turn-around specialist for national economies in distress, when he is not working on international causes like the disappearing Congo rainforest. His work on the problems that affect aboriginal youth at home involves a huge investment in time, money, and energy; in the summer of 2010 he was seeking my advice about the textbooks he is creating specially for aboriginal business students.
Later that summer, at my invitation, he came to speak at the annual lakeside Couchiching Conference. The discussion theme that year was whether the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 had been a “Watershed Moment or a Wasted Opportunity,” and among the 300 informally dressed ordinary Canadians who enjoy discussing important public issues, Paul was in his element. In an open-neck shirt and light summer slacks, he paced the stage. Speaking without notes, wise-cracking, quoting behind-the-scenes conversations, he explained why the G8 had needed to be expanded to the G20 (really the G19, he noted, but none of the finance ministers or their economists can count), then participated in a panel that developed his themes, and fielded questions from the audience.
It was a masterful
performance, revealing a relaxed man who was widely informed, witty, and passionate about the ideas that could lead to solutions for many of the world’s problems. When I asked a question about China — quoting the “Paul Martin, The Not-So-Great” story — he took the chance to denounce the horrors of being edited by me, before going on to muse about China’s role in the G20.
He was the star of the conference. Dozens of attendees — from young graduate students there on scholarship, to experienced university professors, to engaged senior citizens — were stunned, telling me that they had simply no idea how good he was, and regretting that they had never had the chance to see this Paul Martin when he was prime minister.
He is a very decent man, as even Martha Hall Findlay (bumped by him to make way for the new Liberal “star” Belinda Stronach) is happy to attest. And of course he remains such a devoted family man that even his grumpy publisher had to agree that it was worth holding up the very last photo in the book to allow his latest grandchild to be included in the family grouping.
A final thought: I believe that it’s true that Paul Martin was the prime minister we never really got to know. He was teasing me, of course, in his role as non-stop reviser, when he signed my copy of his book with the words, “Doug, There is so much I could add and revise, so much I could say about you. Please give me a chance.”
I hope that, to twist the meaning, I have given him a chance here.
He was more — much more — than just a pretty voice. Not that the voice was the traditional FM baritone, the measured voice of the politician or the pitchman. It was too distinctive, too much of what Maritime writer Sheree Fitch called “a stutter stammer” to be a conventional radio voice. But somehow it worked wonderfully well on the radio, and for fifteen years, from 1982 to 1997, for three hours a day on CBC’s Morningside, it drew the country together as he played the role of what Peter C. Newman has shrewdly called “Canada’s Boswell.” The warm, rough, unpolished voice with the occasional guffaw gave him the role of uncle to a nation.
Stories About Storytellers Page 36