Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  As a matter of practical politics, these ideas fused with the sentiments and ambitions of the constituency my father represented. Windsor was in the process of becoming the classic union town during my father’s period as MP, and he was proud to walk with union leaders at the head of the Labour Day parade. This was not as simple and straightforward as it may seem today. Just south of the border, the American labour leader, Walter Reuther, who was a friend of my father, was leading the charge to unionize the auto industry. The United Auto Workers were militant, as they had to be to take on the auto giants, while also being anti-communist and supportive of the war effort during the Second World War. The union movement of the time advocated not just better wages, benefits, and conditions but also a larger, more secure, and dignified role for the working man in North American life. It inspired great passions. I remember that Walkerville, where many of the auto industry executives lived, was for many years a wasteland for my father. I remember as well my father’s pleasure late in his parliamentary career when he finally wrested the area from the Tories.

  My father’s battles for public pensions, employment insurance, and health care addressed the needs and desires of his constituents and arose from a vision of a very substantially reformed capitalism. If it was a struggle sometimes to convince his cabinet colleagues to come up with the cash for what must have seemed extravagant ideas, he could always come home to the riding and have it driven home to him that it was the right thing to do. In my own career, I have tried to be faithful to my father’s legacy. True, I am a fiscal conservative, but I have always coupled that to a belief that sound finances are the underpinning, the way to pay for the social Liberalism I also believe in and that I inherited from my father. This brand of Liberalism begins with Laurier — a deep respect for individual freedom and a belief that the state has the responsibility to open up the social, educational, and economic opportunities that will enable the poor to achieve that freedom. No trickle-down economics there!

  It says something about the bond my father forged with his constituents that, much later, when he stepped down as High Commissioner to Britain, he didn’t retire to Ottawa but headed back to Essex East to be with “his people,” as he liked to call them.

  One time in the late 1940s, my father drove Mary Anne and me to a church picnic. On the way, Mary Anne asked, “Daddy, what is Essex East?”

  “Don’t you know,” I interjected. “Essex East is the Promised Land.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Young Man and the Sea

  Father Edmund McCorkell was a Basilian priest who was registrar of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto when my father was a student there and who later became Superior of the college. My father greatly admired his lectures in political philosophy, and they became lifelong friends, with Father McCorkell officiating at my parents’ wedding in Windsor in 1937. He was a gentle and generous man. So I am sure that when Father McCorkell, in the course of a visit to our place in Colchester, asked about my studies in the last year of high school, he didn’t mean to ruin my summer.

  There was an unquestioned assumption in my family — certainly unquestioned by me — that once I finished first year at the University of Ottawa, which was the equivalent of grade thirteen in the rest of the province, I would follow in my parents’ footsteps by going to the University of Toronto: St. Michael’s College, to be precise. My mother was a graduate in pharmacy from the U of T. My father had completed a degree in philosophy at St. Mike’s, the Catholic college on campus, before going on to Harvard and Cambridge.

  In general, my high school studies weren’t going at all badly, despite the fact that I was not an avid student. My preoccupations in those years were always sports. I played baseball in Windsor’s warmer climes and hockey in Ottawa. I played high school football when the season was on and swam and played basketball for the university team. The record showed that I could spend my spare time as I pleased and still get through school with a minimum of effort at exam time. There was really only one unhappy exception: algebra. Later in life, in business and in government, I had a knack for numbers. But this did not come from a mastery of the intricacies of quadratic equations. In fact, while I had received firsts in most of my other subjects in the weeks before Father McCorkell posed his question, I had failed algebra. No need to worry, I explained to him, because as I understood it, algebra was not required in light of my other marks. I was not prepared for his response.

  Not long after my conversation with Father McCorkell, Dad and I headed out onto the placid waters of Lake Erie. Fishing was one of those rare occasions in my father’s life that did not, in his opinion, require him to wear a shirt and tie. Usually it was a time for the two of us to relax together without any distractions and we both enjoyed it.

  “Well,” he said once we had muscled the little steel rowboat out into the lake and were arranging our fishing tackle. “Now, what about St. Mike’s?”

  “Well, I’ve got a problem. I didn’t get algebra. Father McCorkell says that means I won’t be able to get into St. Mike’s. It looks like I’ll be staying at the University of Ottawa for at least another year.”

  When I was finance minister, and later prime minister, I developed a reputation for a volcanic temper — exaggerated perhaps, but not entirely undeserved. Let me just say that I was not the first member of the Martin clan to exhibit this characteristic. My father’s temper was not the slow, simmering kind. It was more the sort that blows the top off some great mountain, darkens the skies, and drapes the landscape in ash before settling back, almost as suddenly, to a quiet, looming presence.

  The fishing excursion did not last as long as originally planned. Before I knew it, I found myself working with a tutor for hours each day through the long, hot summer, studying for my algebra “sup.” Perhaps through the intercession of the clergy, if not an even higher power, I arrived at St. Mike’s late that fall, but arrived nonetheless.

  It must be hard for those of any other generation to understand the extraordinarily lucky timing enjoyed by pre—baby-boomers like me. Our parents had lived through two world wars that had depleted their generation and scarred those who survived. They had also weathered a devastating Depression. For my father’s family — who struggled financially at the best of times — the Depression had been a period of real suffering, insecurity, and want. It left its lifelong mark on my father. Even once he enjoyed political success and national renown, he was haunted by a lingering fear of financial ruin. It was not until his very latest days that the fear bred in him by the Depression loosened its grip. Even for my mother’s family, which weathered the Thirties better than my father’s, there was a real prospect of being pitched back into the poverty they had escaped by dint of enormous effort over many years.

  But for us, the pre—baby-boomers, all that was literally history. Our experience was of universities yawning with places waiting for us, law firms and medical schools yearning for bright young people, and businesses with too much to do and not enough capable people to do it. The unprecedented economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s pulled us up the ladder of success. It never occurred to us that if we wanted to go to university or to law school, or to get a job in business, there would be any problem. For the generation after us, who faced stiffer competition in a weaker economy, that was not the case. This was one of the reasons that in later life I felt so strongly that it was unfair for my generation to ask our children to pay for the financial and pension deficits we had created.

  I had some of Canada’s greatest scholars teaching me at the U of T — the historians C.P. Stacey and Tom Symons, among others. I was also just as likely to audit a course I had never enrolled in as attend those where I was supposed to be. Marshall McLuhan, for example, lectured in a backroom of House #2 (now called McCorkell House, after my father’s friend), where I was quartered at St. Mike’s. His class was handier, and much more interesting, than some of the philosophy courses in which I was actually enrolled.

  At the ti
me, my principal objective in life was to play in the Canadian Football League (CFL). My friend from Colchester, Jerry Philp, who remains a good friend to this day, was the best athlete I ever knew and went on to have a long career as an end with the Toronto Argonauts. (His wife, Joanne, was also a tremendous cook, and in my years at the University of Toronto she gave me much needed respite from the residence cafeteria.) I had been a reasonably good high school football player. However, I did not have the size to make up for my lack of talent, or the talent to make up for my lack of size. When I tried out for the University of Toronto Blues, my grandmother had died and I showed up late for training camp, and was rocked when I didn’t make the team. It taught me a hard lesson about being prepared if you really want something. In the meantime, I swam and played water polo and basketball. I played tennis in the summer and skied in the winter.

  A lot of my attention and enthusiasm in these early years went into my summer jobs. I had begun working when I was quite young. The story my father used to tell of us driving by a tobacco farm in the riding when I was about thirteen or fourteen is well known, and quite true.

  “Boy. Thank god I don’t have to do that,” I said. “Look at those people working in the hot sun.”

  For my father this was an alarm bell, and the next day I found myself picking tobacco in the fields of Essex County. It was the most backbreaking job I ever had. It meant reaching down thousands of times a day to the base of a plant to sever the tobacco leaves as the dry, dusty air filled your nose and eyes and the searing sun beat down on your back and neck. It certainly gave me the incentive to find my own work the next summer. At the time, there was a thriving fishery on Lake Erie. Mance Campbell had a fishing business and his boat was moored just off the Colchester dock. So, when I was contemplating my escape from the tobacco fields, I went over and asked whether I could get a job on his boat and he said yes — as simple as that. I loved the idea that I could get up at four in the morning, head to the dock in the pre-dawn light, jump on the fishing boat, and we were away. I did the grunt work: helping to pull in the nets filled with bass, perch, and — the big prize — Lake Erie pickerel, the best-tasting fish that ever swam. We packed the fish on ice and then cleaned them at the dock when we returned. It was not exactly the deep sea, but I loved it. It was the beginning of my lifelong romance with boats, ships, water, and anything nautical.

  Unfortunately, perhaps because of a downturn in the fishery, I had the job for only one summer. My father was determined that I keep working and next year landed me a place at the Hiram Walker distillery. It should have been a dream job, I suppose, but it was office work and I chafed at it, like a big dog locked in the house all day, looking out the window at real life. As soon as I could, I found other work, in construction, and quit Hiram Walker. That was the beginning of a series of similar jobs over the next few years, working for Eastern Construction in Windsor. I am sure my dad, who was friends with the owners, Bud and Ed Odette, got me in, though I put it about that they had hired me as a ringer for their fastball team. Fastball was a fast-pitch variation of softball, and Windsor’s fastball league was one of the best in the country. I was sure I was about to write a historic page in the annals of the company team. This little bit of myth building came crashing down when I struck out almost every time at bat, and I was soon back in the Essex County baseball league where I belonged.

  So I worked in construction, and worked hard, though that is not what the Odettes would remember me for, any more than for my prowess on the fastball field. Ed Odette had a brand-new Chrysler Imperial, a very fine automobile, which had some kind of a problem and needed to be taken to the shop. It took about two weeks to get fixed, and I was dispatched to get the car, which Ed Odette had only driven once before. By this time, I was an experienced driver for a teenager, having driven pickup trucks and even a cement mixer. On the way home from the garage, somebody had evidently misplaced a stop sign, because I didn’t see it, and I hit another car at the intersection. Luckily no one was seriously hurt, but the Imperial was totalled. If I needed further proof that the Odettes were family friends, let me just say that I wasn’t fired.

  Later on, I was hired by Coca-Cola. I considered it a great inequity that my friend Ed Lumley (who later became a cabinet minister under Pierre Trudeau and John Turner) was allowed to drive a truck while I was relegated to a secondary role as his helper, something he has never let me forget. It has since been pointed out to me that my experience with the Odettes, and a later one during a summer job in Alberta that I landed through Maurice Strong, did not recommend me to any job involving holding the driver’s wheel.

  Maurice Strong was president of a company called Canadian Industrial Gas and Oil when I was in university. He gave me a job near Morinville, in the oil patch just north of Edmonton. My assignment was to drive around to the wellheads checking gauges. Being a clever young fellow with lots of initiative, over the course of a few weeks I noticed two things: the gauges never changed and the Calgary Stampede was going on just 190 miles south. It seemed to me that it would be an important part of my education to see the Calgary Stampede. Naturally, I took the company pickup as my means of transport, though I neglected to tell anyone. After a merry day taking in calf-roping and the like, I headed back to Morinville. It started to rain hard while I was negotiating the back roads. The roads were clay — gumbo really — a substance that was new to this Eastern city-boy. I hit a slippery patch and flipped the truck into the ditch many miles away from any place I could reasonably have been if I had actually been doing my job. Maurice has always insisted that he did not fire me, and I don’t recall that we had a face-to-face confrontation. I am nonetheless pretty sure my employment was terminated, whatever he says, because I soon found myself hitchhiking north to Hay River on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.

  In Hay River, I was excited to land a job with the Yellowknife Transportation Company, which plied the Mackenzie River north to the Beaufort Sea with several tugboats and dozens of barges. I was hired for one of the tugs because they needed extra crew for a salvage job they were planning to undertake once they unloaded up north — or rather “down north” as the expression was, because the Arctic was downriver. After the Second World War, someone had bought a military surplus Landing Ship Tank (LST), designed to run aground and release troops and equipment on enemy shores. After being brought to the Beaufort Sea for use as a barge, the LST had broken free of its moorings and drifted ashore on an island, where it had been abandoned. The people running Yellowknife Transportation had decided that it was worth trying to salvage the LST for use on the Mackenzie.

  One day, while were waiting at Tuktoyaktuk to mount the salvage expedition, I had some free time and decided to take a walk on the tundra. People don’t realize this, but it can get extremely hot in the North in the summertime and after walking for an hour or so, I was tired and decided to lie down for a nap. I slept for maybe half an hour. When I woke, I sat up and looked across the Arctic landscape, virtually featureless in every direction. I simply had no idea where I was or how to get back to camp. I could have set out in any one of four directions, and maybe walked for hundreds of miles without finding anybody. As I stumbled about, lost, I heard the sound of water and was elated: the Mackenzie! I walked for half an hour toward the sound, but when I got there, it was nothing: just a tiny stream whose sound had been magnified in the windless air suspended over the treeless landscape. I continued to wander for several hours before, by the grace of God, I came to a place I recognized and was able to make my way back.

  Later, the mate on the tug, who had befriended me, took me back to where I had been and showed me how I had gone wrong. He was Métis, well acquainted with the tundra. He demonstrated how, if I looked carefully, it was possible to see the imprints of my boots on the spongy ground. Had I understood that, I could have followed my own tracks back to camp from where I had slept. It struck me how well he knew and understood his environment. And it occurred to me that ma
ny Aboriginal people from the North, coming to our cities in the South, must feel at least a little like I had when I was stumbling around on the tundra.

  After that, I stayed close to the tug but not out of trouble. A few days later we headed out into the Beaufort Sea and managed to free the LST. We lashed it to our tug with a steel cable and towed it back toward the mouth of the Mackenzie. But as we chugged along, a storm blew up, slapping our faces with sleet and churning up the sea. Huge plates of pack ice began to squeeze in on us, and I was sent up the radio antenna tower to keep watch. When the wind shifted again, all of a sudden a chunk of pack ice slammed into the tug and threatened to overturn it. I was still high on the antenna, which had swung out over the heaving water and ice at an ugly tilt. Our ship and our lives were now in the balance, and the captain decided the only way to save the situation was to cut the LST loose. The crew waved and shouted for me to come down from my perch, but I didn’t listen because I was enjoying the show. Thinking that I had descended as I had been ordered to, they went ahead and took an axe to the tow cable. When it snapped, the tug swung violently back and forth with me up top being flipped around like a rag doll and hanging on for my life.