Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  To those who say that Canadian companies benefit when they are part of a great international network, I’d say that I agree. No argument there. But why can’t some of these great international networks have their head offices here?

  To those who say that an open season on Canadian companies is a necessary step toward nirvana in the global marketplace, I’d simply respond with the question: “How come that’s not true for the multitude of American, French, Japanese, Indian, and Chinese companies that are off-limits to foreigners?”

  To those who say that the answer lies in reciprocity, again I’d say, fine. Except that by the time those other companies get around to offering us reciprocity, we’ll have nothing left to be reciprocal with.

  Finally, to those who say that people who share my opinions are afraid of globalization, I say, “You couldn’t be more wrong! This has nothing to do with fleeing from globalization. It has everything to do with taking advantage of it — and you can’t do that if you don’t have the tools of the trade.”

  Now these are views that will not make me popular in some quarters. So be it!

  In August 2006, a few months after I stepped down as prime minister, I was out in Vancouver for a meeting of the Liberal caucus. One evening, Belinda Stronach arranged for me to have dinner with some of the MPs that had been closest to me over the years. It was a wonderful event, with plenty of sentimental speeches and lots of wine. After it was over, though, I had something left to do that evening. I had heard that there was a newly commissioned ship in harbour: the Baldock, which was 50 per cent owned by CSL and carried the company logo. For eighteen years I had not stepped foot on a CSL ship. At about ten that night, my executive assistant, Jim Pimblett, and I boarded a water taxi and rode out into the harbour. It was a beautiful evening, with the glittering lights of Vancouver all 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 a thin metal pole, and took in the sea air. They liked it less when I raced up the Baldock’s ladder maybe four storeys in height. The Baldock is a seventy-five-thousand-tonne ocean vessel. It is a hybrid, whose front end, equipped with the most modern self-unloading technology in the world, was grafted onto a back end salvaged from an earlier ship. With Mounties in tow, Jim and I explored the bridge, the sailor’s quarters, and state-of-the-art computer room with the Ukrainian captain, who knew only a little English and may not have had any idea who I was or what my connection to CSL might be. In the engine room, we scrambled over the enormous boilers and the propeller shaft on catwalks suspended above. Then we walked the length of the ship — almost two and a half football fields long — all below deck as I inspected the conveyer system that makes the guts of a self-unloader. It was the kind of ship I had dreamed of when I was building CSL in the 1980s — the kind that could range the world from Vancouver to Singapore. I had never seen one before. And it is part of a large fleet that is controlled by Canadians.

  1 The CP deal eventually fell through, as it happened.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Drawn to the Flame

  For better or for worse, I have always lived my life intensely engaged in the challenge of the moment. There has never been a time when I dabbled in a little of this and a little of that. Since I stepped down as prime minister, many people have remarked on how completely my new preoccupations have taken over my life. When I do have dinner with an old political colleague, instead of trading old war stories I want to talk about the new projects I have launched with Aboriginal Canadians, in Africa, or perhaps about this book. Except when I am asked to give a speech or take on a particular task, I maintain only a passing interest in the current political scene.

  This tendency to focus narrowly on the task immediately at hand has always been there, whether I was in business, or at the Department of Finance, or in 24 Sussex. There are always outside obligations, distractions, and pleasures, of course, that connect me to the other strands of my life and my career. But I tend to push them to the fringes of my consciousness. The same was true during my years at Power Corporation and at CSL. Given my background, politics inevitably intruded into my life during this period to some extent. It is only in retrospect, however, that my political involvement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was intermittent, episodic, and peripheral to my life, seems to have acquired some significance — and even then, the significance seems greater to others than it does to me.

  Before I moved to Montreal, my involvement with the Liberal Party had always been in connection with my father’s political career. Still, I had made some friends among the Young Liberals, including Robert Demers. He later became known as the lawyer who negotiated with the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) for the release of James Cross on behalf of the federal and provincial governments during the October Crisis in 1970. In 1966, shortly after I had moved to Montreal, the Liberal government of Quebec led by Jean Lesage called an election. Bob Demers was working for a young lawyer by the name of Robert Bourassa, who was running for the first time for the Quebec National Assembly in the riding of Mercier in the East Island of Montreal. Demers recruited me as the “warm-up man” at kitchen parties held for Bourassa. I would arrive at a home where there was to be a meet and greet with Bourassa before he got there and get the crowd warmed up. Then Bourassa would come along, and I would leave to do the same job at the next event. That way the candidate’s time could be used to maximum advantage.

  There was another Liberal candidate in the nearby riding of Dorion, named François Aquin, who later went on to become a key figure in the sovereigntist Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale (RIN), a predecessor to the Parti Québécois. Because of Aquin’s obvious sympathies, some federal Liberals supported a rival, independent Liberal candidate, the well-known Quebec wrestler, Johnny Rougeau.

  One day on our way back from a kitchen party for Bourassa, Bob wanted to drop by Aquin’s headquarters. Not a lot was going on, and after about fifteen minutes, feeling restless, I decided to check out what was happening at Rougeau’s campaign office, which was just a block away. The door was open, but there was no one around. I picked up some campaign literature and headed back to Aquin’s office, where I hoped to persuade Bob it was time to go home. About fifteen minutes later, I heard a commotion in the front room and went out to see what was happening. There were two men the size of the Empire State Building — workers for Rougeau — shouting at the Aquin people: “You guys sent a spy into our headquarters and he took some of our stuff and we want it back.”

  It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I was the “spy.” All hell was about to break loose, and even though Aquin’s supporters greatly outnumbered the intruders, they were not about to take on the wrestler’s buddies. Clearly it was up to me to straighten everything out. Unfortunately, while my French is good, I may have been a little weak on the street argot that day. I took them by the shoulders and said, “Come on, let’s go outside and settle this.” Not the perfect choice of words. As we stepped onto the street, from nowhere, it seemed, a clenched fist came crunching into the middle of my face. I don’t remember much more of the moment, except that when I went back into Aquin’s headquarters I had a broken nose.

  It didn’t end there, though. Aquin’s people saw obvious political opportunity in my disjointed nose. You can imagine the headline the next day: Johnny Rougeau’s Workers Beat Up Paul Martin’s Son. The next thing I know, I get a call from my dad: “What have you done now?” Five minutes later, Guy Favreau, the Quebec lieutenant of the federal Liberal Party, phoned: “Rougeau is our candidate, and now you’ve given this coup to Aquin’s campaign. The police are pressing charges. What were you thinking?”

  Favreau’s call was the first I had heard of criminal charges, which had apparently been pressed on Aquin’s insistence. When I phoned the police, they refused to drop them on my say-so. So I phoned Aquin directly. “You’ve got to call the police and tell them it was all a mistake,” I said, “and that they shouldn’t w
orry about it.” But Aquin said, “To hell with you.” So I hung up and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to figure how I was going to get myself out of this jam. Then I phoned Aquin back and said, “Look, go ahead. Press charges. But I want you to know what my testimony will be. These guys came into your headquarters and all your supporters, who outnumbered them ten to one, went running for cover and left me to go out into the street with them alone. In fact, I may just phone up the papers and tell my side of the story this afternoon.” Mysteriously, the charges were dropped. This was my last foray into the more muscular political arts — “muscular from the neck up,” my father would have said.

  The next year — the year of the leadership contest to replace Lester Pearson — would prove to be my last period of political activity for a decade and a half. At the outset, my dad appeared to be the frontrunner. He was the most popular with the public among the likeliest contenders. As a Franco-Ontarian, my father had an obvious appeal to Quebec delegates, one he shared in varying degrees with Jean Marchand and Eric Kierans, of course. But unlike them, he had considerable support in the rest of Canada too.

  There was a great deal of speculation about whether Marchand would run, in part because of the Liberal tradition of alternating between anglophone and francophone leaders. Marchand had always been regarded as the most senior of the so-called “wise men” recruited from Quebec by Pearson, who also included Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Trudeau. To this day, I think my father would likely have won had Marchand entered the race. Dad would have held his vote in English Canada and made inroads in Quebec. And Marchand’s supporters would likely have stood behind my father once their candidate was eliminated. But it was not to be. Marchand decided not to run. Trudeau jumped into the race late and Marchand threw his considerable weight behind him.

  As I mentioned earlier, I took a leave of absence from Power Corporation to work on my father’s campaign. My job was to be a surrogate speaker at meetings Dad couldn’t attend — a role my sons would later play in my own leadership campaigns. Although I went to events across the country, I concentrated on Quebec. My father’s campaign was organized by Duncan Edmonds, with active involvement from Maurice Strong, Jack Austin, Hugh Faulkner, and Jimmy Pattison, among others. The campaign was run in much the same fashion as his 1958 leadership attempt. Paul Hellyer, in contrast, mounted a highly coordinated riding-by-riding campaign, which foreshadowed the organizations that would dominate future contests in the Liberal Party. But it turned out that neither approach could compete with the Trudeau phenomenon. Trudeau’s campaign owed as much to John F. Kennedy’s as it did to anything we had ever seen in Canada before. It was about a change of generations; it was about sweeping out the old with the charisma of the new. Suddenly, all my father’s advantages — his seniority, his experience, his diligent working of the party over decades — were disadvantages, as Liberals were mesmerized with the novelty and promise of Trudeau’s candidacy.

  By the day of the convention, April 6, 1968, we knew it would not happen for us. For the Liberals, it was the first true television convention. My father sat in the stands under the glare of TV lights while I buttonholed delegates on the convention floor. My concern wasn’t so much winning as what the loss would mean to him. That evening, my father scrambled onto a table in a backroom at the convention centre at Lansdowne Park to speak to his supporters. He told them he would not be running again. “In years to come, I will walk along Wellington Street and point at the Parliament Buildings and say I used to work there,” he told them. He knew that his long career in the House of Commons was nearing its end, though in my mind I did not see why he wouldn’t run again and continue as external affairs minister under Trudeau as he had been under Pearson.

  It is my strong memory, and Sheila confirms this, that neither my dad nor I seemed devastated by the loss. The day after the convention, in a gesture that I have never forgotten, John Turner, who had run a strong campaign, invited our family to his home for breakfast. Sheila still vividly recalls how placid my father was in contrast to John, who was still furious at what he saw as the “backroom deals” that determined the convention. I never did find out how my dad voted after he chose to drop off the first ballot. He never said, and I never asked.

  Pierre Trudeau treated my father very well after the 1968 convention. The new prime minister had spoken out about Senate reform during the campaign. Although my father had decided that eleven elections were enough for him, he accepted an appointment to the Senate as government leader, given the challenge of reforming the institution. Later when it became clear that the prime minister was not able to follow through on plans for Senate reform, he appointed my father High Commissioner to the Court of St. James — in effect, the ambassador to Britain. My father accepted this post with enthusiasm, though he worried that it would delay the writing of his memoirs, which had become an important project for him. The time in London turned out to be one of the happiest periods of my parents’ lives, and so I had every reason to feel grateful to Trudeau — and did. In 1979, Joe Clark was elected as the Progressive Conservative prime minister. He told my dad: “You can stay in London as long as you would like. I am not going to ask you to step down.” My father told him that he wanted to come home to write his memoirs, however. Prime Minister Clark’s gesture was a gracious one for which both my father and I were very grateful.

  From the time my father left politics, my active interest in the Liberal Party waned. I continued to have Liberal friends, of course, including Ed Lumley and Jim Coutts, who were very involved in the Trudeau government. But I focused almost exclusively on building my business career. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to politics. When they needed warm bodies at a rally, I was happy enough to show up. But if I thought about government at all, it was from the perspective of a businessman.

  Everyone in Quebec was affected by the October Crisis in 1970, of course. We were all in shock after the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte. There were some provincial cabinet ministers living in our neighbourhood in Mont Royal, and Andrée Bourassa, the premier’s sister, lived just down the street. So there were literally soldiers and police in the streets. Sheila remembers the eeriness of Halloween night, when she walked young Paul from house to house in a neighbourhood bristling with military vehicles and armed men. There were frequent bomb threats, but like many people we drove the police crazy by ignoring the threats and refusing to vacate buildings. As for us, we installed our first-ever alarm system in the house at the urging of the company. I was told not to park the car nearby, for fear that it might be booby-trapped, and not to take a taxi because it might be used in a kidnapping. But these were no more than minor inconveniences. What was far more gripping for Sheila and me was the human and historical drama unfolding around us. We were stunned and deeply saddened when Pierre Laporte was found dead and enormously relieved when James Cross was finally released after his ordeal.

  As the 1970s progressed, I found myself slowly growing out of sync with the economic policies of the Trudeau government. From my vantage point, it was clear that the global economy was changing fundamentally. The days of easy economic growth, abundant job creation, and low inflation were behind us. But like a lot of governments around the world, Canada’s was slow to recognize what was happening. The economy was stalled but inflation continued apace, and a new term — “stagflation” — was coined. Many people in power apparently still believed that Ottawa could spend its way out of economic difficulties, and all that borrowed money would be easily handled in the next upturn. But of course it was nothing like that. And while failure to recognize the new economic reality may have been understandable for two, three, four years, even the passage of time did not seem to change the government’s course. I still remained a strong Liberal, but a political career could not have been further from my mind at the time.

  I remember having lunch sometime in the 1970s with Brian Mulroney. Sitting in the restaurant atop Place Ville Marie, Brian calmly told me of his pl
an to become prime minister one day. His accomplishments were considerable as a lawyer in the high-profile Cliche Commission investigating organized crime in Quebec’s construction industry and later as a businessman. Still, I remember thinking 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. I was making my way in business then, hoping to reach the financial independence that Maurice Strong had talked to me about, and then, I thought, I would pursue an international career.

  Brian has a somewhat different recollection, which he recounts in his memoirs, of what could be the same discussion, though I can’t be sure. He locates it at the Power Corporation fishing lodge on Anticosti Island. I do remember that day, though not for any political conversation. It was extremely — and unusually — hot, so the salmon were not rising to the fly. In the circumstances, we both stripped down to what God gave us and plunged into the water to cool off — something that was absolutely forbidden in a salmon pool. 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.) That the photograph has never surfaced publicly is a matter of considerable relief to both of us.

  During the campaign for the February 1980 election, which ended with Trudeau’s surprise return to office after the Clark government, Jim Coutts called me up to help pack a hall for Trudeau in Montreal. I remember telling him: “I hope he’s going to talk about the economy, and I hope he realizes how difficult Canada’s position is becoming.” I went and heard the prime minister talk once more about the Constitution, and I thought, My god, this is crazy. I was frustrated that he ignored the economy and what I saw as the sorry state of government finances.