Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  I was also unhappy about the National Energy Program (NEP). It was not that I disagreed that the government had a role in shaping the oil and gas industry. I supported the creation of Petro-Canada, for example, because I believed there needed to be a major Canadian presence in the oil patch. In fact, one of my regrets as prime minister is that I did not create a bio-tech Crown corporation that could have helped aggregate and build Canada’s strength in that field before being sold back into the private sector as Petro-Canada ultimately was. But I believed that the NEP was bad policy. It threatened Western Canada’s economic development and isolated Canada from global currents. In the long run I was sure this would harm us.

  At the time I was involved in a couple of Liberal policy talk-shops: most notably, Grindstone and the Faulkner Group. Grindstone, which was named after the Ontario resort south of Ottawa where it met, was an annual gathering of youngish, reform-minded Liberals to talk policy and have a few drinks. That’s where I met Mike Robinson, who would later play an important role in all my national political campaigns. The Faulkner Group was a similar gathering that attracted a slightly older, more established crowd assembled by former Trudeau minister Hugh Faulkner. It was there that I met Peter Nicholson, the businessman, public servant, economist, and intellectual who would later advise me in many capacities during my time in government, and whose wife, Jane, became one of Sheila’s closest friends. Because of my involvement in these groups — and perhaps also because my father has written that in these years I had already begun to consider my entry into politics — many people think this was the unofficial beginning to my political career.

  Not so. In fact, to the extent that I was engaged in policy debates, I was more active in the international arena, as a founding board member of the North-South Institute, for example, and frequently attended meetings of the international branch of the Conference Board. I had also developed an interest in Aboriginal entrepreneurship — a domestic issue, to be sure, but hardly the express ticket to high political office.

  As Sheila has said, if I was planning a political career at this time, she certainly didn’t know about it. For the moment, I was immersed in the takeover of CSL, an adventure that not only required most of my time and energy but also had me gambling all of our relatively modest personal wealth.

  In the fall of 1981, a matter of weeks after Ladi Pathy and I bought CSL, I did get a visit from three young Liberals: Peter Donolo, Alf Apps, and Terrie O’Leary. Like many young Liberals at the time, my visitors had two preoccupations: party reform and economic policy. Their concerns about economic issues were closest to my own. We had a long, free-ranging talk — much longer than they had imagined possible, as I later learned. I agreed to give a speech on economic policy at a Young Liberals convention that was to be held right before the party’s annual conference. As it happened, my economic speech was overshadowed by an open challenge to Trudeau’s management of the party at the convention. No one remembered much of what I had to say. However, the personal contacts I made with the Young Liberals had an enduring impact on my political life — though I did not recognize this at the time — and the economic principles I espoused formed the bedrock of my politics throughout my later career.

  During this period I was also invited to speak to an audience of Saskatchewan Liberals. Afterwards, I was approached by an awkwardly dressed young man with a bad haircut. He introduced himself as David Herle and said that if I ever wanted to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party, he was going to be there for me. It seemed an unlikely offer and a slender foundation on which to build any such ambition. I had no idea at the time of the importance David would assume in my political career. And I had no way of knowing that he would develop into one of the shrewdest policy and political minds in the country. He came to work for me at CSL prior to going to law school and later played a prominent role in every national campaign I had anything to do with. He has been a great friend and a sound adviser over more than two decades, though I have not changed my views about his style of dress.

  Notwithstanding David’s surprising suggestion, my preoccupation at the time remained business. After all, having engineered Canada’s largest-ever leveraged buyout a few months before (which is a polite way of saying I had borrowed an awful lot of money), I needed to drill down on my plans for refashioning CSL into a world player. When Pierre Trudeau stepped down in 1984, I was on a few journalists’ speculative lists of potential candidates to succeed him, but that was just talk and certainly didn’t amount to much in my mind. I took the much more modest role of chairman of the leadership debates, for which I was qualified mainly by virtue of my bilingualism and my gilt-plate Liberal name. I was personally (though not publicly) a supporter of Mark McGuigan, largely because of Windsor connections, which was just about as good as being completely neutral in the race since his prospects were so slender. Many of the young people who would eventually form the core of my organization, such as Terrie, David, and Richard Mahoney, were cutting their political teeth with John Roberts’s campaign, though I was only dimly aware of this at the time.

  Although the task of chairing the debates gave me an opportunity to see both the frontrunners, Jean Chrétien and John Turner, up close, I didn’t know either man well. Ironically, at the time I knew Brian Mulroney much better. Sheila and I were among the legion of Montrealers who watched his courtship of Mila — and urged him to hurry up and marry her. Brian and Mila had continued to be friends after he became Leader of the Opposition, though we had almost no contact once he became prime minister.

  Possibly because of this earlier friendship I was the lone Liberal appointee to the board of the Canadian Development Investment Corporation (CDIC) not to be fired after the Tories took office. I was horrified when I learned about this, but some of CDIC’s managers urged me to stay on, embarrassing as the situation was, in the hope that I could ease the transition. CDIC’s role was to make investments in key sectors of the Canadian economy — a task more suited to small-l liberal traditions than to those of the small-c conservatives just arriving on the board. At the first meeting I attended, the new chairman let loose with a crude blast at the previous Liberal government, saying in essence that everything that it had done was wrong. I counter-attacked and we got into a nasty row. I realized that my position on the board was hopeless and that to stay any longer would be a betrayal of everything we had done at CDIC during my four-year tenure, so I resigned.

  By the mid-1980s, I had consolidated CSL’s financial position as well as my own, and my mind was starting to turn to the possibility of the second career I had always assumed would be mine. It was time to fish or cut bait. Like many people in their mid-forties, I knew that if I did not make a break soon, I would probably never do so. Although my ambition had always been to work internationally, I now had to face the fact that I had not built a firm foundation abroad. After all, I had lived all my life, save for a few months, here in Canada. It was a little too late to go work for the World Bank as a field officer. In contrast, because of my pedigree perhaps, as well as my business career, I was actually in demand here in Canada. In 1986, Raymond Garneau, who was involved in recruiting candidates for the federal Liberals in Quebec, started to pressure me hard. When I said that I would think about it, he replied, “Don’t think about it. If you do that you’ll never run.” I did think about it, but it didn’t take me long to make up my mind.

  There was one major obstacle, however: Senator Pietro Rizzuto, who headed the Liberal organization in Quebec. Unlike the rest of the country, where most candidates had to get nominated through a democratic exercise of party members at the local level, in Quebec the party machine designated the candidates, and nomination meetings were often no more than a formality. Rizzuto wanted me to run in Laval, which would have put me firmly under his thumb since he so completely controlled the organization there.

  Jean Chrétien urged me to run in Windsor, which my father had represented. He was, of course, positioning himself to run for the lead
ership again and may have regarded me as a potential candidate at some point as well — preferably not against him. He argued that as a member from an anglophone Ontario seat such as Windsor, I would be in a better position to succeed a francophone Quebecer like him. Although I retained many friendships in Windsor, it had been a very long time since I had lived there, and I would clearly have been a “parachute” candidate. Besides, I did not see any particular reason at that point to tie my future to the tradition of l’alternance, which cuts both ways, of course.

  In the end, I narrowed my own list of possibilities to three ridings: Rosemont in the East Island of Montreal, Brome in the Eastern Townships where Sheila and I had our farm, and LaSalle-Émard. I wanted a seat where I could win the nomination on my own and not be indebted to the party organizers. I settled on LaSalle-Émard in part because of what my father had always said about the importance of your constituency reflecting the objectives you have at the national level. It was a middle-class riding, about half francophone with the rest a mixture of allophones and anglophones. In 1984, the Conservative candidate, Claude Lanthier, had won the seat by a comfortable margin of almost four thousand votes. By the national party I was seen as something of a “star” candidate; however, this meant absolutely nothing to the voters of Lasalle-Émard. It has been my experience that apart from hockey players, most “star candidates” are stars only within a narrow segment of the population. This was certainly the case with me. The Liberal Party constituency executive was distinctly unimpressed at our first meeting. I got to know the members one by one, though, and over time they warmed to me. There had been talk that the riding might be contested, but in the end I took it by acclamation.

  In preparation for my entry into political life, I had reorganized CSL under professional management and bought out Ladi Pathy’s share. Given my feelings of responsibility to Ladi, if I had not been able to do this I might never have made the jump.

  I also had to begin to prepare the company for my departure. This was finally completed when I asked a close friend, Tony Chesterman, who did not have a shipping background but who had a wonderful way with people, to come in as chairman. He eventually named Sam Hayes as president and Rod Jones as head of international business. While CFO Gerry Carter eventually headed the domestic operation, Pierre Prefontaine and David Tarr were confirmed as vice-president legal and head of CSL Equities, the real estate company in which Ladi and I remained partners. In short, I was gone, and the company has never looked back.

  By the beginning of 1987, I was pounding the pavement in LaSalle-Émard. I plunged into the world of retail politics in a way I never had before and, I guess it would be true to say, never did again, since I always had national responsibilities in campaigns after that. Of course I had campaigned with my dad in Windsor many times, but this was different. He would walk down the street and people would shout out “Hi, Paul” and “Good luck.” I would go into a supermarket or a mall and say, “How are you, ma’am? I’m Paul Martin, the Liberal candidate” and receive looks that would make “so what” appear welcoming. My dad only had to appear; I had to campaign. Believe you me — there is a difference.

  On the other hand, I did have some small advantages. First of all, some of the people voting for me seemed to think I was my dad, and some others were under the impression that I was Pol Martin, a TV chef well known around Montreal at the time. I didn’t spend much time trying to dissuade anyone that I was neither.

  I was naive enough to be convinced I would win the seat even though more experienced Liberals thought it was a long shot. What only slowly dawned on me was that my opponent had been tremendously effective at working the riding. There wasn’t a church basement or senior citizens’ home Lanthier hadn’t visited; he was a household name as well as a ubiquitous presence in the riding. We actually got to know each other quite well in the course of the campaign. His wife, Violeta, became great friends with Sheila — each hoping the other’s husband would win, I suspect.

  Despite my background, not all the subtleties of campaigning came naturally to me. At one service club luncheon, I shook the hands of people at every table, except the one populated by some of my most active supporters, figuring they already knew me. Before the day was over, I was working hard to keep them from deserting my campaign en masse over the snub. On another occasion, in a crowded restaurant, I shook hands with all the patrons and most of the people waiting on tables but didn’t want to disturb one particularly overworked waitress. Later in the day, I received a call at my headquarters from her furious husband. I ended up going to their house to apologize.

  I also got my first personal lesson in spin during the campaign. Brian Mulroney was planning a swing through the West Island, and into Verdun, and the Tories were spinning that I did not want him to come into my riding. The truth is that after the CDIC incident, the last thing I wanted was for the prime minister to pass through every constituency in the neighbourhood but mine. I should have challenged him to a debate as he passed through and made a big thing of it. But the Tories were quicker off the mark than I was, and got their story out first.

  As a strong supporter of free trade, I was something of an anomaly in the Liberal Party in the 1988 election, though my position was that of the party since Laurier’s time. However, LaSalle-Émard was not immune from the tides of the national campaign, in which John Turner’s opposition to free trade played a major role. There were two big subway stations in the riding, and after the election was called at the beginning of October, I used to go down to one of them every morning at about six-thirty. I stood at the top of the escalator and snagged reluctant handshakes from commuters. I had some supporters standing behind me with big “Paul Martin” signs so that people had an idea of who I was. Maybe one in three would take my hand, or I’d be able to grab it as they’d whip by and whip by and whip by. And then the famous debate occurred, when Turner electrified the campaign with his dramatic attack on the Free Trade Agreement. The day after, people were stopping and coming back to shake my hand. In the first few weeks, I couldn’t wait to get away from the subway station in the morning, and then suddenly I could have stayed all day.

  The burst of public enthusiasm I had felt after the leaders’ debate waned in my riding as it did across the country in the final days of the campaign. By election day, everyone but me was convinced that I had slipped behind Lanthier. I won by fourteen hundred votes. It was one of just two gains by the Liberals in Quebec that election.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Run for the Top

  I had not entered politics with the intention of becoming prime minister. If I had a political role model, it was C.D. Howe, a businessman who had brought his private sector experience to bear in a brilliant, constructive, and influential political career. Howe was a cabinet colleague and often jousting partner with my father, and I had met him often as a boy. Perhaps surprisingly, given the difference in ages, Mrs. Howe and my mother were very good friends. (Coincidentally, Sheila’s grandfather Donald James Cowan, a Tory, was Howe’s predecessor as the MP for Port Arthur before being appointed to the bench.) I wanted to be the C.D. Howe of my generation, using my understanding of business and the larger economy to build a Canada that could take on the economic giants outside our borders. It was that dream that initially led me to fix on becoming minister of industry.

  The aftermath of the 1988 election created a different dynamic, however. While the Liberal Party had entered that election campaign with a reasonable prospect of beating an unpopular Tory government, and we had eclipsed the Tories and a resurgent NDP in the polls for a time in mid-campaign, in the end Brian Mulroney succeeded in polarizing the electorate around free trade and secured himself a second majority. Although John Turner took some time to announce that he was stepping down as Liberal leader, it quickly became apparent that a leadership race to succeed him was underway. The hundred-to-one favourite was Jean Chrétien, who had lost to John Turner in 1984 but had been preparing for a second run from the moment the fir
st had ended. Iona Campagnolo had famously remarked from the podium of the 1984 convention after John Turner’s victory that Jean Chrétien was first in Liberals’ hearts if not in their votes. He clearly did not intend that this would happen again. When he suggested in 1988, somewhat offhandedly, that I run in Windsor, I am certain he did not consider me a serious rival to his ambition. He was just clearing brush from the path. He thought the job was his. Still, there were issues. The trench warfare between the Chrétien and Turner camps, which never really stopped during Turner’s leadership, meant that there were a lot of Liberals for whom Jean Chrétien was a hard sell. As for me, I had the virtue of novelty on the political scene, which could be a considerable political asset, as I had learned the hard way in the 1968 convention.

  There is always room for more than one candidate in any race, and sometimes with a combination of luck and pluck, the underdog actually wins. Was it hubris for a barely elected rookie MP to begin thinking about the leadership of the Liberal Party? I like to think of it differently. It has been said that anyone who runs for Parliament can imagine himself an MP, and if you can imagine yourself an MP, you can imagine being a minister. If you can conjure up images of yourself as a minister, you can certainly picture yourself as prime minister. I had never been one to dally over taking an opportunity when it presented itself, for they rarely re-occur. And after the 1988 election, there was an opportunity — and I took it.

  For all that our political careers eventually became entwined, for good as well as for ill, Jean Chrétien and I never really knew each other very well. I cannot clearly recall the first time I met him, but I imagine it would have been through John Rae, who, before he came to Power Corporation, had been Jean Chrétien’s executive assistant when he was minister of Indian and northern affairs. Certainly, when Jean Chrétien became minister of finance in 1977 and his adviser Eddie Goldenberg asked me to speak with him about the economy, we were already acquaintances. During the 1970s and early 1980s, we often connected socially through mutual friends, sometimes golfing in a foursome with Rae and Ed Lumley or on fishing trips organized through Paul Desmarais (whose son, André, eventually married Jean Chrétien’s daughter, France). I thought he was a nice guy.