Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  When I appeared in Ottawa in late 1988 as the newly minted member from LaSalle-Émard, the media wasted no time in speculating about my potential candidacy to succeed John Turner. I was in the spotlight from the start. What made this somewhat burdensome was the assumption that as my father’s son, I would be like a fish at home in the political sea. In fact, while I could undoubtedly find my way around the corridors of the Parliament Buildings better than any other rookie MP, I had less political savoir faire than many of the former city councillors, mayors, and MLAs who were sworn in for the first time along with me. At our first caucus meeting, John Turner asked each of the novice MPs to introduce themselves. When it came to my turn, I stood up and said “Paul Martin” with an English pronunciation, then repeated “Paul Martin” with a French pronunciation. There was a reaction in the room. I sat down and thought, What a rube.

  In retrospect, I can see that I had not yet acquired many of the basic political skills that a leadership campaign would demand of me. A couple of years on the Opposition benches learning the issues, dealing with the media, and acquiring small political crafts such as speaking extemporaneously would have prepared me much better for what lay ahead. On the other hand, one of my greatest assets as a potential leader ship candidate was that I was able to offer a fresh face and a fresh vision. I had begun to slip a line into my speeches to the effect that I wasn’t sure which was more difficult, being introduced as a Liberal to a business audience or as a businessman to a Liberal audience. But of course it was that very novelty that was part of my political appeal.

  In the last few weeks of 1988, while I was wrapping up my affairs at CSL, I invited Mike Robinson to Montreal for a chat. Mike was a former CFO for the Liberal Party who had an encyclopedic knowledge of its inner workings and a shrewd strategic mind. We knew each other from Grindstone but not particularly well. I think he was taken aback a little when I asked him whether he would become my campaign manager for a leadership bid. We had a very good discussion about my ideas and my goals in public life. Once he was convinced we were of a similar mind on the big issues, he quickly accepted. What obviously compounded his surprise that day was that he suddenly found himself in a meeting with David Herle, Dennis Dawson, Jim de Wilde, and a number of others, who showed him a campaign organization chart they had worked out with his name already pencilled in at the top. Since I first met him that day after my speech in Saskatchewan, David had continued as a very active Liberal. Along with John Webster and others, he had organized to defend John Turner’s leadership during a bitter challenge by Jean Chrétien supporters in 1986. Dennis was a former Liberal MP who, after being defeated in 1984, had eventually come to work for CSL to help manage some of the regulatory issues facing the Voyageur bus lines. What this group unveiled for Mike was a fantasy organization, existing only on paper. But it was a start.

  Mike likes to recount a story about a cocktail party he arranged for me at his home in Toronto a couple of months later. There were about a hundred people there to meet me. Mike asked me to say a few words, which I did. But while doing so I absent-mindedly bent down once or twice — maybe a hundred times according to subsequent legend — and picked up pieces of lint from the carpet, which I proceeded to roll around in my hand as I spoke. This horrified Mike’s wife, known universally as M.L., who had not met me before and was unconvinced that this was a guy to whom it was worth her husband committing the next year of his life. Not ready for prime time, as they say. (M.L. and Sheila soon became great friends, as are Mike and I. I have long suspected that the friendship between the two wives was based, in part at least, on mutual sympathy.) Nor had I yet learned that as a candidate, or a presumed candidate, you aren’t just on stage when you take the stage but from the moment you enter the room. A few weeks later, at a conference at Montebello organized by a number of Grindstone people, I headed to the microphone several times, only to abandon the speakers’ line when someone else pre-empted the point I was going to make. Mike was among a number of my supporters who were flabbergasted at my failure to seize the platform offered to me.

  I was more focused on developing my program, which eventually was summed up in the phrase “nationalism without walls.” It was much more than a slogan. A young Liberal named John Duffy, who would continue to be a valuable supporter over the years, helped pen a booklet that laid out my political philosophy. I was arguing for a robust nationalism that set its sights on taking on the world, developing competitive, Canadian-based multinationals, enhancing research and development, giving our businesses access to capital, and reducing taxes, debt, and interest rates. I also put an emphasis on keeping our population healthy, educated, and secure through a greater emphasis on innovative and expanded social programs. This was the era of the Exxon Valdez and its devastating oil spill in the delicate environment off the Alaska coast. I argued that we should go beyond merely cleaning up our industrial messes and build an environmental industry in Canada that could develop and export new technologies.

  At the time, I was not as focused, as I would later be, on the threat that deficits and mounting debt were posing to every other social, economic, and governmental objective we might have. It was not until I had been minister of finance and went through the department’s numbers that I realized we would not be able simply to restrain spending to the level of inflation and grow ourselves out of the deficit. Still, looking back on the speeches and campaign materials I developed for the 1990 campaign, much of it with John Duffy’s help, I am struck by how consistent they were with the speeches I had given to the Young Liberals in Halifax years earlier, and how clearly I set out the objectives that guided my political career for the next sixteen years — and, as a matter of fact, the projects I have taken up in Africa and here at home with Aboriginal Canadians — since election night 2006.

  All very fine, Mike, David, Dennis, and John would tell me. Very inspiring stuff. But when John Turner announced his resignation in May 1989, I was still on the steepest slope of the learning curve. The night of his announcement, Barbara Frum had me as a guest on The Journal, the premier TV current affairs program of the time. I was nervous, the chair seemed to tip forward so I felt as if I was going to slide off at any moment, and I had prepared myself to rebuff direct questions about the leadership by insisting that “this is John Turner’s day.” Of course, the preamble to her first question was to the effect that we should skip past all the stuff about how it was John Turner’s day. I will always be grateful to Mary Clancy and George Rideout, both Atlantic Canadian MPs, and Zoë Rideout, who bare-faced lied to me afterwards by insisting I had done well.

  A few days later, while I was recording an interview with Eric Malling for CTV, he generously stopped the tape and told me that I should cool down and stop responding to every question as if it were an attack. They rolled tape again — and I was right back at it! What did come more naturally to me, and which my campaign team used to good effect as the campaign unfolded, was the question-and-answer session in meetings with Liberals. I loved the give-and-take on policy, which was usually the order of the day, and although I probably said too much on occasion from the point of view of my campaign team, they knew that this was one of the most effective venues for me to persuade party members and eventually delegates that I had the capacity to lead.

  By the spring, Mike and David had assembled a small campaign team based in Ottawa, which included Kaz Flynn, the president of the Young Liberals, Daniel Despins, Mark Resnick, Jamie Deacey, Charles Bird, and Jonathan Schneiderman. I asked Richard Mahoney, a former president of the Young Liberals with a great knowledge of the party, who shared my interest in the developing world, to join me as my executive assistant.

  Throughout my political career, and certainly in my two leadership campaigns, Young Liberals have been at the core of operations. This started early on. Karl Littler, for example, became involved when he was a Dalhousie law student in the late 1980s; quite simply, he has as fine a mind as you will find anywhere. Michele Cadario is a woman whose
strong social conscience has been her driving force, as it continues to be to this day. Bruce Young, Veronique de Passillé, David Brodie, Mark Watton, Sayla Nordin, Melissa McInnes, Marlene Floyd, Janice Nicholson, and Monica Masciantonio are all former Young Liberals who rose to senior positions on my staff.

  I have never had much taste for the tasks of party organization, though I recognized from witnessing Paul Hellyer’s campaign in 1968 how fundamentally important they were. My idea was to get the right people in place and concentrate on the campaign elements I could handle best myself: developing policy and speaking to Liberals. I was fortunate to get two fine campaign co-chairs — Iona Campagnolo, whose progressive views on Aboriginal issues were an inspiration for many of us and who had attained legendary status in the party, and Jean Lapierre, one of the youngest cabinet ministers ever appointed, and who symbolized the party’s renewal in Quebec.

  There was one early hurdle, however, that was crucial to my decision to run: the timing of the convention. This was a decision of the party executive. And I needed a long campaign. Having the experience of 1984, the Chrétien organization was already well developed, and Jean Chrétien himself was probably the best known Liberal in the country. Fortunately for me, one of the few niches of the party in which I had a foothold was the executive, many of whose members had been allies of John Turner during the insurgent Chrétien campaign for the leadership in the mid-1980s. Still, we needed to pull out all the stops. Gerry Schwartz, the brilliant Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based entrepreneur, was a member of the executive, though he made it a habit never to attend the meetings. On this occasion, however, he flew in from Toronto and stayed just long enough to cast a crucial vote for the convention to be held more than a year later.

  The precise date was determined by the availability of convention facilities in Calgary — a location the party had set its heart on as a symbol of renewal. The executive was aware, of course, that June 23, 1990, also happened to be the deadline for adopting the Meech Lake Accord. But no one could have known that the struggle to pass the accord would come down to the last twenty-four hours or that we would be plunged into a full-fledged national unity crisis on convention weekend. I was a supporter of Meech Lake because I believed it strengthened Canada. It incorporated a fundamental recognition of Quebec’s place in our country and it remedied a flaw in the 1981 patriation of the Constitution: the absence of Quebec’s endorsement. I hoped that Meech Lake would put to rest many of the ghosts that have continued to bedevil us. As I have said before, I was not an enthusiast for the “neverendum” the constitutional debate had become, and I fervently hoped that the passage of Meech Lake would put an end to it. Nor did I want to see it become a divisive issue in the campaign. For the good of the party and the country, Mike sent out feelers to the Chrétien organization to keep it on a low burner — to no avail. Of course, it was not particularly to my advantage to make Meech an issue, since it badly split my own supporters. On the other hand, Jean Chrétien clearly believed that it was to his advantage, and he played the issue up till almost the end, when he had secured his support in English Canada. Then, suddenly, he decided that the debate was not working to his advantage, particularly in Quebec, and that it should stop.

  Before the leadership race was even underway, Mike suggested I have lunch with Pierre Trudeau. “You can’t go through the whole leadership campaign and not talk to the former prime minister,” he said. So it was arranged that Trudeau and I would meet at the Mount Royal Club on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal.

  Although I was often a critic of the Trudeau government’s economic policies, I was a great admirer of his accomplishments. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was his initiative, was an act of statesmanship and an enduring gift to Canadians. Although we took opposite views of the Meech Lake Accord, we had plenty of other things to talk about and the lunch went along amicably for a while. But then, inevitably, the subject of Meech Lake came up. He expressed his strong opposition to it, as he had done before many times in public. I replied that I believed that his portrait of Meech Lake was overdrawn. I said that the clause describing Quebec as a distinct society simply reflected reality, that it conferred no increase in powers to the province.

  At the end of our discussion, referring to Meech Lake generally, he simply said, “Mr. Martin, you are wrong.”

  I replied, “No, Mr. Trudeau, you are wrong.”

  At which point he said, “I believe this luncheon is over.”

  And he knew what he was talking about, because at that moment he stood up and walked out of the dining room!

  In my subsequent encounters with the former prime minister, neither of us ever mentioned that lunch; it was as if it had never happened. I later valued his advice on matters of common interest, particularly our foreign policy with respect to China. But we never spoke of Meech again.

  At the time of the 1990 leadership, my organizers were divided on Meech Lake, as was the Liberal Party. To oversimplify, but not by much, it was my Quebec supporters and Mike Robinson on one side, backing the accord, and my supporters from the rest of the country on the other. David Herle, among others, told me that Meech was hurting me badly outside Quebec. When I announced in early 1990 that I was “unequivocally” behind the accord, removing any remaining wiggle room, Saskatchewan’s Ralph Goodale phoned David and asked, “Did he really say ‘unequivocally’?” I lost considerable ground in English Canada as a result of my position, and was unable to consolidate the support of John Turner’s organization in Western Canada, which otherwise would almost certainly have fallen to me.

  In the case of Jean Chrétien, I disagreed with him about the Meech Lake Accord on substantive grounds as well as on tactics. After all, he had a better than fifty-fifty chance of becoming the next Liberal leader. By stoking the fire of opposition to Meech Lake in English Canada, he was compounding the difficulties the Liberal Party already had in confronting the separatist push in Quebec in the coming election. This is why I wanted him to agree to a nonaggression pact over the issue, if not to change his opposition to the accord. Instead, he ratcheted up the volume. All the Liberal candidates — Sheila Copps, John Nunziata, Clifford Lincoln, Tom Wappel, Jean Chrétien, and me — participated in a series of debates across the country. Manitoba was a crucible in the Meech Lake controversy because it had a minority Conservative government wavering in its support for the accord and a Liberal Leader of the Opposition, Sharon Carstairs, who was a close ally of Jean Chrétien’s and a fierce opponent of the accord. The province also had a charged history in matters related to language and Quebec. It was at the Winnipeg debate that Jean Chrétien decided to make his opposition to Meech Lake the sharp edge of his campaign. And it was there that I responded by saying that Pierre Trudeau was no longer leader of the Liberal Party and it was time to start looking to the future.

  As I later learned, despite his public opposition, some of Jean Chrétien’s closest aides were negotiating with Brian Mulroney’s government over the accord behind the scenes. Mulroney could not bring Manitoba onside without Carstairs, and Carstairs would not come without the okay from Jean Chrétien. Much to their embarrassment, Eddie Goldenberg, Eric Maldoff, and John Rae were all discovered by the CBC in the Château Laurier, right across the street from the old train station where Mulroney and the premiers were negotiating over the accord. This backstairs negotiation obviously played a part in Carstairs’s short-lived support for the accord during May and June of 1990, which briefly revived hope that it would be adopted nationally. Meanwhile, in public, after skewering me on Meech Lake in Manitoba and having attacked Meech all through the campaign to date, just prior to the Quebec debate Jean Chrétien made a speech at the University of Ottawa in which he signalled for the first time his flexibility on the issue.

  All this set the scene for the Montreal leaders’ debate, which would come to have an iconic significance for the Chrétien people in the history of the rivalry between our camps. I suspect that by this point in the contest, Jean Chrétien believ
ed it was obvious he was going to win and the rest of us should just step out of the way. His very recent volte-face on Meech seemed to be motivated by the idea that having wrapped up the race, he could now turn his eyes to mollifying Quebec and winning the next election against the Tories. In other words, the other candidates should just roll over and accept that the prize was his. Of course, this seldom happens in politics. Every candidate gets into the race to win, and most of them — and certainly their supporters — can construct a scenario, however exotic, in which they can see a pathway to victory. My campaign was no different. We knew that Chrétien’s supporters would pack the hall in Montreal and we did the same. Some of the Quebec delegates, including some of my supporters, shouted, “Vendu, vendu” (sell-out) at Jean Chrétien, and some of the young Liberals who had come in from elsewhere for the debate joined them. One of them, Bruce Young, who was a huge supporter of mine from British Columbia, joined in by shouting, “Fondue, fondue,” not quite realizing what the others were saying.

  None of us thought at the time that this was anything other than the continuation of a pretty rough-and-tumble campaign that had started long before we got to Montreal. The high-stakes negotiations going on in Ottawa at the same time to save Meech Lake totally overshadowed the leadership debate in the media. However, after the debate, some of Jean Chrétien’s senior organizers called Mike Robinson in for a tongue-lashing. Recently, it has become clear that Eddie Goldenberg and Jean Chrétien allowed the memory of this event to turn into a bitter shrine in their minds — a moment never to be forgotten or forgiven.