Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  Years later, it was a thrilling moment for me when I mounted that same UN podium for the first time to give a speech myself. The childhood memories came flooding back. And the same is true, I am happy to report, when I have had occasion to speak at Belle River.

  While my mom was everything you could want in a mother, she was not entirely a conventional political wife. She was a beautiful woman with a great sense of humour, both of which allowed her to take politics on her own terms and participate in her own way. My father recounted the story of her first social encounter with the prime minister — a luncheon at Laurier House in Ottawa. Dad was still a young member and quite nervous about any encounter with the man who would determine his political future.

  “My husband thinks you’re a very great man,” she told Mackenzie King as they arrived.

  “And what do you think, Mrs. Martin?” Mackenzie King asked.

  “I’m going to take some convincing,” my mother replied — not exactly the response Dad had coached her to give before they left home. To my father’s astonishment, the very next day Mackenzie King dropped by their apartment in the Sandy Hill district of Ottawa, which was only a couple of blocks away from his, and invited my mother to join him on his afternoon stroll.

  In the riding, my mother was also a considerable political asset to my father because of her vivacity and natural grace. While my father was in and out of the constituency because of his parliamentary and government duties, she was a much more regular presence. During campaigns, when my father could be something of a thorn in the side of the local organizers — like many candidates, somebody to be managed and handled — they could always turn to my mother, knowing they would have a sympathetic ear. While my father might race through a social or political gathering, my mother had a tendency to linger, because there was always someone there who didn’t want to let her go. Sheila had a very similar experience after I entered political life. As the MP or the candidate, my job at an event was usually to shake the hand of every person in the room, which made real conversation impossible. There were many occasions when I had done my duty and was ready to cut out of one event to get to the next but had trouble pulling Sheila away from a group with whom she had become engrossed in conversation. The view of all my supporters in my constituency of LaSalle-Émard was that Sheila was my greatest political asset. I did not disagree.

  For her part, my mother was never keen on sitting on the podium with her hands crossed in her lap while my father sang the praises of the Liberal government, so her campaign appearances were selective, and grew less frequent over the years. She used to tell a story of canvassing during an election in the early years with one of my father’s organizers, Blackie Quenneville. The Quenneville family were stalwarts of my father’s campaigns and later became great supporters of mine. Blackie’s father, Alfred, had been one of my father’s organizers, as were his daughters Izzy and Ramona. In the next generation, Fred Quenneville and his wife, Barbara, who had been close to my father, also worked for me in the 1990 leadership campaign, as did their children, Camille and Carl, in 2003. Four generations of Quennevilles working to help two generations of Martins! Anyway, it seems that while Blackie and my mom were going door to door during one campaign sortie, a fair number of posters for the Conservative candidate went missing along their route. My mother would laugh as she recalled the scene of Conservative workers showing up in a car and discovering what they were up to. There followed a wild car chase through Windsor, because my mother realized that while it was one thing for Blackie Quenneville to get caught ripping down Tory posters, it was something quite different for Nell Martin, wife of the Liberal MP, to be caught dead to rights. In later years when her children raised her “outrageous” behaviour, she always claimed that the Tories had started it. I’m inclined to believe her.

  There were undoubtedly moments of delight for my mother during my father’s long political career. But it was not a world she had chosen or would have chosen if it had not been for my father, which may lie behind some of my own ambivalence to the profession. The demands of politics on the life of the family are vividly illustrated by the circumstances of my own birth. My father, still a backbencher, had been asked by Mackenzie King to join the Canadian delegation to the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva in September 1938. Unfortunately, the departure date more or less coincided with the expected day of my arrival in the world. And so, on August 28, at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Windsor, my mother’s physician induced my birth in time for Dad to catch the train for Montreal and connect with The Empress of Australia, which was steaming for Britain September 2. “It was not easy to leave them,” my father later wrote, “but after a wrenching goodbye, I went on a mission of which my wife fully approved.”

  It was typical of my mother that while she was capable of great patience where her family was concerned, she also had limits that could reveal themselves in spectacular fashion. The most famous story about her is when she was walking along Ouellette Street in Windsor with my father, who was smoking a cigar and in full rhetorical flight, no doubt about some great accomplishment of his. It was all too much for Mom, who did not have much time for my father in his moments of pomposity. She sat down on the curb and refused to move until my father agreed to come down to earth. The sight of the Honourable Paul Martin on a street corner with his wife sitting stubbornly on the curb attracted a few gawkers, then a few more, until there were perhaps twenty or thirty witnessing the embarrassing scene. In the years since, I have personally met all three thousand of them, who each describe it to me with the vividness and relish that only an eyewitness can bring to the job.

  After a lifetime of political demands that she had not chosen for herself, who can blame my mother for looking forward to a day when they would subside? To be honest, I think the happiest time of her life may have been at the end of my dad’s career, when he was High Commissioner in London and no longer had the responsibilities of a politician.

  When my father was appointed to the cabinet in 1945, the decision was made to move the family home to Ottawa. As it happened, this coincided with the most dramatic incident of my childhood. Among my best friends in Colchester were the Coles — Mike, Vince, and Roseanne — whose father was a milkman in Detroit. Theirs was a traditional Irish-American Catholic family. Both Mike and Vince later became Maryknoll missionaries, and Roseanne joined the convent for a time. One day when I was seven years old, I was playing with my cousin Mike and the Coles and began feeling strange — as if I had a huge plate filling a void in my stomach — and I went and sat down on some swings at the McPhersons’ next door. I guess it caught the attention of the adults when I suddenly fell quiet. I remember going home and telling my mother that I was feeling sick. I don’t recall experiencing the alarm that my mother obviously did as she rushed me to the hospital. Like every parent in this era, she lived in dread of one disease above all: polio.

  It was an age of polio epidemics, of children paralyzed or brought to an early grave. What I remember is being dressed in a white hospital robe and sharing a room with twenty or thirty other kids my age. I do not remember any pain. I still have an image of my parents standing at the door, watching me, presumably from behind glass, not allowed to enter the sickroom. It was only later that I was told my parents believed I would likely die or spend my days in an iron lung.

  My father learned of my illness when a note was passed to him during a cabinet meeting. C.D. Howe immediately offered him the use of a government plane to fly home to Windsor, saving him the daylong train trip. I can only imagine what this news meant to my father, whose own life had been blighted by polio, though a different strain. His family, which was clustered around Pembroke, Ontario, were great athletes. My grandfather was a keen organizer of sporting events, and my grandmother’s youngest brother, Jean, played hockey for the New York Americans. When he was four, my father fell seriously ill. For a year or two after he survived the immediate crisis, he was pulled around town in a wagon or sleigh by his father an
d brother because he remained paralyzed on the left side and could not walk. Although he had a partial recovery, Dad permanently lost the use of his left arm and he always had a bit of a limp in one leg. The illness also cost him the sight in his left eye. It was one of his great regrets that his handicaps prevented him from being the “sportsman” he wished he could be. When he was a student at St. Mike’s at the University of Toronto, he coached the hockey team because that was the closest he could come to the actual game. Later he enlisted in the army reserves, but suffered the regret that only those who have lived through wartime can understand when he was judged not physically fit to serve. This is not to mention the financial strain my father’s illness placed on his family in the early years. His father, a millworker and later a grocery store clerk, struggled to make ends meet at the best of times, the more so with a sickly child. This searing childhood experience explained my father’s later passion for universal medical care.

  A few years after my illness, I had a startling encounter with my dad as he worked in his study. When I interrupted him, he was uncharacteristically short with me, and my mother hustled me out of the room. I only later learned what it was all about. At the time, the recently invented polio vaccines that eventually proved so effective in suppressing the disease were being administered in North America on a mass scale for the first time. However, a number of children in the United States had apparently contracted polio from the vaccinations themselves. The American government had decided to halt its vaccination program while it figured out what had gone wrong. As minister of health at the time, Dad needed to decide whether to follow the Americans in declaring a moratorium on vaccinations. The Canadian vaccine was not from the suspect American lab, but from a different one here in Canada — the Connaught Laboratory. Still, no one could be perfectly sure whether there had just been a bad batch of vaccine or if something more fundamental was amiss. It was as he pondered this decision — loaded with personal and public significance — that I had interrupted him. He eventually allowed the vaccination program to go ahead — a decision that ultimately saved many lives and rescued many others from a terrible blight.

  What I remember about my own recovery from polio was that it delayed my entry into grade three at École Garneau, a French-language separate school on Cumberland Street in Ottawa. Even after I started attending classes, I was supposed to take it easy — for two years, my mother later told me. I wasn’t supposed to play baseball or football, for example, though it was a rule I pretty much ignored when I was out of my parents’ sight. Also, I wasn’t supposed to be upset. I remember that while out with friends several miles from home I lost a softball without a cover, which for some reason was precious to me. A few days later, I came home to the upper-floor duplex where we were living on Goulburn Street and was stunned to find the coverless softball lying there. Much later, my mother told me that she had bought a new softball and removed the cover, thus resolving the mystery. A prohibition against upsetting an eight-or nine-year-old is not likely to improve his temperament or character, however, and apparently it did not improve mine. After seven or eight months of being coddled, I did something — I don’t remember what — that led my mother to blow her stack, and I remember catching it like no one had ever caught it before. At that point, things returned to normal.

  Ottawa in my youth, in contrast to Windsor, was Old Canada: riven by linguistic divisions. In Ottawa, I had a unique perspective on the linguistic divide. My father’s family was originally Irish, and had come to Canada in the 1840s, fleeing the potato famine. They settled around Thurso in Quebec and were assimilated, as many Catholic immigrants were at the time, into the francophone population. My dad was born after the family moved to LeBreton Flats in Ottawa. Soon after that, they moved to Pembroke, where the family remained part of the francophone community and my father grew up. My father always considered himself a Franco-Ontarian and was schooled in French until university, though interestingly enough my aunts, who were a few years younger, considered English their first language, which may have had to do with their own schooling or perhaps even the ethnicity of the archbishop in later years.

  My father’s extended family in Pembroke played the same role in my Ottawa life as my mother’s did in Colchester. Pembroke in my childhood memory is perpetually winter, just as Colchester is perpetually summer. My Aunt Lucille would take me for walks in the snow or out tobogganing. I called her “Ceo,” but she was known in the family as “Blackie” because of her dark complexion — according to legend, a legacy of Indian blood somewhere in the family line. There was also my Uncle Émile and Aunts Marie, Aline, Claire, and Anita. Aunt Anita was more than an aunt, in fact. A public servant who lived in Ottawa, she eventually moved in with my family, parenting us whenever my parents had to be away. She was also a great Ottawa Rough Riders fan, which no doubt contributed greatly to my own interest in professional football.

  The French-English divide in Ottawa extended to the Catholic Church. When I was old enough to be an altar boy, I remember being questioned by the French Oblates at École Garneau about serving Mass at the Irish Oblate provincial house near my home — a crime second only to consorting with Jesuits! A little more important for me as a boy was the fact that to get to École Garneau, I needed to fight my way past Osgoode, the English public school. And then, if I made it that far without a bloody nose, I had to navigate by St. Joseph’s, the Irish-Catholic school, where my Irish-Canadian heritage and my still-nascent grasp of French counted for nothing.

  My best friend at school was Dick Robillard. I was a guest during many discussions around their dinner table about the fact that there were harsh limits on how high Dick’s dad, who was a public servant, could rise in his career because he was French-speaking. There was also the lingering aftertaste of Regulation 17 — which had banned French-language instruction in Ontario’s schools for a time. My grandfather had been an outspoken opponent of Regulation 17, and it remained very much a part of the recent history of Franco-Ontarian society in general and their schools in particular. I remember the teachers telling us about the St-Jean-Baptiste Society and the need to preserve the French language. For me as a boy, these experiences revealed something about Canada — the Old Canada at least — and the need to recognize the value of our two linguistic traditions. Later on, I realized how this also opened me up to the “multiculturalism,” as we would come to call it, in places such as Windsor.

  But these experiences of the Old Canada were not as deeply stitched into my personality as they had been for my father. My dad grew up as a member of a francophone Catholic minority in Ontario, and never lost the sense of being an outsider that it fostered in him. His family was also poor, as was often the case with Franco-Ontarians. That having been said, the long climb of the lame little boy from Pembroke to Collège St-Alexandre to the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, then to the House of Commons and ultimately minister of the Crown would have been impossible without the early patronage of a friendly Irish-Catholic archbishop.

  My father eventually settled in Windsor, half a province away from where he had grown up. Although he was a lawyer, that meant something very different in a town such as Windsor than it did in the great commercial centres of Montreal and Toronto. The clients and eventually the constituency he came to represent there had many of the features of the outsider as well: a population heavy with newly minted Canadians as well as francophones, filled with people who made their living with their hands and with their sweat, in the great new industries then developing. Windsor was a multi-ethnic industrial boomtown in the shadow of the United States. It was a place where New Canadians were getting on with making new lives for themselves in new industries and were too busy to worry about Canada’s traditional preoccupations. The dominant relationship was not between English and French, as it was in Ottawa, but between us and the United States — a rivalry that was usually friendly but also very intense.

  In contrast with sedate and proper Ottawa, Windsor was a border
town that was proud of its racy legacy from the era of Prohibition. I remember my mother pointing out a house near the cottage that had once been a “blind pig” — or speakeasy — and I remember the implication that she had been an occasional customer. According to legend, freighters would show up at the Hiram Walker distillery on Monday to be loaded for Cuba only to be back two days later to reload. When we moved back to the riding after the Liberal defeat by John Diefenbaker in 1957, Dad bought a house in Walkerville that had once belonged to a notorious rum-runner named Harry Low. There was also a story that the house we had bought had a secret tunnel to the Detroit River, three miles away. Mary Anne and her best friend, Sheila Cowan, spent a good portion of their adolescence looking for it, without success.

  My father often said that it was important that you represent a constituency that reflects your own political goals, something I remembered many years later when I chose the ethnically and socially mixed riding of LaSalle-Émard in which to run. As the advocate of the little guy, the working man, the immigrant, and the francophone, my dad made himself the principal proponent in his generation of the socially progressive strain of Liberalism. Although he was a great friend of C.D. Howe, and said in later years that Louis St. Laurent was the greatest of the four prime ministers in whose cabinets he served, he represented a very different perspective than their fiscally conservative, business-oriented Liberalism and would often butt heads with them in order to enlarge the social responsibilities of the government in the postwar years.

  The college my father had attended — a junior seminary, really — was St-Alexandre’s on the east bank of the Gatineau River. On a clear day, you could see down the Gatineau, across the junction with the Ottawa River, to the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. When Sir Wilfrid Laurier died in February 1919, Dad sneaked away from school and walked the ten miles into Ottawa to watch the funeral procession. The deep emotional connection with Laurier and his vision of Liberalism never left him. It was in part about identification with a great francophone who was also a great Canadian, a Catholic of anti-clerical views. But it was also about a particular kind of politics: the politics of inclusion, and the use of the state to address the worries of the common people — education, health care, and financial security. It was about providing people with the material foundations with which to enjoy the freedoms our society could afford.