by Paul Martin
We left the LST behind us at the mercy of the storm, and for all I know it is still up there somewhere. I am lucky that I am not still up there with it. By the time we made it back to port, the summer was almost over, and I made the long trip back to Toronto and to university.
My experience on the Mackenzie was part of a lifelong romance with the North. I had already visited the First Nations settlement of Winisk on Hudson Bay one summer while working on construction of the Mid-Canada Line — a series of Cold War defence installations similar to the better-known DEW line but strung south of the Arctic Circle. And, of course, every time I was near the sea, I was reluctant to leave. Another summer, I shipped out from Arvida, Quebec, on a Canadian vessel called the Sun Rhea, whose primary job was carrying bauxite between Jamaica and Norway. I was made a cadet officer rather than an ordinary seaman, an honour I later learned meant getting less pay for doing the same work: mostly scraping paint.
It was another aspect of the good fortune of the pre—baby-boomers that I was able to range so freely around the country. My father’s name may have helped get some of the jobs, but most of them I got just by walking in and asking, and that was important to me. The desire to be master of my own fate — my own boss, if you like — was one that would often serve me well in my career, particularly in business, where I took some big gambles that luckily for me paid off. But that same aspect of my character could sometimes rankle when I was not in charge, or if I was in charge but was hemmed in by constraints imposed by others.
University, sports, and summer jobs. In later years, people had difficulty believing that amid all this, politics was not a priority for me in my youth. But it was not. A few political incidents jump out at me from the early and mid-1950s, mainly because they were isolated in my consciousness. I remember having a Coca-Cola with Louis St. Laurent at 24 Sussex, for example, and meeting Vincent Massey at Rideau Hall, probably because my dad was so insistent that “you will remember this for the rest of your life.” I remember the 1953 election when I campaigned door to door as a kid for my dad and the Liberals won a huge majority. I have almost no political recollections from then until — bang — it was election night 1957. We watched the local and national results at my dad’s campaign headquarters in Windsor and then returned to Aunt Mame’s house, where I recall the family sitting around the table in disbelief. Although the Liberals had won a plurality of the votes, they had fewer seats than John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives. Dad, however, had hung on to Essex East.
But if politics was not a preoccupation or priority of mine, my father’s career continued to be. My first semester at the U of T began in the fall of 1957, just a few months after the Liberals’ defeat. Although Mr. St. Laurent briefly considered forming a coalition with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and some independents in the House of Commons to stay in power, he soon decided to resign as prime minister and announced his intention to retire from politics: he was seventy-five years old at the time. A leadership convention was arranged for January 1958, and it was clear from the start that my father would be a candidate. Still, it was always a long shot. C.D. Howe represented the right wing of the party and my father the left. The party establishment, including Mr. St. Laurent himself, cleaved closer to Howe’s fiscally conservative politics.
Lester Pearson had been both a friend and rival to my father over many years. They had had many common experiences, especially on the international stage, and they held similar views on issues both international and domestic. But Pearson had entered politics only in 1948, and he had gone straight from being undersecretary of state for External Affairs (what we would call deputy minister nowadays) to leading the department in cabinet. Although he was a true social reformer and later brought in medicare as prime minister, Pearson had not participated in many of the party’s social reform debates of the early 1950s, in which my father, as minister of health and welfare, had been at the centre. To the party establishment, my father looked like he would take the party further left than they wanted to go. And it didn’t hurt Pearson’s prospects one bit when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his work on the Suez crisis, which had been a source of considerable national pride.
When I arrived at the U of T, I became a member of the campus Liberals, mainly because it was expected of me as the son of a prominent Liberal and prospective leadership candidate. My actual involvement in the leadership race was pretty limited. It is important to understand that there has been an enormous evolution in the organization and sophistication of leadership contests over the last half-century. The race that culminated in the convention in 1958 would seem primitive (and relatively cheap!) in comparison with the 1968 race that chose Pierre Trudeau. And the evolution continued through to the conventions that selected Jean Chrétien in 1990 and me in 2003. My involvement in the 1958 convention was mainly limited to helping organize the floor demonstration. The convention was in Ottawa, and I used my University of Ottawa connections to put together a group of university and high school students who donned the Martin colours and paraded through the hall at the designated moment waving Martin signs and chanting to the sound of the obligatory brass band. We were the hoopla. I remember great resentment that the chairman of the convention cut off our floor demonstration prematurely, though I am not sure that a little more “spontaneous enthusiasm” from us would have made much difference to the result.
Maybe it was the relative intimacy of the leadership process in 1958, without the massive organizations and the riding-by-riding grudge matches that were featured in later contests, that explains why the ties between the two candidates stayed so strong. Maybe it was the fact that, by the time the delegates gathered in Ottawa, everyone could already clearly see what was coming. For his part, once he became leader, Mr. Pearson continued to treat my father with the utmost respect and friendship, and my father was happy to reciprocate.
Soon after the Liberal leadership convention, Canadians were heading back to the polls with John Diefenbaker’s Tories feeling the wind in their sails. During the campaign, there was a major rally at Massey Hall in Toronto, where both Pearson and my father were featured. Naturally, I teamed up with the campus Liberals and we made the noise that helped make it a very successful meeting. When it was over, we spilled out of the hall, full of enthusiasm, and gathered on Yonge Street without any very specific plan other than maybe to head to a pub. A policeman came along and said: “All right, break this up. No demonstrations here. No congregating here.”
I stepped forward and in a moment of stirring street oratory declared that this was a free country, and that we had the right to free speech, and that there were a couple hundred university students standing courageously behind me in defence of our liberties.
“Well, I’m telling you to move along,” the policeman repeated.
“By god, we’re not moving,” I answered. “We’re staying right here. You can’t make us go.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he replied. “We’re bringing the paddy wagons and you can all come downtown and explain it to the judge.”
And at that moment I realized that the massed forces of the University of Toronto Young Liberals had melted away, perhaps looking for that beer. The next thing you know I was in a jail cell. At six o’clock the next morning, a captain from the Salvation Army, God bless him, showed up and chatted with me to keep my spirits up, commiserating with my outrage at the attack on my civil liberties. Not long afterwards, I was standing in front of a judge who was asking me what happened. When I started to explain the injustice of my incarceration, he cut me off and said, “Why don’t you just get out of here, go home, and stop causing trouble?”
My father happened to be listening to CBC Radio and caught an item about his son being arrested — the first he had heard about it. I got home in time to receive his call. Let’s just say it was reminiscent of our fishing expedition a few years before. It was not the last time he would have reason to excoriate his son for getting mixed up w
ith the law during an election campaign.
After graduating from the U of T and starting law school, I became reacquainted with Sheila Cowan, a girl from Windsor. Sheila’s father, Bill, was a partner in the law firm of Martin, Laird, Easton, and Cowan. The firm was perfectly balanced politically, with two Liberals and two Tories, and Cowan was one of the latter. Despite having his name prominent on the firm’s masthead, my father was not in active legal practice, of course, when he was a cabinet minister. After the 1957 election, although he retained his seat, he was out of government and therefore temporarily returned to practising law part-time in Windsor. He purchased the Low home in Walkerville. As it happened, the Cowan family lived two doors away. Sheila, who was named after her mother, became a close friend of my sister, Mary Anne, whose convent-school background, fluent French, and flamboyant personality made her an exotic addition to Walkerville High. I first met Sheila on a trip home from university when she was still in high school, but as she will tell you, the vast difference in our ages precluded our encounter from turning into anything more. Some years later, when Sheila turned up at the U of T herself, she called me to see if a friend could get a ride with me down to Windsor one weekend. It didn’t work out, but I used the occasion to ask her whether she’d like to come bowling (although I had never bowled before) with my friend Bob Fung and his girlfriend (and eventually his wife), Enid. That began a romance that has lasted now for more than forty years. At the U of T, we went to the movies together and occasionally to the theatre; most frequently we just met up on campus for a Danish and coffee, which was about all I could afford.
One incident early in our courtship that is all too clear in my memory happened on a skiing trip we took to Blue Mountain near Collingwood, Ontario. I had invited Sheila to come up with me and the Wendling twins, Peter and Paul, whom I lived with in university and who are still close friends. She was not an experienced skier, and on about the third run she took a terrible tumble that resulted in a fractured ankle. I drove her to the Collingwood Hospital, where she spent the night in a hospital bed and I tried to sleep as best I could in the corridor. The next day, we drove back to Toronto with Sheila in a cast. Not long afterwards, when we were both back in Windsor, Sheila’s father took me aside and gave me what-for because I had taken his little girl away with me on a romantic weekend tryst. Some romance. Some tryst.
Over Christmas in 1964 — the year Sheila graduated from the U of T and I finished law school — we went down to the cottage in Colchester and I asked her to marry me at the water’s edge. Sheila tells me that she and her mother snickered in the next room as I stammered out the news to her father, who did not give his consent without first subjecting me to a vigorous grilling. It wasn’t just that I was a Catholic and the Cowans were United Church. More problematically, my father was a Liberal MP and Bill Cowan’s father had been a Tory MP.
Coming from a Protestant family, Sheila was required to take a pre-nuptial course. Fortunately, Father Bellyea, who was a wonderful priest and had been at St. Mike’s when I was there, agreed to take on the task of schooling her in the Catholic ways. They ended up spending most of their time discussing Jane Austen. The wedding was originally planned for June but was delayed to September because my dad was expecting a spring election. As it turned out, the election wasn’t till November, so our wedding, which took place on September 11, actually occurred during the run-up to the campaign. It was a tremendous party, made all the more satisfying for the Martins because my dad invited all his election workers and Bill Cowan had to foot the bill. The ceremony was held at Assumption Church near the university, and the reception afterwards was at Beach Grove Golf Club. Our honeymoon consisted of one day across the river in Detroit, and then we headed back to Toronto, where I started the bar admission course. We had found a basement flat near the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. But because of the election, we spent many of the early weekends of married life doing family political duty back in Windsor — Sheila’s first experience of a campaign.
My friends and family will tell you that I have always found it hard to talk about my emotions — even those I feel most deeply — perhaps I should say especially those I feel most deeply. Unlike my father, whose joys and sorrows were often visible on his face and in his eyes, I have a tendency to change the topic when something comes too close to home. Sheila likes to recall my speech at the wedding, in part because it was easy for me to make jokes and impossible, as it turned out, to say the familiar, and important things, such as thanking the Cowans for raising Sheila, telling my parents how much they meant to me, and proclaiming with all the friends and family there that I loved Sheila and why.
The truth is that in a life blessed with luck, my greatest good fortune was to meet Sheila. I loved her when she was in her twenties. I love her even more now. She has been a wonderful mother. The fact that Paul, Jamie, and David have all turned out so well is due entirely to her. How she put up with four men in the house I will never know. After David and his wife, Laurence, gave us Ethan, our first grandson, and now Liam, our second, when I watch them all at the farm in the Eastern Townships, it reminds me once again what Sheila has given me.
Sheila is in some ways my opposite. Where I can be impatient and impetuous, she is calm and considered. But we also share a love of people as well as a need from time to time to withdraw. We enjoy the same company at dinner, and as likely as not, we are also ready to head home at the same time. But most important, Sheila has been a friend and companion as well as a wonderful wife. Whether it involved family, business, or politics, when I was down, there was never a more powerful tonic for me than just being with Sheila. When my career took its unexpected — and from her perspective, unwelcome — turn from business into politics, Sheila never wavered in her support. As it turned out, she took to the political life more than she expected, though she was clearly happy when it was over. I have had and continue to have a life that would have been impossible without her, a life that is never happier than when she is with me.
CHAPTER THREE
Down to Work
From the moment I flipped his truck on the road home to Morinville, I did not see Maurice Strong again until my wedding day. I had finished law school, and my dreams for the future had begun to gel around the idea of an international career. I had managed to get a stint in the legal branch of the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg, and was thinking that I might want to work as a field officer with the World Bank or a United Nations agency. It was more of an impulse than a plan. Like many young people of my generation, I wanted to make the world a better place and was searching for a way to do it. Maurice had by that time already established a fine reputation with his unusual combination of business and development work; so naturally I turned to him for advice. He pointed out that the developing world was not really crying out for fledgling lawyers like me. He suggested that I should go into business, acquire some experience that would be helpful in the Third World, build up a bit of wealth for myself and my family, and then launch into my more far-flung ambitions. I didn’t know the first thing about business or have an interest in it for that matter, and I said so. But Maurice wasn’t troubled by that and invited me to join him as his executive assistant at Montreal-based Power Corporation, where he was chief executive. Here, instead of a pipe-dream, was a plan, and an offer of a job at a salary of $9,000 a year. Could life get any better?
Maurice Strong was born in 1929 in Oak Lake, an agricultural town in southern Manitoba with a population of just a few hundred. He completed only grade ten before quitting school but managed to make his way in the world with a combination of ambition, drive, and intelligence, becoming by turn a businessman, social activist, environmentalist, and diplomat of international standing and impact.
By the time Maurice came into my life, he had already had a business career that took him from the Arctic to Africa and back to Canada. In the 1950s, he had been hired by the Winnipeg-based Richardson family to become an oil and gas analyst, o
ne of the first ever in Canada. Later on, he managed to get control of a firm called Ajax Petroleum, which eventually became Canadian Industrial Gas and Oil. A friend of his named Bill Richardson (no relation to the Winnipeg Richardsons) had an idea based on his knowledge of mining history. The ancient Romans had been great miners, and the locations of many of their mines were well known. Most of them had been abandoned once they had been mined out. But Richardson’s notion was that with modern technology they could be brought back into production. In particular, the friends fixed their sights on a mine in Anglesey in North Wales. At the time, as I have already mentioned, my father had lost his ministerial job in the Diefenbaker victory and was supplementing his modest MP’s salary by practising law part-time. Maurice approached him to manage the purchase of the Anglesey mine. While nothing ever came of it, Maurice and my father became good friends, and I met someone who would eventually become one of the greatest influences on my life.
Maurice not only gave me a summer job but he launched my business career, and continuously led by example, organizing the historic United Nations Rio Summit on the environment in 1992 (to pick one of his many accomplishments), which I attended as the opposition environment critic. In early years, he was more of a friend of my father’s than of mine, and more of a mentor to me. But his significance in my life went beyond our direct contact. His career would be remarkable anywhere but especially here in Canada.
For some reason that I have never been able to fathom, Canadian business people, unlike their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom, are suspicious of any mixture of business and public service. A business person who decides to enter public life is seen as having lost his or her bearings or perhaps suffering from a strange psychological disability. As for public servants having risen through long years of hard work and commitment to the public good, how could they have anything to contribute to the hard edge, stand-on-your-own-two-feet world of business? These wrong-headed attitudes not only deprive Canadian companies of a wealth of useful experience, but they also have a pernicious effect on the public service. When I was prime minister, one of the first speeches I gave was to the senior leaders of the public service, in which I recalled the story of Gordon Sinclair, a gifted public servant who resigned as head of the Coast Guard when I was in business because he was tired of being accused of living off the public teat. I concluded by saying, “Can anyone tell me why someone who spends his or her whole life building a better health-care system, or strengthening the public finances so that we can secure our social programs, is deemed to be making a lesser contribution than someone who makes hula-hoops?” It is an attitude that does Canada little credit.
