by Paul Martin
Maurice Strong cut a different path: a career that travelled through both business and public service. He was an early developer of the Canadian oil patch and also an early exponent of global environmentalism. He was a titan of industry and one of the builders of what has become the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). He has served Canada and the world, primarily through the United Nations. He has sometimes been criticized for his restless movement from job to job. But that flows naturally from his visionary nature. For me, what he offered was a pathway that honoured both business and public service for their unique contributions. He also gave me an insight into the challenges of the environment and of development in the Third World, which has stayed with me all my life.
If all this seems terribly idealistic, remember the times. The security we felt, the growth we experienced, and the limitless possibilities that opened up in the postwar years fuelled an optimism and sense of hope that is only beginning to re-emerge. In the United States, it produced the aura of “Camelot” around John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency. But everywhere in North America among people of my generation it inspired the dream of a better world.
Many years later, when I was well established in business, I was invited to speak to a class at the U of T law school. As a student, I had been taught at this same law school by some of the giants of Canadian legal thinking, including Caesar Wright, Ronald St. John MacDonald, and Bora Laskin (who later became chief justice of Canada). They were men who very much believed that the law was an enterprise devoted to the improvement of the human condition. I was introduced to the class as someone who had been waylaid by a business career on his way to working on the problems of the developing world.
When I was finished my talk, one of the students stood up and said, “This stuff about you wanting to go and help in the Third World sounds like a load of bull. Come on, why wouldn’t you just want to get your law degree and get a job and get on with life?”
I went back at him pretty hard. “There’s a real problem with your question,” I said, “and it is symptomatic of what I know a lot of you think. The fact is, among my peers, it was very much the norm to be concerned about the wider world. I have to wonder what the matter is with your generation. Don’t you have any sense of duty to others?”
He came back at me even harder. “Mr. Martin, when you went to law school, did you have any doubt that you’d get in?”
“No,” I replied.
“Well, I did. And when you went looking for an articling position, did you have any doubt you’d get one?”
“No, there were all kinds of jobs.”
“Well, it is different for us. Half of us don’t know if there will be jobs for us when we graduate.”
It underscored for me once again how privileged my generation had been because we had had the luxury to pursue an idealism that some other generations did not. More recently, I have been struck in talking to university audiences by the extent to which this idealism has returned, perhaps the product of a strong economy similar to that of the 1950s and 1960s.
But all this was in the future for me when I moved to Montreal and joined Power Corporation in spring of 1966 immediately after being admitted to the Bar of Ontario. Power Corporation opened up a world of action, decision, and results, for which I quickly learned I had something of a knack. For Sheila and me, it was a time of transition from our student years. I still remember my first business lunch and realizing that the bill was about what Sheila and I normally spent on groceries for a month!
The move also meant that Sheila and I were parachuted into Montreal at a time when Quebec was in a wonderful turmoil — what we now know as the Quiet Revolution. This “revolution,” the rapid modernization of Quebec society, was led by nationalists such as Jean Lesage, the former federal Cabinet Minister and then Premier of Quebec, who also believed deeply in both Quebec and Canada. They were engaged in a process of fundamental reform that permeated every aspect of life and made us want to live at the centre of this exciting swirl of events. The fact that Power Corporation was headquartered in Montreal clinched my decision to take the job. I was an Ontarian of mostly Irish descent, but I was very aware of my francophone roots. I had been educated in French and had grown up with francophone friends. The Quiet Revolution resonated deeply with me. The changes were taking place not only in culture, education, and the arts but also in business, as Quebecers found the confidence to take their destiny into their own hands. It was a very exciting time and I wanted to be part of it.
Power Corporation got its name as a holding company from two investment dealers, Arthur Nesbitt and Peter Thomson, who traded in the bonds of Shawinigan Power and B.C. Power and in the process acquired much of their common stock, eventually securing control of each. Along the way, Power Corporation had also acquired an oil company called White Rose, which it sold to British-American Oil in 1962. The next year it sold Shawinigan Power to the Province of Quebec, which was creating Hydro-Québec; similarly, the Province of British Columbia acquired B.C. Power as it formed its provincial utility, B.C. Hydro. The fact is, both companies were acquired under the hammer of a threat to nationalize them. As a result, Power found itself sitting on a great pile of cash. It used that cash to build a huge holding company. This was very much the business fad of the time: a hierarchy of subsidiaries, often doing business in completely unrelated fields, held by controlling minority stakes to create a kind of corporate pyramid. That’s how Power Corporation initially worked. Of course, eventually many of these far-flung investments got into trouble; and Maurice Strong was hired to sort it all out. I entered the corporation at what I later realized was a pretty rarified level. There was an enormous amount to do as the company reorganized, so despite the fact that I was the most junior person in the executive office by a long stretch, I was given a tremendous amount of leeway.
I had only begun to get my sea legs, however, when Maurice abruptly left Power, much to the disappointment of the board of directors. My dad was deemed the culprit. As minister of external affairs, he lured Maurice away to become head of Canada’s External Aid Office (later to become CIDA). As a protégé of Maurice Strong’s, I figured I was a goner, and would have been if the new CEO, Bill Turner, had not stared the naysayers down and asked me to stay on as his executive assistant. Bill Turner, one of Canada’s best business leaders, eventually became one of my most significant tutors in learning what business was all about. However, when Lester Pearson announced he was stepping down some months later in 1967, I took a leave of absence to support my father’s bid for the leadership. The leave of absence was no more than a precaution in my mind, because I actually intended to use the natural break in my relationship with Power Corporation to reorient myself toward the promised international career.
By the time the leadership campaign was over, Paul Desmarais, whom I did not know, had engineered a reverse takeover of Power. At our first meeting, he asked me what I did at the company, and I told him. Then he asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him I wanted to quit and go abroad. “I don’t know you,” I said, “and it has nothing to do with that. I’ve done my thing here and I want to see what I can do in the developing world.” Somewhat taken aback, he made a pitch for me to stay for a year. I did stay: for thirteen. Throughout this period, I always imagined that at some point I would quit and pursue my ambition to work for the World Bank or the United Nations, but whenever that point seemed to have arrived, a new and compelling challenge would arise at Power. Furthermore, our first son, Paul, was born on our first wedding anniversary in 1966. Jamie came along in 1969 and then David in 1974. I was a family man now, and I wanted to secure my family’s financial future — something that had worried my father most of his life.
When Sheila and I first arrived in Montreal, we had lived in a small duplex near Côte-Vertu until we were able to afford a house in Mount Royal, which reminded us of the Walkerville area of Windsor where our families had lived. Eventually we were able to move to a larger house in Moun
t Royal and then bought a house in Westmount. In the late 1970s, Sheila and I started to look for a place to get away from the city on weekends and in the summer. At first we tried to find a house on the water but discovered that everything was out of our price range. Eventually, we chose a 150-year-old farmhouse in a little valley near Knowlton in the Eastern Townships, about an hour outside Montreal. Several farms in the valley, including the one we bought, had belonged to a family called Moffat — early British settlers. We don’t know exactly when they put down stakes in the area, but there is a diary entry from an Anglican minister in the 1840s saying that it was the Moffat brothers who came to greet him when he first arrived. Much of the little valley had been cleared by the Moffats to create farmland, but it always was quite marginal land. The steep hillsides must have been difficult enough to plough with a horse-drawn rig. When tractors replaced horses in the 1940s, they couldn’t work on them without flipping and so the farm was abandoned — and eventually naturally reforested. Today, there is sheep pasture along the narrow valley floor, and Sheila and I are now sheep farmers. Basil Moffat, who was born a few hundred metres away and is descended from the original family of settlers, works the farm and lives on a house near our own. He is a fixture in our home as well as on the land. To my great good fortune, he likes to get up at an ungodly hour and have coffee with friends in town before stopping by for an early morning chat, where he provides me with all the local news and we both complain about the weather.
In the early years, the farm was the place where we could get away and spend what people nowadays call “quality time” together. Back then, it was just being with the family. The old farmhouse was not quite as romantic as it may sound. They were able to make rickety houses in the nineteenth century too. Ours had been partially renovated when we got it, but it has taken thirty years of incremental changes designed by Sheila to make it the relaxed country home it is today — big enough to accommodate the changing cast of family who inundate the place. It has gradually replaced the cottage in Colchester as my sentimental home.
As many people do after their kids come along, in the 1970s Sheila and I were settling into the rhythms and routines of family life. We started the boys off in a local French school, St. Clement’s, but then, because of the frequent strikes in the public school system at the time, moved them to Collège Stanislas and eventually to Lower Canada College. When the boys were young, I worked late almost every night and travelled frequently. Sheila says I never changed a diaper, which is libellous. She also recalls that in those years she wasn’t particularly keen on having me around the house while she tended to their meals, baths, and homework. I tended to come home after all that and spend a little time with the boys before putting them to bed. We were together more on weekends at the farm, the house a chaotic scene with the boys and their friends mingling and generally raising Cain.
The boys learned to ski in nearby Knowlton. Most weekends we would take them to the hills along with our neighbours, Brian and Nancy Gallery and their daughters. The Gallerys became very close friends, despite the fact that he was an active Tory and an early backer of Brian Mulroney. I’m glad to say he helped me later on, for which I’m sure he will earn bonus points in heaven.
By this time I had stopped skiing due to an injury I had suffered some years earlier. Sheila and I had gone with some friends to a summer cottage they had rented in Muskoka. Given my world-famous modesty in later years, you may be surprised to discover that I could be a bit of a show-off back then. I was a pretty good water skier, and one day with everyone sitting on the dock enjoying the sun and some refreshments, I had the idea that I would get up on one ski and zing by at top speed, spraying Sheila and her friends. What I didn’t realize was that there was a boat docked there with a very short anchor-rope. When I came roaring by, my ankle hit the rope, and I spun into the dock, ramming my knee with full force; then I flipped into the air before landing with an unpleasant thud. The vacation ended in Bracebridge hospital, and I ended up three to four months a year in a cast for several years afterwards as the doctors did reconstructive work. Thus ended the elite sports career of Paul Martin. It also meant in later years that the boys needed to snow ski without benefit of their father’s technical advice. Amazingly, they all became good skiers.
My sons couldn’t be more different. Paul, the eldest, is like his mother: quiet and happy to be on his own. Jamie can be quiet but is mostly very sociable. What sets him apart is that the musical ability that ran in both my family and Sheila’s, but somehow skipped us and the two other boys, has landed with him. David is more like me: seldom quiet and feeding off the company of others. As kids, the boys had the common experiences of many Canadian children, such as music lessons (for two of them — hopeless), team sports, and summer camps. Later on, they found summer jobs, often working in places that allowed them to see a bit more of our country. One summer, young Paul worked in the Arctic, for example, not far from where I had once taken my walk on the tundra.
Eventually, two of the boys went to the University of Toronto, while David went to McGill — all of them initially in arts. Subsequently, Paul completed an MBA in shipping at the City University of London and eventually moved to Singapore with Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) for several years before returning to make his home in Canada. Jamie had a band and later studied at the American Film Institute; he now lives in Los Angeles and runs his own film production company. David completed an MBA at Cambridge and worked with my friend Laurence (Ladi) Pathy’s shipping company for a time, where he, too, learned the shipping business, and then spent time with Merrill Lynch. Now he runs a private equity fund and is active with CSL but is also very involved in projects involving Aboriginal Canadians. In fact, David and Paul were both well along in forging other business careers before getting involved in CSL (about which, more later).
It has been a great blessing for Sheila and me that my departure from politics coincided with the arrival of our first grandson, Ethan, and that his parents, David and Laurence, live in Montreal. Our good fortune grew when two years later (indeed, just before I wrote this) Ethan’s younger brother, Liam, appeared on the scene. As a grandfather, I have discovered that I am in an intense competition for Ethan’s and Liam’s time, which I often seem to lose to Sheila. My birthday and Ethan’s fall close together, and as it happened we each gave the other a tent as a gift the last time round. One of them has become a semi-permanent part of the furniture in our living room. When I see how involved David is with his two sons’ daily care, I realize how much about parenting has changed, and perhaps how much I missed out on. Like a lot of fathers of my generation, I regret that I did not spend more time with my boys when they were young. I greatly admire — and perhaps even envy — David’s involvement with his sons. I will admit, though, that I have exercised a grandfather’s prerogative not to change diapers. Laurence has also told me that in the interest of historical accuracy I should not exaggerate David’s domestic involvement.
Apart from family, my preoccupation in the 1970s was my business career. After rejoining Power, I had become a corporate firefighter, going into a troubled business, fixing the place up, and getting out again. This shaped my decision-making style, which later served me well in politics, though it opened me up to a great deal of criticism as well. My job was to go into a company — whether it was a glass manufacturer or a shipyard — and either make it profitable or sell it off. As a thirty-something lawyer, I was acquiring business experience as I went along, but obviously did not have detailed knowledge of any of the industries into which I was plunged. When I started, Paul Desmarais would sometimes suggest I go in with someone else, but I always refused. “Send someone else if you want, but if I go in, I want to know I am in charge — that I have full authority.”
The first big deal I ever did concerned a company called Congoleum Nairn, the inventor and marketer of linoleum, in which Power had a large stake. For a long time Power and the other major owner, the Nairn family, had been looking to sell,
but nothing had ever happened. Somehow, I got the assignment to divest Congoleum Nairn. I got hold of Brian Aune and Tom Kierans at Nesbitt Thomson. Eventually, we worked out a sale to Bath Industries, which planned to merge the two companies. It was a huge transaction by Canadian standards, and some of the senior people at Power balked because I had done the deal on a handshake. The fact was I was able to sell an investment for much more than the board had originally expected, and in the end, to my amazement, all these senior people got out of the way and let me execute my plan. When it came time to sell, though, it was politic to get the approval of the head of the Nairn family, Sir William Nairn, who was in Scotland at the time, and we only had a week to do so. Although the sale was critical to the family fortune, when I phoned him to explain the situation, he told me that it was impossible for him to deal with this at the moment because it was the opening of the grouse-shooting season, an almost sacred time. I explained the urgency, but he made it clear that the grouse shooting came first. So I told him: “Fine, I am going ahead — we’re selling now. What you do is up to you.” So he came on board, which taught me a lesson about setting an objective, getting the authority, and going for it. That was my start as a corporate troubleshooter.
