Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  There was a time early in 1990 when, despite the increasingly acid debate over Meech Lake, we strongly believed that I could win the convention. After a rocky start organizationally in English Canada we found our legs, especially in Ontario, where we had a strong campaign team, including John Webster, Tim Murphy, Joe Volpe, Albina Guarnieri, Pat Sorbara, Pam Gutteridge, and Jim Peterson. We also had Earl Provost, who, as a Young Liberal, was the first Paul Martin delegate elected in Canada.

  In Quebec, we thought we were competitive in many ridings. In the first few days of delegate selection in mid-February, there were some hopeful signs. We had some initial wins in Ontario, where delegate selection started earlier than the rest of the country, including a hard-fought battle in Windsor St. Clair — the successor to my father’s riding of Essex East. The media began to take our campaign more seriously. But the early optimism was short-lived. In English Canada, there were many delegate selection meetings where both Chrétien’s campaign and my own turned out hundreds of supporters. We often lost by agonizingly narrow margins and, because of the winner-take-all system then in effect, came up empty even where we had considerable support. In Quebec, it was a different story. The party had decayed considerably, and delegate selection meetings were often poorly attended. But we underestimated Pietro Rizzuto’s ability to turn out just enough supporters to beat us in these small meetings.

  By the time we headed to Calgary, we knew it was a long shot, but we still had not given up hope. If Sheila Copps did well enough to force a second ballot, I was told that some of her organizers had agreed to help swing much of her support to me. In the days leading up to the vote I was performing well, and we had some success in moving Chrétien delegates to our side. Candidates always imagine that their convention speech can make a difference, though it seldom does. I laboured over my speech, and the general view in the media was that I bested Jean Chrétien that night. Sheila Copps gave a terrific speech, to the point that when her teleprompter broke down she carried on extemporaneously so well that no one in the audience noticed. In the end Jean Chrétien’s victory on the first ballot came as a disappointment but hardly a shock. The night before, Sheila and I gathered our sons, who had worked hard on the campaign, and gave them the bad news that I was not going to win. I knew from my own experience that defeat can sometimes hit family members hardest.

  Besides being the expiration date for the Meech Lake Accord and voting day for the Liberal Party leadership, June 23, 1990, was my father’s eighty-seventh birthday. Out of the blue my supporters organized a celebration on the convention floor. A birthday cake appeared, and the whole convention burst into a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You,” followed by a round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” It was a special moment. Our situations were reversed from the two earlier conventions, and I knew my father’s concern was solely about my well-being. But once again, others were to feel the sting of defeat much more bitterly than either of us did.

  I knew that my Quebec supporters would be tormented by the victory of a man who had gone beyond criticizing Meech Lake to very publicly embracing one of its most ardent opponents, Newfoundland’s premier Clyde Wells, at the convention. But I had no inkling that Jean Lapierre and Gilles Rocheleau, both Quebec MPs, would leave the party to help form Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Québécois. If I had known, I would have done everything in my power to dissuade them, which may be the reason they never spoke to me about it.

  That night we had a tremendous party for my supporters. In politics, it is sometimes difficult to express how deeply you feel about the people who devote their time, energy, and enthusiasm to help you achieve your goals. They give up so much for you. I did my best to thank them as a group and as individuals. In the years that followed, the media often remarked at how extraordinarily deep the bonds were among my aides and supporters. Much of that was forged in the course of that first leadership campaign. Many of the people in the room that night went on to play significant roles in shaping the economic and social policies that they deeply believed would make Canada a better place. In an era when politics has lost its allure for many Canadians, it is worthwhile to stop once in a while and honour the efforts of those who do commit themselves.

  For me, there was no anguish after the leadership race was over, only a slight feeling of disequilibrium. After all, I had never really been a regular MP. I had gone virtually directly from the corporate headquarters of CSL into a leadership campaign. How strange it was walking into the caucus meeting Jean Chrétien called the next day right there in Calgary. It was a very businesslike meeting, in which he assumed the role that he had successfully won, and I was another member of caucus. I had run for leader and lost. In the process, a lot of harsh things had been said and done. And the caucus had largely been united around him. You had to wonder, how was all this going to work?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Opposition

  It is only natural after losing a leadership race to feel some uncertainty about your relationship with the winner. It was no different for me. My dream of becoming the C.D. Howe of my generation was undimmed, but what I could not be certain of at first was whether that door would remain open. Within a few weeks, however, Eddie Goldenberg came down to the farm in the Eastern Townships and we discussed my future role in the Liberal Party. Eddie’s father, Carl, who had been appointed to the Senate by Pierre Trudeau, had been a friend of my father. I had always liked Eddie, and given his long association with Jean Chrétien, I certainly had no quarrel with his decision to back Chrétien’s leadership bid in 1990. The most important thing for me was that I have meaningful work within the party and eventually in government, and Eddie was clear that this would be the case. Over the next decade, Eddie, along with Chaviva Hošek, who was Jean Chrétien’s policy adviser, would play an important role in lubricating the political and governmental relationship between him and me.

  Much of the day-to-day interaction between Chrétien’s office and mine was channelled through Terrie O’Leary, who had replaced Richard Mahoney as my executive assistant after the leadership and continued in that role for many of my most important years at Finance. Terrie would be at my side through many political battles and we would become the closest of friends. She has an extraordinary combination of gifts. She shares my interest and enthusiasm for the details of public policy. But her political antennae are more acute than mine, and her understanding of political communications is formidable. She is an indefatigable worker when she commits herself to something, and a superb organizer and leader of people. Equally important, she is a thoroughly decent person, delightful and funny. I suppose that is part of the reason that I have never minded that she will take me apart when she disagrees with me, not only in private but in a room full of others, if she thinks it is time to give me what-for.

  Jean Chrétien and I had a personal relationship that ran the gamut from cool to non-existent, so it was in large part due to Terrie’s relationships with Chrétien’s people that we found a way to make the governmental partnership work. At times, when Jean Chrétien would cut Eddie out of the loop, she would bring him back in, knowing this was important if we were to bridge the frigid river between me and the prime minister. Whatever reservations Eddie had about me and my role in the party and government — deep ones, apparently — he disguised them completely from me during more than a decade that we worked together under Jean Chrétien’s leadership. I took him at face value and we got on with business.

  My main concern in the summer and fall of 1990 was to carve out a set of tasks that would occupy me intellectually and politically. I was unprepared for the routine of Opposition life, which I had been spared in my rookie years by the leadership race. I wouldn’t “troll” for media attention, as opposition MPs are supposed to do after question period at the House of Commons. Although I deeply disagreed with many of the Mulroney government’s policies, I also understood, perhaps in part through my father, the complexities of governing and for that reason disliked the ritual denunciatio
n of government actions that our system seems to demand of opposition MPs.

  In retrospect, I can say that asking questions in the House of Commons is much more difficult than answering them. In government, if you are any good, you know your issues better than anyone else, and little, if any, preparation for question period is required. In Opposition it is very different. In thirty-five seconds, you need to blast the government, give context to the issue you are raising, and then let loose with a cleverly constructed question that will put the government on the spot. Terrie recalls that I once declined an invitation to have lunch at the American Embassy with Katherine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, because I had to ask a question in the House in the afternoon and wanted to prepare. Terrie, who has a passion for John F. Kennedy, told me in no uncertain terms that I was going, and gave me a list of questions for Ms. Graham, who had been a friend of JFK’s. She was not at all mollified when I came back to the office having gleaned nothing because I could not concentrate on anything else over lunch but my upcoming half-minute performance in the House.

  There are a number of real problems with question period. The first is that it has little to do with the eliciting of information and contributes little to needed debate. Second, the first point might be tolerable if it was good theatre. It’s not. Third, question period has two different audiences with two different perspectives. How many times did I leave the House of Commons with my caucus colleagues cheering because of some “brilliant” put-down, only to have a senior citizen (they are the ones who watch question period on TV) ask me on the weekend, “When are you and the rest of those hyenas in Parliament going to grow up?”

  I asked for, and received, the role of environment critic. I already had a deep interest in the environment. In the beginning, my interest had been rooted in the conservation of Canada’s wilderness. I thought preservation of the environment was a moral value, whether it was to have a decent and healthy country for children to grow up in or quite simply to be able to fish in rivers where there were actually fish. As I have said, the environment was an important part of my leadership platform. My political ambition remained to go into government as industry and trade minister, in the footsteps of C.D. Howe, but one of the things that had changed since his time was the clear link that had now been established between sound environmental policy and a nation’s economic success. I also knew I already had the bona fides for the industry job from my business background. The environment critic’s job would broaden my experience and deepen my knowledge on a vital issue.

  Above and beyond the specific critic’s job, however, I asked to be entrusted with the development of the party’s overall election platform — an idea that met with indifference from my closest advisers, with the exception of Terrie. For twenty years, beginning with Pearson’s defeat of Diefenbaker, the Liberal Party had been the party of government, and so its election platforms tended to be based on policies developed through the mechanisms of government. The specifically political gloss and the day-to-day campaign announcements — the “Gainesburgers,” as the media called them — were drafted by party strategists. They did not reflect a medium-or long-term vision of where the Liberals wanted to take Canada. They were strategies for the campaign, but they were no more than that. As a result, the Liberals had failed to develop a comprehensive vision for the future. The most significant policy position the party had taken during the 1980s — opposition to the Free Trade Agreement1 — had proven politically popular, but it was not grounded in a comprehensive economic or social strategy. The time had come to rethink many of the party’s policies.

  Jean Chrétien had run a classic front-runner’s campaign during the leadership, which meant that he had never fully developed a policy platform. He was also cautious by nature, unwilling to be tied down to promises that might come to haunt him in government, which meant he would sometimes resist some of our more ambitious and specific ideas. But he was shrewd enough to see the political value of constructing a more elaborate platform, in part because he understood it would address public concerns about our readiness to govern after nearly a decade out of power. Indeed, he ultimately made the platform we constructed into a defining document of his career as prime minister.

  To get the process underway, Jean Chrétien appointed Chaviva Hošek and me as platform co-chairs. I knew Chaviva from the time she had been Ontario’s housing minister and I was the Liberals’ housing critic (during the leadership race) and we had hit it off. Later she became head of the federal party’s research office. She brought with her the resources of her office and, more importantly, her deep convictions on a wide variety of policy issues. She had a profound understanding of how policy might affect the lives of individual Canadians, particularly women. I do not think that when she took on the job, however, she fully understood how ambitious my plans were.

  Over the course of 1991, we organized dozens of meetings with Liberals across the country. Often tons of invitations were dispatched, and hundreds of people showed up. Chaviva and I both thoroughly enjoyed the experience of interacting with rank-and-file Liberals as we wrestled with the formulas we might devise for our social well-being and economic prosperity as a country. In addition, we organized many meetings with experts and organizations that had specialized knowledge of specific fields. It was during this period that I met Fraser Mustard, the brilliant Canadian physician and academic, whose pioneering work on early childhood learning deeply influenced me.

  In my opinion, the modern Liberal believes in the freedom of the individual and is wary of an all-seeing state attempting to restrict that freedom. That’s why Pierre Trudeau brought in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and why I later sought to abolish its notwithstanding clause. At the same time, the modern Liberal is also a descendant of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who championed the role of the state in providing the means by which individual freedoms are guaranteed for everyone. The dichotomy leads us to continually re-evaluate the role of the state to make it more progressive, for example, by bringing in health insurance and medicare, as my father and Monique Begin did, or by seeking to do the same with child care, as I was to do.

  Of course, we could not develop a new platform in a political vacuum. It was crucial to free the party from the grip of the accumulated ideology of the party and set it on a new path. In the fall of 1991, the party held a conference in Aylmer, Quebec. The media at the time, and often since, portrayed the Aylmer meeting as a contest between “business Liberals,” such as Roy MacLaren and me, and “social Liberals” such as Lloyd Axworthy, with victory going to the former. In reality, there were many divergent voices heard at the conference, but a common theme emerged: that globalization was not the property of the left or right but a fact of life with which Canadians had to come to grips. The conference opened the door to rethinking many of the party’s traditional positions.

  The Red Book, as the platform ultimately came to be called, was a collective effort involving thousands of Liberals and hundreds of hours of negotiation and discussion among Terrie, Chaviva, Eddie, and me. The language was crafted in part by John Godfrey, a Liberal MP and former journalist whose graceful pen added both poetry and seriousness to the end product. Although I had always understood the gravity of the problem posed by the mounting deficits run by the federal government from Pierre Trudeau’s time through Brian Mulroney’s, it was not until I became finance minister that I fully understood the difficulty of solving it. I still believed, as I think most of my colleagues in the party did, that the main engine of deficit reduction would be economic growth, and not a fundamental re organization and reduction in the size of government. Everyone understood, however, that we needed a credible policy on the issue. Jean Chrétien suggested that we adopt the approach of the recently signed Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union (EU) by tightening the economic relations between the countries of the predecessor European Community. It stipulated that members of the EU should not run deficits greater than 3 per cent of their g
ross domestic product. Ironically, it was a standard that two of the dominant players in the EU, France and Germany, did not achieve in the years to come. Although once in office I pushed well beyond that mark, reaching a balanced budget and ultimately running surpluses, its importance in the Red Book was to establish a credible goal with a specific timeline that had not just been plucked from thin air.

  Meanwhile, I proposed that the Red Book be fully costed. Unlike election platforms since time immemorial, which promised the sky without seriously considering the consequences of implementation, ours would state plainly what we thought a proposal would cost, and how we would finance it while still achieving our goal of reducing the deficit. Demonstrating once again his natural caution, Jean Chrétien was reluctant to be pinned down so specifically. Ultimately, however, he, too, recognized the value of precise costing, as well as its implicit acknowledgement of the trade-offs necessary once we achieved power. We commissioned economist Patrick Grady to develop an economic model to reconcile the numbers and give the document the look, feel, and intellectual heft of a budget as much as of an election platform. I like to think that it embedded our specific campaign commitments in a clear expression of our party’s economic philosophy that included job creation, responsible management of monetary policy as well as decisive action toward reducing deficits, and a careful enhancement of social programs as fiscal circumstances permitted.

  I thought at the time that it would set a standard for party election platforms in Canada, and it did for a while. When I look at the 2006 election, however, when the Conservatives were able to take power on the basis of a series of uncosted promises (most of them broken early on), it is clear that I was overly optimistic.