Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  In the midst of this process, in 1992, I also attended the Earth Summit in Rio as opposition environment critic. Prior to leaving, I conducted a round of intensive consultations with non-governmental environmental groups. This was when I met some of the leading activists in the environmental movement, such as Elizabeth May, Louise Comeau, David Runnalls, and Stephanie Cairns, who continued to be friends and advisers for many years. In government, you have a huge bureaucracy on which to rely for advice, but in opposition you find that it is often the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have the most readily available expertise. My contact with these groups convinced me of their enduring value, and even as finance minister and later prime minister, I made it a habit to consult with NGOs before embarking on a foreign trip whenever the subject was the environment or international development.

  My companion on the Rio trip was the NDP’s environment critic, Jim Fulton, who is a deeply committed environmentalist. Our role was to be observers and little else. Jean Charest, who was Canada’s environment minister at the time, would meet with us each morning and listen to what we had to say. But naturally it was he and his bureaucrats who went off to the meetings where the actual discussions were held or, as often happens at such meetings, the communiqués previously negotiated were ratified. Of course, there was an extra dimension of interest in the summit for me because Maurice Strong chaired the meeting and had been the driving force behind creating the assembly.

  The Earth Summit was in some ways a heady experience and in others a sobering one. Heady in that this was the first time the international community had come together to treat the issues of pollution, biodiversity, deforestation, desertification, water scarcity, and global warming as the common problems of humanity they had become. Yet, as was apparent to a degree at the time and became more obvious in the sobering aftermath, like many international meetings it produced much less than it promised. Media attention was focused on whether George Bush Senior, then president of the United States, would attend the meeting. He did, but to what end? Despite Maurice Strong’s valiant efforts in the years that followed, there was little or no follow-through by world leaders to the high-flown rhetoric in which they indulged at Rio.

  This gap between rhetoric and commitment angered and frustrated me, and influenced some of my strong views about global governance. In domestic politics, politicians who fail to keep their promises face the discipline of the electorate if the promise is important enough. No such discipline exists in international forums. Leaders who make international commitments, which in the modern world may be just as important as any domestic promises they will ever make, have little compunction about abandoning them once they’ve smiled for the leaders’ “family photo” and headed home. These broken commitments at the international level bring the whole system of international governance into disrepute, paralyzing the world’s attempts to deal with the hard edges of globalization.

  My distaste for this practice later led me to adopt some controversial positions in government. While inside the cabinet, I was critical of Jean Chrétien’s commitment to the Kyoto Accord without any plan to implement it. He did not expect to meet the goals to which the government had agreed, as Eddie Goldenberg has subsequently confirmed. It was in a similar spirit that I resisted pressure from my friend Bono, among others, to join other governments in a pledge to devote 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product to foreign aid. Even the supporters of the pledge understood that most of the leaders who made it had no intention of carrying it out, but they hoped that grand public declarations would put political pressure on George Bush. I believed strongly in the objectives of both the Kyoto Accord and the 0.7 per cent pledge. I just didn’t like the cynicism of promising the earth and delivering nothing more than dust in the eyes.

  A few weeks after I returned from the Rio summit, my father’s health deteriorated sharply. He had been frail for several years. Still, he had kept up many of his regular activities, such as attending an annual conference of Canadian and British lawyers and judges at Cambridge University that he had helped to establish as High Commissioner. But we suspected he may have suffered from a series of small strokes because he had developed a tendency to trip unexpectedly, which worried us enormously. I had always maintained close contact with my parents, speaking with them by phone almost every day, and swinging by Windsor to see them whenever I was within an hour or two of their home. But that summer, when Dad was hospitalized after a major stroke, Sheila and I began making the trip to see them even more regularly. Early in September, Dad slipped into unconsciousness and several days later, on September 14, 1992, he passed away. At least we had had time to prepare ourselves and to say goodbye.

  My father had been an MP for Windsor for thirty-three years, and had returned there in his retirement years. His funeral was an occasion not only for the family but for all of south-western Ontario. Outside Assumption Church, there was an honour guard of more than seventy Knights of Columbus in their regalia — black suits with red capes. The funeral mass was concelebrated by the bishop of London, John Sherlock, three other bishops, and perhaps a dozen priests. It was delayed a few minutes to accommodate several dozen MPs travelling from Ottawa on an Armed Forces plane that had been kindly arranged by Prime Minister Mulroney. Despite the many political dignitaries, and the crowd of about a thousand people, the funeral had an intimate quality arising from the fact that almost everyone in the room felt they knew my father and had been touched by him in some particular way. I gave the eulogy. I spoke about his French-Canadian upbringing, his Catholic faith, and his dedication to the people of Windsor and of Canada. I spoke about some of his accomplishments at home and abroad: as a father of medicare and of the Canadian Citizenship Act. But mostly I recounted the stories — the many funny stories — that reflected his lack of navigational skills, his exuberant love of politics, and his impish sense of humour. There was a lot of laughter in the church that day, which was what helped me get through it. Later, though, at the cemetery, when his casket was lowered into the ground, I wept.

  The Windsor Star published what may have been my father’s most eloquent epitaph. It was an editorial cartoon. It pictured Dad sporting angels’ wings in heaven with St. Peter behind him. He looks around and utters his immortal line: “Is there anyone here from Windsor?” Dad would have laughed. I still have that cartoon framed and hanging in my office.

  For my mother, the public display of affection for my dad was a huge comfort at a devastating moment.

  When I returned to Ottawa, the prime minister presented me with the flag that had flown at half-mast over the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill the day my dad passed away. For many years after, the flag, mounted on a pole, decorated my parliamentary office. It is now at my home.

  I don’t believe that my father’s illness and death affected my political life except in the narrow sense that, absorbed as I was with my family on the one hand and the development of the Red Book on the other, I was aloof from the turmoil that gripped some of my fellow Liberal MPs during this time. Jean Chrétien faced a challenge from some of those within the caucus who wanted the party to take advantage of the public’s outrage over the GST and promise to abolish it. Ultimately, the Red Book contained a commitment to replace — not abolish — the tax, whatever others might have said when ad-libbing their way through the 1993 campaign.

  I watched with great interest, as did all of us, Brian Mulroney’s belated resignation as party leader and the ascendance of Kim Campbell, first in the media and then for a time in public popularity. I was not one of those “Nervous Nellies” in the caucus who Jean Chrétien so famously castigated in the spring of 1993 because they feared another Tory victory. Maybe because of my involvement in developing the Red Book, I felt that we were extremely well prepared for the campaign once it came.

  In early September 1993, Kim Campbell finally dropped the writ for the election. There was an eerie period at the beginning of the seven-week campaign when the Progressive Conservatives maintai
ned a lead over us in the polls, seemingly defying the laws of political gravity. A week and a half into the campaign, on September 19, we released the Red Book. On Terrie’s suggestion we had arranged the release to the media as a “lock-up” similar to what accompanies a budget. That is, the reporters were given the document but were sealed off from the world for a couple of hours while they read and absorbed the text and began preparing their stories. This is done for a budget so that a superficial read by reporters pressed to get their stories out doesn’t adversely affect the markets. Of course, our platform was unlikely to do that, but the adoption of the lock-up mechanism added to the weight and seriousness of the document and helped ensure that it got more than a quick skim before being consigned to the wastebasket by the press corps.

  It worked brilliantly. When the lock-up was over, we held a press conference at which Jean Chrétien was flanked by Chaviva and me. It emphasized party unity as well as the idea that the leader was backed up by a strong Liberal team, an important theme of the campaign. For the most part, reporters took the document seriously and Jean Chrétien used the opportunity to emphasize that the Red Book would create a new form of accountability to voters by giving a specific measure of success once in office.

  Unlike in 1988, I had national responsibilities to campaign outside my own riding in 1993. That, perhaps along with a dose of realism, made me more nervous about my own seat than I had been the previous election, even though this time the conventional wisdom was that I would easily win. In 1993 and in subsequent campaigns, I was helped tremendously by Sheila’s grace and skill as a door-to-door campaigner on my behalf, as well as a superb local campaign team that included my sons. Meanwhile, Terrie joined the Chrétien tour. With her detailed knowledge of the Red Book, she was ideally cast as a media contact on the plane and bus tour, where she spent long hours with reporters, answering their questions and stick-handling the issues they raised. No one disputed the enormous value she brought to the campaign tour. Some of the relationships she developed with reporters at the time continued to serve us well for years to come.

  Unfortunately, however, she was an uneasy fit with the Chrétien people, some of whom continued to regard anyone with a Martin connection with deep suspicion. At one point, because of this, she was ready to quit the tour, and I had to go down to the bus station in Montreal, where the campaign bus was parked, to meet her and persuade her to stick with it. As the campaign neared its end, she phoned me and asked whether I would cover for her if she told the tour organizers she wanted to spend election night with Sheila and me. She had no intention of doing so, and spent the evening in Ottawa with David Herle and Richard Mahoney. But no matter, there was more than enough for Liberals to celebrate on election night, wherever they were and whoever they were with.

  1 It is important to remember that John Turner was not opposed to free trade per se. He was opposed to the particular agreement negotiated by the Mulroney government. I supported free trade, and while I felt the FTA was deficient in important areas I also felt it was the best we could get in the circumstances.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Good Morning, Minister”

  On November 4, 1993, I was sworn in as finance minister, along with the rest of Jean Chrétien’s new cabinet, at the Governor General’s residence at Rideau Hall. After the swearing-in, there was a reception for the freshly minted ministers and their families. It was an intoxicating moment, poised as we were between the satisfaction of electoral victory and the responsibilities of governing. Yet, it was there that Jean Pelletier, the prime minister’s chief of staff, took me aside to tell me that my mother had been taken to the hospital. When I spoke with my mother’s physician, he reassured me that her situation had stabilized and that I had time to attend that afternoon’s cabinet meeting and meet briefly with the department the next morning before catching the plane for Windsor.

  Right after the swearing-in, I stopped by the apartment building on Bay Street in downtown Ottawa where I was staying. David Dodge, who would be my deputy and was coming to meet me, stepped out of his own car at the same moment as I stepped out of mine. “Good morning, minister,” he said in his inimitable nails-on-chalkboard voice. “Welcome aboard.” I suspect I must have looked around to see who he was talking to, because it was the first time anyone had called me minister. After a brief meeting with David, I made my first visit to the departmental offices on O’Connor Street. Terrie O’Leary and I had a quick tour of the ministerial suite, and she immediately declared that the washroom in the corridor separating our offices would be a joint one. In fact, since my staff ended up being predominantly female, and the room filled up with hairspray and hand lotion, I don’t think it would be true to say that it ever was a joint space at all.

  The department had given me a huge stack of briefing books. One of the first things that caught my eye was David Dodge’s biography, in which I discovered he had been responsible for managing the GST file — the target of many a Liberal attack when we had been in Opposition. When I went out to share this with Terrie, she was coming the other way, having just stumbled across the same information.

  The next day, there was the planned briefing with David and the assistant deputy ministers, and I was off to the airport with a stack of briefing books in tow. By the time Sheila and I arrived in Windsor on the evening of November 5, it was well after dark, and I was un certain whether we should go to the hospital so late. Sheila insisted, and I am glad that she did, because my mother’s condition had worsened. Indeed, it was one of the last times that we were able to talk to her as she slipped in and out of consciousness. Throughout her life, my mother had always suffered from frailer health than my father. In the latter years, hers was a slower, steadier decline than my dad’s. I am certain she knew he would have found it impossible to get through a day without her, and so she clung to life by sheer force of will. After he passed away, it was clear she felt she was now free to go, and it was just a matter of time. Increasingly, she suffered the symptoms of angina, including shortness of breath. She had been very ill before the campaign began, then rallied, then slumped again just before voting day. I had made a number of quick trips to Windsor during the election campaign and during the transition before we took office.

  My sister lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where her husband, Michael, was head of the English Department at St. Thomas University. They have two daughters, Katie and Julie.

  Shortly after I had arrived at my mother’s bedside on that eventful first day in government, she looked up and saw Sheila and our boys and Mary Anne and her family all gathered around her. She said only one word: “Why?” Thinking she was wondering why we were all at her bedside, Mary Anne told her that we had come because she was ill, and then she slipped back to sleep. A few minutes later she, she woke up and asked again, “Why?”

  I told her, “Mother, we’ve explained to you. You’ve been sick and we’re all here to make sure you get better.” And then she said, “No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean, why Finance? Why would you want to be minister of finance?”

  My mother had a very deep faith, and was at peace with the idea of her own passing. When she got very ill, the medical staff put breathing tubes down her throat. On one occasion when they did this, Mom told Mary Anne and me that she didn’t want to go through that again, and said that when it was her time to go, she wanted to be left to it. At the very end, I had a hard time accepting that wish; I would have done anything to keep her with us a little longer. My sister was more compassionate and willing to see the physicians step back and let nature run its course. Mary Anne was a great rock at a time when I found it hard to deal with my grief.

  It was a tough week in which to have to plunge into the new job I had just taken on. The Hôtel-Dieu Hospital was the place I had been born, where my father had died, and where my mother would spend her last days. Now it was also the scene of my initiation into my responsibilities as minister of finance. With my mother slipping in and out of a coma and the family gathered
around her bed, I suppose I resented the time I needed to spend learning my new job. But I had just three and a half months to prepare a budget, the first Liberal budget in a decade. As my mother’s question implied, Finance was never the portfolio I had sought, so it was not as if I had the framework of a budget already sketched in my mind. My first preference was to be minister of industry. It took the energetic intervention of people such as Ed Lumley, the late Arthur Kroeger, and others, including Terrie O’Leary and David Herle, to persuade me to go for Finance. “If you want to be the modern C.D. Howe, you have got to be minister of finance,” they told me. “The minister of finance is the most powerful minister in the government. In any other job, you’ll have to depend on the finance minister to support whatever you want to get done.” They were right, of course, which I soon saw. When I went to Jean Chrétien and told him that I would like Finance, he graciously consented, although my change of heart undoubtedly complicated his cabinet planning.

  In that difficult week, David Dodge made a generous gesture by decamping to Windsor with some of the department’s most senior officials. That way I could be briefed while still being able to keep vigil at my mother’s bedside. For the most part, we met in the chaplain’s room at the hospital, which effectively became my ministerial office. Subsequently I remember joking to a friend of mine who was a priest that I could feel the church’s guidance as I prepared the budget. His reply did not miss a beat: “You can blame the church for a lot of things,” he said, “but I suspect your budget is beyond saving.”

  A legend has grown up that at some point I threw all the briefing books into the garbage in disgust. I have no recollection of this, nor do any of the principals who would have been there had it actually happened. Like a lot of legends, though, it conveys a whiff of the truth. The briefing books had clearly been prepared with the idea that the new Liberal government was not going to place a priority on addressing our dire fiscal situation. I made it very clear from the start that I was serious, though I did not yet fully understand what that implied.