Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  Thérèse’s nickname for the group of my closest advisers stuck. The Board was a name that none of them relished, but it became their media moniker. I used the term myself, mostly because I knew it bugged them. The group did not issue membership cards, and it changed composition with the passage of time. But a snapshot of the group taken at Terrie and David’s cottage in the Gatineau Hills a few days after the Chicoutimi caucus captured the group fairly well as it then was. It included Terrie and David, of course. Elly Alboim, whom I came to know as finance minister, brought his exceptional policy mind and communications skills. Michele Cadario, who had long been a road warrior in my cause, painstakingly building my organization across the country, became campaign director in the leadership campaign. Véronique de Passillé, who was president of the Young Liberals at the time, and Pietro Perrino, an important strategist for the provincial Liberals, were my main organizers in Quebec; Dennis Dawson was one of my principal advisers on the province. John Duffy had been involved in drafting my policy platform in 1990 and would do similar service now. Brian Guest, a passionate advocate for cities and the environment, now also became communications director. Karl Littler was an exceptional organizer who would lead our effort in Ontario along with Charles Bird. Scott Reid, who had left my staff by this time, was working closely with Brian on providing media and communications advice. Tim Murphy, an experienced organizer, formidable policy adviser, and a former member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament, continued to work as my chief of staff. Richard Mahoney lent his unsurpassed knowledge of the party and network of personal contacts. Ruth Thorkelson, who had also gone to the private sector, was in charge of debate preparations.

  John Webster was éminence grise of the campaign. He had a commanding presence and was always the calm in the middle of a storm. A steadfast and loyal friend, he was at the centre of both of my leader ship and election campaigns. Mike Robinson, meanwhile, provided a key link to the party elites, and Francis Fox did the same, concentrating on Quebec.

  It was more than just a political organization. It was a network of close friends whose relationships had been forged through many political campaigns over many years. Interestingly, most of them had significant histories in the party as activists and organizers that pre-dated my own entry into politics. They provided me with a cadre of advisers who knew me exceptionally well, who were my most loyal supporters as well as my sternest critics. The intensity of their personal relationships sometimes made it hard for newcomers to penetrate — or at least gave them the impression that it would. At times, it also gave my opponents, inside and outside the party, a ready target to shoot at. Often this was presented in the form of an attack on Earnscliffe, the Ottawa firm where many of them worked from time to time. I think a fair examination of the record would show, however, that these attacks, which often insinuated conflicts of interest, were never backed up with even the flimsiest of evidence. I know these people very well, and they are as honest as they were loyal.1

  In addition to The Board, who provided the core of the campaign organization, I also needed to raise the funds to fuel it. Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman had been close friends as well as supporters since I had first got to know them in my 1990 bid for the leadership in which Gerry, a celebrated Bay Street entrepreneur, led the fundraising effort and Heather co-chaired my Ontario campaign. I was very grateful that Gerry agreed to head up my national effort once again. Guy Savard, one of Canada’s most able merchant bankers, raised contributions in Quebec. Together they not only raised sufficient money for the leadership, there was enough left over to pay off the Liberal Party’s $3.5 million debt from the Chrétien years.

  From the outset of the leadership campaign, we knew that the likelihood was that we would win. In retrospect, I regret that in our zeal to turn that likelihood into a certainty we alienated some of those in the party who supported other candidates. I do think, however, that we were successful in broadening my already-large base in the party. One of the priorities of the “insiders” on The Board had to be to make room for those who were only just making up their minds to support me. In British Columbia, Mark Marrisen, for example, had been a Chrétien organizer in 1990. Admittedly, in Quebec, the scenario was more challenging. The depth of antagonism between our organization and Jean Chrétien’s was so great that few had any interest in crossing the divide. Jean Chrétien’s former supporters mostly looked to other candidates such as Allan Rock and Brian Tobin and when they left the race either gravitated to Sheila Copps or simply dropped out altogether.

  For me, party renewal implied much more than a change of leader. It meant reaching out to a whole new generation of voters, and doing so in areas where few had recently if ever voted Liberal. By the end of the leadership campaign, the Liberal Party had its largest membership in decades. The Quebec organization had been infused with life and the party in British Columbia was stronger than ever. Besides former Chrétien supporters, we had also reached out to the Trudeau wing of the party, and some party legends such as Marc Lalonde, Otto Lang, and Tom Axworthy came to play important roles.

  It was important that the leadership campaign also send messages of inclusion to Canadians outside the party who had not recently supported the Liberals. Many of the themes of my campaign were about reaching out. For a long time, I had believed that the Liberal Party could do more to attract voters in Quebec and Western Canada who had felt excluded by some of our policies, and often simply by our tone of voice. One of the first trips I undertook after Chicoutimi was a swing through the Western provinces, where I was greeted by an enthusiasm that suggested they did not have to be a perpetual graveyard for Liberals. I also believed my “cities agenda” would connect with people in places such as Quebec City, East End Montreal, and Calgary, where the party had been especially weak.

  I continued to make democratic reform an important part of my message to Liberals and to the public. At the broadest level I was concerned, as many people are, about the declining interest in politics among Canadians. I thought the place to start was with parliamentary reform. Unfortunately, over the course of forty years or so, Canadians had seen the influence of individual Members of Parliament eroded as the power of the prime minister and the executive branch of government grew. It was, sad to say, a Liberal prime minister who once described MPs as “nobodies.” What has happened is that MPs, who form the most personal link between individual citizens and the government in Ottawa, have been gradually disempowered. They vote according to the dictates of their party, and too often, when their party is in power, no one in the government cares particularly what they have to say. No wonder fewer and fewer Canadians are bothering to vote.

  To address this, I developed a series of proposals aimed at reducing party discipline on MPs, giving them a greater role in initiating and shaping legislation, strengthening parliamentary committees, giving MPs a role in overseeing government appointments, and creating an independent ethics commissioner. Although the devil, as always, is in the details, the underlying impulse behind these proposals was more important: to reconnect Canadians with their democracy.

  From the start, the leadership campaign went well. Extremely well. So well, in fact, that I sometimes felt frustrated by the front-runner’s role, which invariably is to be cautious, when my own inclinations were to engage the party in real debate. Yet to stake out new territory far from the place the Liberal Party had occupied under Jean Chrétien was to invite yet another round of party in-fighting with the sitting prime minister. For instance, he fiercely attacked the proposal I had made to allow parliamentary committees to choose their chair-persons by secret ballot (rather than, as tradition had it, by the prime minister himself). Eventually, the Canadian Alliance introduced a motion to flush out the Liberals on the topic; the issue was only defused when the prime minister agreed to a free vote in the House on the matter. Not surprisingly, MPs voted to empower their committees rather than preserve the prerogatives of the Prime Minister’s Office. Jean Chrétien also sought to rat
ify the Kyoto agreement, but still with no plan in place to implement it — a concern that Anne McLellan, still a senior minister, was bold enough to raise publicly. In the House, I was forced to choose between the treaty I supported and the government’s promises without preparation, which I regarded as a shell game. In the end, I decided that the principle was too important not to support, even if a plan would have to wait until I had the reins.

  One of the most perplexing decisions Jean Chrétien made in the last months of his leadership was to introduce a “reform” of the party financing system that seemed designed to hobble the Liberal Party. No one would argue that party financing in this country was perfect. Yet the effect of the legislation was to force the Liberal Party, without any period of transition, to develop a system along the lines of the one already perfected by the Reform/Canadian Alliance/Conservative Party over more than a decade. There was simply no time for us to develop a large base of small donors, as the legislation required us to do. The president of the Liberal Party at the time, Stephen LeDrew, described the law as “dumb as a bag of hammers.” Ironically, while it was a substantial irritation to me as Liberal leader, the debilitating effects of the legislation on the party were gradual and not truly felt until after I stepped down and was replaced by Stéphane Dion. It was Stéphane, I am sad to say, who suffered most from legislation that might reasonably be interpreted as having been aimed to get at me.

  The paradox of the leadership campaign was that it was a great success from the narrow perspective of securing a victory in the Liberal leadership, but in many ways it did not set up the party for the coming election as well as it might have done. When Allan Rock and, some time later, John Manley withdrew from the race long before the convention, it was an acknowledgement that the party had made up its mind. Only Sheila Copps remained in, and she never gathered the support to be in serious contention. Because the media had no contest to report on inside the leadership race, they focused on the ancient rivalry between Jean Chrétien and me, which now had a new dimension: effectively, there were two leaders of the Liberal Party at the same time.

  Early in 2003, I laid out the elements of the dilemma this situation created for my leadership campaign as explicitly as I could in a statement to reporters in Sherwood Park, Alberta. I told them that loyalty to the current prime minister could not be allowed to preclude the public discussion of controversial ideas. I said plainly that there could only be one prime minister at a time, and that the positions I put forward were not demands on the current government but policies I was proposing for my own.

  There was, however, another element to this strange situation that was unknown to the public and the media at the time. I could declare publicly that there was only one prime minister at a time, to free myself up to discuss new ideas in public. But the reality that change was coming at the top was naturally affecting the expectations of those in office. Tim Murphy was more and more often approached by ministers in the Chrétien cabinet seeking approval for their departmental plans for the future.

  In order to circumvent some of the stifling constraints of the situation and to kick-start the renewal of the party, our campaign opened up a mammoth exercise in policy consultation, led by Mark Resnick and aided by Ruth Thorkelson, Peter Nicholson, and John Duffy, in which we drew hundreds of academics, party members, and policy analysts into lively debates on everything from parliamentary reform to health care to Aboriginal policy. I also mounted a series of town hall meetings with voters of every stripe across the country, organized with the help of think-tanks such as the Canada West Foundation and Canada25. These provided the kind of forum I have always enjoyed, letting loose with plenty of free-flowing debate and lots of time for questions and answers. The policy wonk in me relished the chance to delve into a wider range of issues, much beyond what I had dealt with in Finance.

  Once summer turned to fall, our challenge became how to sustain public interest in the campaign. I had long ago intended to go to the polls within months of becoming leader and prime minister, in order to secure my own mandate from the electorate. That meant that the leadership convention in November was an important stage from which to speak to Canadians. Unfortunately, by this point, the media’s interest was really flagging. In many ways, it was more like many American party conventions, where the outcome is already known ahead of time, than what we are used to in Canada. Brian Guest had suggested inviting Bono to the convention; we had by this point developed a good relationship born from our mutual interest in Africa. I was taken with the idea because his star quality would go a long way to elevating public interest in the developing world among Canadians. Many of my staffers hoped that Bono would perform as well as speak at the convention, but that was not to be. Still, it was great for the family to have him hang out with them for much of the day.

  We arranged for Sheila Copps to give her pre-vote speech in a hall that we made sure was packed to cheer her on. As the certain victor, I did not speak at the convention until after the vote was over. I spent a lot of time preparing for my keynote address, as I invariably do for big speeches. I talked about my belief in Canadian ambition: to be a more substantial presence on the international stage; to create a more prosperous, competitive, and advanced economy; and to do much more to educate our children, look after our seniors, create opportunity for our Aboriginal peoples, end the marginalization of our disabled, and improve our health care for all. In particular, I made the case for attacking wait times in our medical system as a visible sign that we were serious about reforming medicare.

  I think it went well, setting the tone I wanted as I approached my return to government and to the electorate in a different role. But later in the convention, my staff told me, to my surprise, that I also needed to make some off-the-cuff remarks to a general meeting of the delegates when they met with the new party executive. My message was that the Liberal Party often ends up becoming too dependent on the government when the party is in power, which is not a good thing. When, as inevitably happens, Liberals find themselves back in Opposition, the party structure has often atrophied and is not up to the job. The government will make the decisions it must, I said, but the party should remain independent, even challenging the government at times. As often happens, in my experience, the universal opinion seemed to be that this off-the-cuff address was the better speech.

  During the convention, I did everything I could to ensure that Prime Minister Chrétien got the praise he deserved for his decade in office. There was a tribute evening at the convention, and we made sure our supporters were there. In my speech, I said I was proud of what we had accomplished under his leadership, which was true. There was no need to dwell on our cool personal relationship. Behind the scenes, however, things were not going smoothly. To that point, the PCO and the PMO had refused to provide me with any briefings whatever in preparation for the transition. Once briefings began, they were not always as complete as my transition team would have preferred: for example, we did not have access to some departmental officials who would have been helpful as we planned the reorganization of government departments. It would also become clear in the coming weeks that the PMO was not happy about me playing the semi-official role that I inevitably assumed in the weeks before I took office, and which was imposed on me by the prime minister’s decision to delay the handover: meeting with the premiers at the Grey Cup and touring parts of Halifax that had been devastated by Hurricane Juan are two examples of this role.

  The prime minister had said publicly and repeatedly that he had no intention of stepping down before February 2004, the date he had announced at the Chicoutimi caucus so long before. Naturally, I planned for the transition on that basis, anticipating that I would call an election for the early spring, very soon after taking office. This was not something I would be able to do any earlier because the Conservatives had not yet held their leadership convention, and there was a pending redistribution of parliamentary seats that would benefit the West. I had long believed that the West
needed a larger voice in Ottawa and the Liberal Party, and I was not about to call an election at a time when it would do the opposite.

  Soon after I was chosen leader, however, word reached us that the prime minister was actually planning to step down much sooner. At one time, this would have been welcome, but at this late date it complicated our transition plans. We then got the indication that he would stay until his original date only if we asked him to, something that would have seemed laughable after we had had so long to prepare for office. So I left him to choose his own date of departure.

  In retrospect, many have assumed that this dance over timing was about the release of the Auditor General’s report on the sponsorship program. Perhaps, but the fact is, the prime minister had already guaranteed that the report, which dealt with problems on his watch, would only be released on mine. Let me explain that. The Auditor General can only report when Parliament is meeting. By proroguing Parliament as he did, Jean Chrétien ensured that this would not happen until I was prime minister, whatever the ultimate date of the handover. Once Parliament is prorogued, there are technical requirements to bring it back into session, including that it start off with a throne speech and the subsequent debate. The idea that having relinquished the leadership of the Liberal Party, but not yet the office of prime minister, Jean Chrétien would summon Parliament into a new session in early 2004, have a throne speech, table the Auditor General’s report, take the heat that was rightfully his, and then — at that point and that point only — hand over the Prime Minister’s Office is too absurd to take seriously. The fact is Jean Chrétien could easily have chosen to have the Auditor General’s report tabled and made public while he was prime minister — but he opted not to do so.