by Paul Martin
By the time I walked into my new office after the swearing-in, I had had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do as prime minister, and how I would do it. Later, I would be criticized for having too many priorities. I accept that I had a great many. I might even accept that my agenda was too large for the political circumstances in which I found myself. I do not, however, accept that my agenda was too large for the country. I had, of course, envisaged at least four years as prime minister. It quickly became clear that I might not have that privilege, and that the sponsorship issue might blot out any other matters of policy. And so, I decided, I would get my agenda out anyway. I thought it was a compelling vision for the country and would help us win the election. But I also believed that if we stumbled at the polls, it would be a guide to future governments and policy makers.
The Conservatives have tried to undo much of what we accomplished. But the day will come when we find our way back as a nation to the principles and policies I laid down. The delay will cost us, I am sure. The children who miss out on the chance to enrich their minds in their earliest years will never get that lost time back. The Aboriginal people who do not get the education or economic opportunities they deserve will be affected all their lives by our collective failure. We will eventually make a serious start on containing greenhouse gases, but we will have lost more precious time. It will take time to rebuild our role as an independent force in the world. And the trading opportunities we are squandering in China and India, for example, will take years to recover. But all of this will come over time.
I have no regrets about my desire to shake things up as prime minister. That’s why I wanted the job. Still, it took a while for me to adapt my management style to the peculiarities of the office. Whether in the business world or at Finance, I had never been one to respect rigid hierarchies. I preferred talking directly to the expert on an issue, whether he or she was the head of marketing or a director-level official in the Ministry of Finance. As finance minister, I didn’t have much taste for the pablum that makes it up through two or three levels of bureaucratic editing to the desks of many ministers. If something was on my mind, I went to the expert, not his or her boss.
The problem was that while I could do that at Finance, it was much more difficult as prime minister. Instead of sitting down with the front-line policy makers, you meet with the officials in the Privy Council Office and five or six ministers, then set a general direction. When they come back to you with their recommendation, you say yes or no or send them back to the drawing board. That took some getting used to. Another thing that took getting used to was the hand-holding that some of my cabinet ministers seemed to need. As minister of finance, I liked to have as much scope as I could carve out, and my contact with the prime minister was as limited as I could manage it. I remember Jean Chrétien telling me that this was pretty much the way he had handled his relationship with Pierre Trudeau when he was a minister. What I discovered as prime minister is that not everyone likes to operate that way.
That having been said, and despite the burden of the sponsorship issue (which I will deal with in the next chapter), I was able to lay out my ideas and aspirations for the country in the leadership campaign, my first months in office, and in the platform for the 2004 election. I also wanted to reshape the political balance within Canada and within the Liberal Party. Western Canada is our most economically dynamic and fastest-growing region. Yet our central institutions have not reflected that. Westerners expressing the region’s entrepreneurial spirit have sometimes been treated like visitors from outer space in Ottawa. As finance minister, I had done what I could to redress that; as prime minister, I hoped to do much, much more.
In my home province of Quebec, meanwhile, the Liberal Party had allowed itself to shrink into a smaller and smaller redoubt. The bitterness over the failure of Meech Lake, and the reluctance of the federal government to convey its understanding that Quebec as the home of the largest francophone population in North America has a special responsibility, had taken us outside the political mainstream there. The issues between the governments in Quebec and Ottawa are substantive, as they are with any province. In many ways, however, sending the right message to Quebec is also a question of tone.
In the little more than two years I had as prime minister, we made enormous headway on many of our most ambitious goals. What the public saw in Parliament and in the media, day in and day out, however, was the sponsorship issue. As a consequence, the 2004 election campaign turned out to be very different than the one I would have chosen to run. After that election, I confronted the almost daily crises and challenges thrown up by minority government. And then there were difficulties of my own making: I wanted to do too much, too quickly, for the bureaucracy to absorb and I did not always communicate my objectives to the public as clearly as I saw them myself.
Like any prime minister, I was heavily dependent on the public service to achieve my goals. At the top of the bureaucracy is the clerk of the Privy Council, who is at the same time the prime minister’s deputy and the master of the bureaucracy. Alex Himelfarb was the clerk when I took office, and at first I regarded him with some trepidation, since he had been closely associated with my predecessor. As the first weeks turned to months, however, my confidence in him grew. Tim Murphy, who was Alex’s counterpart in the Prime Minister’s Office, felt the same way. Not too long after I took office, Alex, who was obviously uncertain about his place on my team, took a trip to Australia to think things out. I later learned that when he came back, Tim sat down with him and talked things out. After that, there were no issues between us. He shared my enthusiasm for ideas, and my desire to get things done (perhaps too quickly sometimes), which helped establish our bond. In time, I saw that he was prepared to serve me just as loyally as he had served Jean Chrétien. Alex has a first-class mind. He is also innovative and, when we had determined on a course, was able to surmount many obstacles, bureaucratic or otherwise, on our behalf.
In addition, Alex brought some of the public servants I had most admired over the years into the PCO, including Jonathan Fried, who had worked with me on international issues at Finance as my foreign affairs adviser, and Dale Eisler — a distinguished former journalist from Saskatchewan and later chief of communications at Finance — as head of PCO communications.
When I was sworn in, I also made a number of changes to the structure of government, some of which worked out quite well, while others did not. In retrospect, it was probably more structural change than was necessary so soon. The alterations we made to the Treasury Board under Reg Alcock were important for modernizing government. Splitting the Human Resources Department in two enabled Ken Dryden, as minister of social development, to concentrate his energies on getting us a national child-care system. Anne McLellan took over the new Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, which was an important adaptation to the post—September 11 world. Later, in the wake of the SARS crisis, I would establish the Public Health Agency, and appointed Dr. Carolyn Bennett, who was a great success as the first minister of state for public health.
But the split between Foreign Affairs and International Trade was not a success. That proposal, which had long been contemplated at the PCO, was strongly opposed by some members of my transition team on the grounds that if anything, trade and foreign policy were becoming more closely interlinked. Personally, I did not feel strongly about the matter. In the end, I decided to let the PCO go ahead with the change, but the resistance of many senior public servants produced spectacular bureaucratic turf wars over the issue. To my surprise, the PCO’s plan came to be seen as a hobby-horse of mine. It wasn’t; but I did let it play out, which probably was a mistake.
In the first few weeks of office, I oversaw the preparation of a speech from the throne while Ralph Goodale, as finance minister, developed the first budget of the new government. We knew that these were in a sense the formal prelude to an election that I intended to hold shortly, in order to seek my own mandate wit
h the public.
One important part of preparing for an election was to recruit new candidates. We were very successful in bringing on board a group of leading Canadians with a natural background in areas such as business, labour, municipal government, and social justice, too many to name.
As well, along with Scott Brison we attracted two former PC Members of Parliament, John Herron and Keith Martin, to the Liberal banner.
In addition, we were successful in recruiting many able individuals who, although they might not have national reputations, were important figures in their local communities. Collectively, these recruits sent a strong signal in English Canada that we were a party whose reach was wider than ever.
Of course, for every candidate of this calibre I managed to lure, there were many others who declined. Often, it was because of family or business concerns. The harsh truth is also that many people who have been successful in their lives — whether it is in business, public service, sports, or in the community — are reluctant to sacrifice the reputations they have succeeded in building up over decades to the bitter attacks that characterize so much of our public life. The challenges facing women are particularly tough since they are often expected to balance family and career in a way that many men are insulated from.
But nowhere was the challenge more formidable than in Quebec. As I’ve noted, many Quebecers have tended to regard Ottawa as increasingly remote from their concerns. The most crushing blow for us, however, was the Auditor General’s report on the sponsorship program, which hit Liberals particularly hard in Quebec, where the tawdry affair had unfolded in an especially intimate relationship with the national unity project — almost literally wrapped in the flag. We could see the impact of this on our fortunes in quite specific ways. We had up to that point enjoyed many contested nominations in the province. Suddenly we were having a hard time attracting quality candidates. Some of those who were going door to door said they felt the public blowback hot in their faces. Some were taunted on front porches where they would have once been welcomed. In this context, it was particularly gratifying to me that Jean Lapierre, who had left politics after my defeat in 1990 and pursued a very successful media career, chose to declare his candidacy even after the release of the Auditor General’s report. It was quite simply an act of political courage.
I had always wanted to change the dynamic of the party in Quebec, which meant appointing a Quebec lieutenant who could make that happen. Jean Lapierre was born in the Magdalene Islands, had been the MP for Shefford, and is a passionate Quebecer. Despite his passage through Bloc Québécois in the wake of the failure of Meech Lake, he is a strong Canadian. He often played a bridging role, helping Quebec to understand the rest of Canada, and the rest of Canada to understand Quebec. He was a strong and innovative minister, and he continues to be a good friend to this day.
By early April, the redistribution of seats was in place and we had recovered slightly in the polls from the initial blow created by the Auditor General’s report. There was some debate over whether I should abandon my original plan to go for an early election, and govern for a while, giving me a chance to plant my agenda more firmly in government and in the public’s mind. To do so, however, would have branded the new government as a lame duck — an impression that would only have been reinforced as the sponsorship issue continued to simmer. I also wanted a public mandate for the agenda I had set out. I consulted with both ministers and political advisers before dropping the writ, although I was never really in much doubt personally that I would go in the spring. On May 23, I went to the Governor General to ask for an election to be held on June 28. I understood how difficult the election would prove to be; and it was evident that the sponsorship issue would force me to run a very different election campaign than the one I had planned.
On the simplest and most personal level, the experience of leading my party through an election was not as novel or bewildering to me as it must be to some first-time leaders. You are jammed into an airplane for week after week, with forty of your best friends — the press corps — riding just five or six rows behind you. You may wake up at an ungodly hour in Halifax, have a “media availability” on the wharf, give a luncheon speech to a service club in Thunder Bay, and end the day with a rally in an arena in Winnipeg. Although I have long ago seen the toned body of my youth metamorphose into something, shall we say, less toned, I have always been blessed with a strong constitution and lots of energy. I can go long hours without exhausting myself, which is what you have to do on an election campaign. I can also sleep on planes. Furthermore, throughout the Chrétien years, the party had routinely asked me to conduct a national speaking tour parallel to the prime minister’s during elections. These tours were almost as extensive as his, but with none of the support a party leader enjoys. I was used to schlepping around the country on scheduled aircraft, suffering long waits in airport lounges and at hotel counters. The “leader’s tour,” with its retinue of logisticians, made the campaign a relative breeze. Nothing, however, made as much difference as having Sheila by my side. Her presence meant that on the flights between events, I could retreat with her and take my mind away from the campaign.
The main challenge was having the mental composure to step back and play the role you can most usefully perform in the campaign: that of salesman-in-chief. I loved it. I had got into politics to sell my vision of what the country could become. But this meant that I did not have much direct contact with the campaign managers, David Herle, John Webster, and Lucienne Robillard. Lucienne was new to the campaign team, but I had watched her over the years as a cabinet colleague. No matter what portfolio she assumed she mastered it quickly, knew what she wanted, and got it done. She also was a person of very strong integrity and conviction, exactly what we needed at this particular juncture. I dealt with them and the others on the ground mostly through Terrie and Tim, who came with me everywhere on the tour. When I would ask to see the overnight polling numbers, Terrie would tell me that wasn’t necessary; it wasn’t in my job specs and wasn’t going to help me concentrate on what I had to do. If I really wanted to see them, I generally had to go behind her back.
Though the kaleidoscope of towns, villages, factories, landscapes, hotel rooms, crowds, cameras, and candidates can get a little confusing on a leader’s tour, there are a few simple rules. For example, one of the great things about political rallies is that they are invariably festooned with signs that have the name of the party candidate and the riding in which the candidate is running. If you are a party leader: read these signs. That way, as the days and places and people all become a blur, you will never forget the name of your good friend “X,” or what riding, let alone what province, you are in, when you go on to commend him or her to the local voters.
One thing I did not like about the leader’s tour was that I was often booked into halls too small to accommodate the Liberal supporters crammed into them. This is an old political trick, to make the rally look good on TV. Better to have five hundred people sar-dined into a room registered by the fire inspector for two hundred than to have them looking lost and lonely in a hockey arena. The problem is that as the candidate, it is very difficult in a loud, crowded room full of cheering supporters to take the mike and appear prime ministerial. No doubt this is what happened to Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential race when, carried away with enthusiasm during a rally, he let out his famous yowl. This does not connect well to the TV viewer, in his or her pyjamas, placidly sipping a cup of Ovaltine before bed. I was never quite that bad, but I do remember Terrie taking me down after one especially throaty and agitated performance standing on a table in a Burlington pub. “For crying out loud,” I said in my defence. “If you don’t want me looking and sounding like that, don’t book me into that kind of event.” But of course the local candidates always loved those sweaty, overpacked rallies, whatever the TV viewers made of me, so they never really went away.
In December, 2003, when I took office as prime minister, there was ever
y reason to believe that the coming election would be fought on health care. It had, for many years, been the number-one issue for the public. Because of the federal government’s sound financial stewardship, we now had the resources to reinvest in the system. And as a new prime minister, I would be able to open negotiations with the provinces with a clean slate. The Liberals were the founders of the national medicare system. The Conservatives, under Stephen Harper, were — to say the least — suspect in their commitment to it. There was every reason to believe that we could win on that issue, and it did prove to be a bulwark of our platform.
There was one hiccup in the run-up to the campaign, however, when Pierre Pettigrew, whom I had appointed minister of health, mused publicly about “experimenting” with the private delivery of publicly funded health-care services. Of course, it should go without saying that many of the services we receive through medicare are already privately delivered. But the matter of private delivery of care is often confused with what I regard as the fundamental issue: whether we have a publicly funded system that covers everyone and guarantees universal access. What Pettigrew said was unremarkable in Quebec, but it touched a sensitive nerve in the rest of the country, where some people mistakenly saw it as a less-than-complete commitment to medicare. It took a day or two to get that one back in the box — another lesson, as if one were needed, about how passionate feelings are on this issue, and how difficult it can be to navigate.
During the campaign, I met with a group of cancer patients at a YMCA near Toronto. I heard a presentation from Michael Decter, the health-care expert, and Dr. Terry Sullivan, the head of Cancer Care Ontario, on how to reduce waiting times for cancer treatment. I was very moved by this encounter: on the one hand, I could see and hear people who desperately needed life-giving care and, on the other, experts who knew there was a way to make sure they got it, if only governments would do their part. I told them I was going to put the message I heard that day on the national agenda. I hoped that this event would be instructive to the media, helping them — and through them, the public — to understand why I felt so strongly about waiting times. Ironically, this event did not get much coverage. It happened to come the same day that Ralph Klein raised the prospect of radical changes to medicare in Alberta that would challenge the principles of medicare going back to my father’s day. Paradoxically the Alberta premier’s intervention helped us to make our case to the voters for enhancing the existing system.
