Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  But health care was just one part of our platform. I have always believed that a party should enter an election with a carefully considered policy document. That is what the Red Book was all about. Still, I was not naive enough to think that parties win on their platforms alone — or even primarily because of their platforms. Often relatively trivial or completely unexpected incidents, surprising media coverage, or gaffes by the leaders or their candidates can play a substantial and even determining role in the outcome. It quickly became apparent in the 2004 campaign that our challenge as a party was not to reach out to new groups with our agenda but to retain the loyalty of voters who had long put their faith in us. Our core vote, in the cities, in Ontario, and especially in Quebec, was bleeding away. The sponsorship program had become the locomotive for the Opposition campaigns.

  We might have weathered that if it were not for another issue — this one a ricochet from the government of Ontario. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government had taken office in Ontario just a month and a half before I took over as prime minister. One of his centrepiece promises in the election campaign was that he would not raise taxes. Soon after the election, Premier McGuinty came to see me at 24 Sussex, where we discussed a number of issues. Almost off-handedly as he left, he mentioned that his government “might have to do something on health premiums.” Nothing in what he said prepared me for his government’s first budget, brought down on May 18, just days before I called the federal election. It introduced a “health premium,” which was in effect a tax, ranging from $60 to as much as $900 depending on income. Coming when it did, where it did, in the province where the federal Liberals had historically had their stronghold, and creating not just a tax issue but also an issue of political trust, it was a heavy blow to our fortunes. I remember that most of our Ontario MPs thought the health premium was a bigger problem than the sponsorship issue, particularly in the first weeks of the campaign.

  The Conservatives, under their new leader, Stephen Harper, understandably wanted the election to be about the sponsorship program. I wanted it to be about our future and the kind of Canada we wanted. I knew that despite their disgust over sponsorship, most Canadians did not share Harper’s view of what we were or what we should become. He had a long career behind him in which he had shown himself to be firmly in favour of dismantling many social programs, including important elements of medicare. He had been such an over-the-top decentralizer that he had at one point talked about Alberta erecting a “firewall” from Confederation and creating a kind of provincial autarky within a limply federated Canada. He had also made it very clear that he was not a supporter of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as it was evolving through the courts. I had trouble believing that anyone would be attracted by this pinched vision of Canada.

  Fortunately for us, Harper’s candidates scored many own-goals on our issues. It was the usual thing to which we had become accustomed from the Reform and Alliance parties. The Conservative organization outdid even its predecessors in mid-June with an official party press release headlined “Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography.” Really. Almost unbelievably, Stephen Harper’s response was to refuse to apologize, though he said that he thought the headline “was a bit strong” and directed that it be changed. Somehow they failed to understand that this kind of preposterous slander reflected on them among voters and not on me.

  I never lost my confidence that we were going to win the election, although I would not have bet heavily on a majority. My organizers were not so sure. Roughly halfway through the campaign, David Herle and John Webster met me at the Ottawa airport when the tour plane arrived there for one of our few down days, and rode with me back to 24 Sussex. They wanted no one else in the room when we talked. David laid out some of the polling data on which he based his sober assessment: we were slipping behind. In government, I have always found polls less useful than focus groups, which can help you figure out how to communicate with the public about the policies you have developed. A poll can’t tell you much about whether to balance the budget, how quickly, or when. In elections, however, I get much more interested in the polls, because they are the quickest and most effective way of knowing whether your message (and that of your opponents) is getting through.

  As the three of us sat in the little sunroom at 24 Sussex, they laid out a two-pronged shift in strategy. It has always been John’s strongest ability to look at a situation, however bad, and see a road out of it. First, in English Canada, he recommended that I move away from a concentrated attack on Stephen Harper and his values, which had already penetrated quite effectively to voters of the centre and left. The problem was that many of those turned off by Harper and his agenda were fleeing to the NDP, in part, no doubt, in disgust over sponsorship. We needed to make very clear to progressive voters of all stripes that the only effective way to prevent a Harper government was to re-elect us. “You let me worry about Harper,” David said. “You have one job in the remaining days of this campaign: convince Canadians that you’ll cut wait times in the health-care system if you are re-elected.”

  In Quebec, if anything, the problems were more acute. The Bloc Québécois had managed to turn the sponsorship issue, with its links to national unity, into a comprehensive condemnation of the federalist system in the minds of many Quebec voters. David made it clear to me that the Quebec campaign I had imagined, in which we reached out to nationalist voters, had instead become a fight to save the furniture as federalists stampeded into the Bloc Québécois camp, or resolved simply to sit this election out. We were in deep trouble, he told me, in danger of being reduced to a small rump of seats in heavily anglophone and allophone ridings. In that context, he recommended that we remind Quebecers of what was at stake. A massive Bloc Québécois victory would potentially lead us back into the swamp of referendum, uncertainty, conflict, and doubt.

  The strategic turn in English Canada was the easier of the two to accomplish (though, interestingly, many reporters had so much trouble understanding why we would turn our sights on the NDP that they almost failed to report it). Personally, I had no problem reaching out to voters who were considering the NDP and reminding them of the stakes in this election. Changing tack in Quebec was much more difficult. The party there was deeply attached to our original strategy of wooing voters back from the Bloc Québécois. A strategic change now required a more muscular approach from my national organizers toward the management of the Quebec campaign.

  Given the issues and those stakes, there was no one better to make the case for federalism and the Liberal Party than Stéphane Dion, with his unique combination of intellect and passion, alongside Pierre Pettigrew, who like Dion had joined the federal cabinet in the wake of the 1995 referendum. It would have been easy for Stéphane, given his exclusion from cabinet just a few months before, to play the dog in the manger. But that isn’t Stéphane. To that point, he had devoted his energies almost exclusively to his own riding, but he leapt at the opportunity to play a bigger role on a wider stage. In the final weeks of the campaign, he barnstormed the province, going on every radio talk show and speaking at every public meeting he could.

  In the last days of the campaign, many commentators in the media wrote us off. I was certain, however, that a victory was still there for us. I felt the turn at a speech I delivered in Toronto to a meeting of the Women’s Executive Network, organized by my friend Pam Jeffrey. I could feel the rising anxiety among this group of accomplished and progressive women about what a Harper government would do to the Canada they believed in. The anxiety was all the more acute because Harper had begun speaking in public as if victory was already his — and many in the media had started believing it.

  I hatched the idea of going on a cross-country tour in the last hours of the campaign. I started by dipping my foot in the Atlantic in Nova Scotia, and with the time-zone advantage was able to fly to Gatineau, Quebec, on to Toronto, then Winnipeg, Regina, and Vancouver — ending the day by putting my feet in the Pacific. Perhaps because he believed t
he election was in the bag, Stephen Harper spent much of his time in the final days in Alberta, where the results were never in doubt. It was a gift to me because it painted such a contrast.

  Of all the major polling firms, only one predicted a Liberal victory. On election night, CTV’s pollsters revealed their biases by all but declaring us defeated before the votes had even been counted. But David Herle knew better. Whether it was our mid-campaign course correction that made the difference — and I am inclined to think it was — our support rallied tremendously in the last forty-eight hours before voting commenced. David could see from his research as we rounded the last corner into the stretch that we were pulling back into contention and then opening up a gap.

  But such was the overwhelming opinion of commentators and pollsters that we would lose, that even Sheila was shaken. I learned much later — indeed only when I started on this chapter of the book — that on election day she went into David’s hotel room where he was trying to get some badly needed sleep, stood over his bed, woke him up, and said, “David, tell me you’re not lying to my husband!”

  On election day, as usual, I went to vote in my constituency in Montreal and then retired to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel to rest and prepare to watch the evening’s results roll in. David dropped by and gave me his final reading: we would win more than a hundred and thirty seats and a minority government. When the results came in, they were just as David had predicted. We had won. We had been reduced to a minority, but we had fought back from what many had considered certain defeat, and won.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sponsorship

  All of us strive to be masters of our own destiny in an uncertain world, many elements of which are beyond our individual control. This is as true of politicians as it is of anyone else. There are, however, differences. Politics is played out in the public glare. Furthermore, in politics, there is always someone actively trying to prevent you from reaching your goals. A win for you is almost always a loss for someone else; and of course the reverse also applies. To a degree, you can calculate the odds of various possibilities and make your decisions accordingly. For example, it was obvious to me that if I stayed on in politics after 2000, I might inherit a Liberal Party whose stock of goodwill with the public was somewhat depleted. I considered that possibility and believed that through a combination of ideas, organization, and force of personality I could revivify the party and the government, and convince Canadians that I represented change. I always knew there was a risk that I would be proved wrong; it was a calculated risk I was prepared to take.

  In politics, as in life, however, there is also another form of uncertainty — what Donald Rumsfeld memorably dubbed the “unknown unknowns.” A freak storm may knock down your house or a cancelled flight may lead you to miss the meeting at which you could have sold your million-dollar idea or landed a part in a Broadway show. It is difficult to calculate what you can’t anticipate. And in politics this is a particular problem. Modern governments are enormous and complex. No one knows, or can know, everything that is going on. Yet our system rightly says that there needs to be responsibility and accountability at the top.

  For me, the sponsorship issue fell into this category of “unknown unknowns.” When I made my decision in 2000 to stay in politics, with the intention to run for the job of Liberal leader when Jean Chrétien stepped down, the sponsorship program was a ghostly presence on my radar. As I have said before, because of our differing views on Quebec, because of our competing political organizations in Quebec, and because of our personal rivalry, the prime minister excluded me from any close participation in the Quebec file. This was his baby. In my Finance years, I accepted this, albeit a little resentfully. To Jean Chrétien’s credit, I had been fully empowered in Finance at a crucial moment in history. The portfolio had given me great latitude to pursue my interest in international affairs. And, to be frank, my English-Canadian supporters had been divided among themselves — and often from me — over Meech Lake; there was not much enthusiasm among them for poking that particular beehive with a stick.

  Given the sway I had over the direction of the government in the 1990s, it is perhaps understandable that people assume I must have known more than I did about the inner workings of the sponsorship scandal. “Paul Martin was practically running the government; how could he not have known?” The answer is threefold. First, as important as the finance minister’s job is in setting fiscal policy and directing resources to priority areas, the role is not one of oversight. Finance is a small policy department, despite its outsized reputation and clout. It does not oversee the disbursement of funds, as the Treasury Board does, nor does it audit them. Second, no one in a renegade program has an interest in phoning up either the minister of finance or the people in the department and saying, “Guess what? We’re siphoning off public money.” Conspiracies — which is what this was — are by their nature secretive. Third, Jean Chrétien’s organization and my own were virtually at daggers drawn in Quebec. The last person to whom anyone in this conspiracy was likely to talk was me, or anyone close to me.

  Whether I liked it or not — and I definitely did not like it — my time as prime minister would be marked by a scandal that was the fruit of mismanagement and malfeasance by others. I understand the anger of Canadians; indeed, I share it. In retrospect, it is easy to see why many of them took their anger out on me and the party I led: where else could they direct their rage? I dealt with the scandal as openly and honestly as I could, and though some have criticized this openness as a political mistake, I have no regrets for doing what I believe was the right thing. But you will understand my anger that in my time as prime minister, the scandal prevented me from devoting my whole energies to my dreams for Canada.

  The consequences of the sponsorship scandal were actually much broader than any missed opportunities for me and my government. Consider where we were politically in this country before the Auditor General’s report was ultimately tabled in February 2004. Separatism, and its Ottawa proxy, the Bloc Québécois, were in full retreat. The polls suggested the Liberal Party was poised to move back into franco phone Quebec in a way that it had not done since 1980. The NDP continued to wither on the vine, as it had been doing for a decade. The Conservative parties were finally getting their act together, but many “progressive” conservatives were uncomfortable with the new creature coming into being and were looking for another home. It is no exaggeration to say that the sponsorship issue revived separatism and the separatist parties in Quebec, lifted the NDP back on its feet, and lubricated the unity of the right. The ultimate product is a government now led by the most right-wing prime minister in Canadian history, representing barely more than one-third of voters, confronted by a centre-left electorate divided among four parties. That is what the authors of the sponsorship program and those who suborned it by looking the other way have to answer for.

  The first inklings I had of what would become the sponsorship scandal came, as they did for most people, through the pages of the Globe and Mail. Like everyone else, I knew the government of Canada had long been in the business of supporting local festivals and suchlike. That had been happening since I was a child. In this context this specific program — what came to be known as the “sponsorship program” — had been initiated by Jean Chrétien after the referendum to raise the profile of the federal government, particularly in Quebec. What was new, unusual, and unknown to me, as it was to most people, was the degree to which the sponsorship program was mismanaged and that unscrupulous people were illegally profiting from it. When the first stories broke, it seemed like small beer, worth investigating and sorting out but not much more than that. Jean Chrétien asked the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, to look into it. And the news stories kept coming. Naturally, the Opposition jumped on each incremental revelation. It was an escalating political problem, but still far short of a defining national issue. The Auditor General’s first public report on the issue generated some discussion and concern, but i
t remained a second-order issue for the public. Polls at the time showed that health care remained at the top of Canadians’ political concerns, with government integrity and accountability far, far down the list.

  In 2002, not long after I had “got quit” from cabinet, the prime minister wisely appointed Ralph Goodale as minister of public works — a job that no sane man would have wanted at the time but one that Ralph was perfectly suited for by virtue of his probity and unimpeachable integrity. From what Ralph has told me, starting the day he was appointed, he managed the portfolio with almost no direction, or even interaction, with the prime minister, beyond the initial instruction to find out what was wrong in the department and fix it. Less than a day into the portfolio, Ralph announced that he was suspending the sponsorship program. Shortly afterwards, he threw out the advertising agencies to whom the job of managing the program had essentially been contracted out. And then he referred a number of specific elements of the program to the RCMP for further investigation. Finally, he sent an electric jolt through the government system, telling other ministers that he had ended any contact with the ad firms involved and suggested they do the same. All that in a matter of weeks.