Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  Internationally, I spoke about the rise of China and India, and the effects this would have not only on our trading relationships but also the international political system in which we needed to secure a role fitting to our interests and ideals. Preparing ourselves for the economic challenges and opportunities, I said, meant building up our cities, the engines of growth in the globalized world, as well as the research, innovation and skills of our population. At the same time, I argued, government needed to transform itself because the international dimension of our national life was no longer the sole property of the Department of Foreign Affairs. We needed to show international leadership on the environment, on human rights, on conservation, on trade, and capital flows. That meant that departments such as Environment, Justice, Agriculture, Fisheries, and Finance were increasingly operating in a world that stretched well beyond our borders. Nowhere was this globalization of government more in evidence than in the area of security, whether it was the threat of terrorism or of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). I also talked about rebuilding our Defence forces and refocusing our international development assistance.

  This speech, which also addressed many other issues close to my heart, including Arctic sovereignty, and education, for example, became the spine of my platform in the election, when it was fleshed out to more than eighty pages of concrete proposals. It prepared us for the election campaign I wanted to fight — but not the one I eventually did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Last Election

  It is a little difficult in retrospect to recreate the atmosphere in which we entered the 2005–06 campaign, when it was triggered by the NDP on a Tory non-confidence motion in the last days of November 2005. The polls at the time had all the parties at pretty much the same level of support as the 2004 election. We had recruited some “star” candidates, for example Marc Garneau, the former astronaut, and Michael Ignatieff, the high-profile professor and writer. Our campaign organization was reasonably well financed and in good shape, ready to go. The opposition parties were champing at the bit for an election because they hoped to explode from the box on the strength of Mr. Justice Gomery’s preliminary report, which laid out the details of the sponsorship mess at the beginning of November. They preferred this to going to the polls after the final report as I had promised, just a few months later, because they knew from the evidence that it was likely to state clearly that neither I nor any of my ministers were involved in any way.

  As I went to Rideau Hall on the morning of November 29 to ask Governor General Michaëlle Jean to call the election, I hoped that I could shape the election around the future of the country. Our plan was not to lay out the platform in depth before Christmas, before the public had fully tuned in. Until then, there was plenty to talk about in terms of our record on the economy, on health care, child care, and Aboriginal affairs — and to contrast it with Stephen Harper’s record and plans. There was also the United Nations’ conference on climate change starting in Montreal, with Environment Minister Stéphane Dion at the helm. Our plan was to lay out the details of our platform for our next government in January, after the holiday season, when we hoped the public would begin to pay more attention.

  It was the 180-degree opposite of the Conservatives’ strategy, which was to roll out their long list of promises before Christmas — many of which we can now see they had no intention of keeping — backed up by extensive advertising. We were husbanding our ad money for when it would count most. We could see that they were shooting their bolt and wondered how they hoped to compete in the home stretch. Of course, we could not have anticipated the “in-and-out” scheme later unearthed by Elections Canada, who have accused the Conservatives of shuffling money around between constituency organizations and the national party, giving themselves about a million dollars more for advertising than the law allows. As I write, the commissioner of elections has only recently directed investigators to raid Conservative offices with the assistance of the RCMP to obtain documentation of the scheme, so there may be more to come. What we could see during the campaign in terms of their sustained advertising campaign — continuing to buy ad-time long after we thought they should be out of cash — certainly defied the laws of political gravity as we understood them.

  The United Nations’ climate change conference, which we hosted in Montreal from the end of November until December 10, turned out to be my government’s last hurrah on the international stage. Of course, we had not planned for this to occur in the middle of a campaign since these events don’t happen at the drop of a hat. I had been enthusiastic about bringing the conference to Montreal, and we had made a significant diplomatic push to host it. The purpose of the conference was to lay the groundwork for the next stage of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, beyond the term of the Kyoto agreement.

  Some of my officials did not take to the idea of hosting the conference, feeling quite justifiably that it would highlight our poor record on limiting emissions. I was very much aware that our performance, even as signatories to Kyoto, had not been impressive. But I drew the opposite lesson from this. By hosting the conference, I hoped to signal to Canadians and the world that while we had not yet lived up to our obligations, we were now determined to do so. I wanted to acknowledge our failures openly, and to use the conference to build public support for getting this country back on plan and to stop blowing hot air on the subject.

  As the conference approached, we found ourselves in a game of chicken with the Americans (and to a degree with the Russians), who preferred that the conference fail to create a robust process to set targets for after 2012, when the first phase of Kyoto would end. As my adviser Brian Guest remarked, they wanted to keep Kyoto’s face under the water until it stopped moving. The Americans were trying to subvert the conference despite a commitment at the Gleneagles summit that they would re-engage and try to make it work. Later, some critics said that by taking on the United States at the Montreal conference, I had been deliberately provocative. The provocation came from the Bush administration’s attempt to blow up this important conference on our soil.

  Stéphane held the gavel at the conference and did a superb job, both before and during the formal deliberations, of negotiating the diplomatic shoals and leading the international community toward a productive outcome. It was his day in the sun, and no one could have been better suited or better prepared for it.

  Long before the election was called, or was foreseen for that time, I had committed to delivering the opening speech for the key negotiating session. I wanted to convey my belief that we were facing a global challenge in climate change, and to ask whether we wanted to look back on this moment and say that we had failed humanity by not stepping up to the challenge.

  In my speech, I acknowledged before an international audience what I had already said to people here at home: that we were laggards in reducing our emissions and that the laggards had to catch up and become leaders.

  I wanted to raise the bar in terms of what we had to do as a global community. The speech received an enthusiastic response from delegates who had come to expect more cautious, bureaucratic interventions. Many countries began to redraft their remarks in response, and Elizabeth May has said that it was the first time in all her years attending these conferences that she saw someone receiving a spontaneous standing ovation.

  I did not criticize the United States directly from the podium, but in the press conference afterwards, I said that there is such a thing as a “global conscience” and that it was time for all of us, including the United States, to listen to that conscience. I had for some considerable time been talking about the need for a “New Multilateralism,” including the United States. However, that term was too dry to capture the moral dimension of what I was advocating. In the context of the press conference, I used the more evocative term, and I am not sorry that I did.

  Inside the negotiating halls, the American delegation was becoming increasingly obstructionist, walking out of
meetings, for example. It was in this context that news first circulated that Bill Clinton was going to attend the conference as the guest of the Sierra Club, whose leader, Elizabeth May, was an old friend. The conference organizers decided to ask Bill Clinton to speak in the main conference hall. It was a way of raising the profile of the conference in the United States, and sending a message to the Bush administration that we understood that there was a large domestic constituency south of the border that did not want our efforts to fail.

  I learned that when the American delegation discovered this, they reacted with anger and a fair degree of panic. They actually offered to change their position and allow some of the previously disputed resolutions to pass if President Clinton was prevented from speaking. That was their negotiating posture: “Ban Bill Clinton and we’ll allow these critical negotiations to take a step forward.”

  But no one on our side blinked. There really was no separating out the domestic and international politics in this situation. We knew that to make the conference a success we had to rally opinion inside the United States. I also knew that with an election under way, a photo op at an environmental conference with Clinton wasn’t going to do me any harm. But I would have done the same thing even if there hadn’t been an election. Behind the scenes, the Americans were furious, but within forty-eight hours they bent to the will of the world and allowed progress to be made. Thus the conference not only demonstrated our commitment to the environment, but it was a major international success and served Canada well.

  Another element of our pre-Christmas campaign had been longer in the works, however. My relationship with Buzz Hargrove, the leader of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), surfaced in the public’s mind early in the election campaign when Buzz invited me to a meeting of the union and gave a strong recommendation to his followers that they vote Liberal in seats where we were best positioned to defeat the Conservative candidate. Unlike the NDP, who seemed to relish the prospect of a Conservative government, Buzz, along with many other less outspoken labour leaders, recognized that our health-care and child-care policies were important to his members, as was the Kelowna Accord. His stance created some controversy and led to his eventual divorce from the NDP.

  What many people did not understand was that my relationship with Buzz and with the CAW was not just a made-in-campaign marriage of convenience. As I have said, my father had deep relationships with the labour movement in Windsor where the Canadian auto industry was originally based, despite the fact that the NDP was an increasingly strong challenger in his riding. I believed, like him, that organized labour was capable of making a profound contribution to economic growth. What many people overlook in Buzz’s case, because of his often gruff, confrontational rhetoric, is that he has helped make the CAW one of the most progressive and innovative unions in North America. The CAW evolved when unions south of the border — and the NDP up here — failed to do so, in the face of a changing world economy.

  After the 2004 election, I appointed Joe Fontana as labour minister, and he proved to be a tremendous asset to the government. Joe, who represented a riding in London, Ontario, is as affable as he is politically astute. Joe already had a good relationship with the labour movement prior to joining the cabinet; he also had a social activist bent and had been active as an MP on matters such as poverty and housing. In fact, I first got to know Joe many years before when we were still in opposition and we co-chaired a Liberal task force on housing. Joe was the point man in nurturing the relationship between the government and the labour movement. Both of us developed a good working relationship with Ken Georgetti, head of the Canadian Labour Congress, and Secretary Treasurer Hassan Yussuf. It was through Joe that the CAW was heard at the cabinet table on the issue of reciprocity in the auto sector as we negotiated trade agreements with Korea. Buzz met with us on many occasions concerning other issues, and we saved a lot of jobs in the industry through strategies that were worked out together. When the election campaign came, Buzz shared my conviction, and that of many progressive voters, that the greatest danger to our ideals was a Conservative victory, and that the NDP had become their accomplices. I think subsequent history bears that out.

  Not everything went well in the pre-Christmas campaign. Scott Reid, who was my director of communications, a long-time aide, and a great friend, has been an invaluable asset to me for nearly two decades. But he would be the first to admit that his quick tongue sometimes betrays him, as it did in a CBC interview in mid-December when he was commenting on the Tory plan to replace the national child-care program we had put in place with a direct subsidy to parents — cutting them a cheque, in essence. “Don’t give people twenty-five bucks a week to blow on beer and popcorn,” Scott said. “Give them child-care spaces that work. Stephen Harper’s plan has nothing to do with child care.” I certainly wouldn’t dispute the underlying point: that the proposed cash subsidy was trivial compared with the significance of the system we were building. But the choice of words was poor as he was the first to admit. “It was dumb,” Scott said, soon after, when he made a public apology. I don’t remember him getting much argument from the rest of us.

  Still, this was hardly a turning point. There were more ups than downs in the pre-Christmas campaign, and although the Conservatives were putting out their “Gainesburgers” as the media calls them — the daily ration of pre-packaged announcements — including their promise to cut the GST, they were not getting much traction with the voters in the short-term, although these promises probably helped lay the groundwork for their later success. For my part, I strongly believed from all my years at Finance that cutting the GST, rather than taxes on income, was unwise policy — something with which virtually all the economists agreed. Perhaps for that reason, we tended to discount the impact of the Conservatives’ pledge. As I headed back to the farm with the family for Christmas, I was happy with the campaign so far, and was looking forward with relish to January, when we would start laying out our platform, of which I was very proud, and which I believed was going to prove compelling to voters — and we were already in the lead. But if I went to bed on Christmas night with sugar plums dancing in my head, I was soon to have a rude awakening.

  The decisive moment in the campaign came three days after Christmas. I was in a hotel room in Halifax when Alex Himelfarb reached me by phone with the news. I realized the significance right away. What had happened was unbelievable and built on a falsehood, as subsequent events have proven. It was nonetheless devastating.

  Guiliano Zaccardelli, the then still-respected commissioner of the RCMP, had written a letter before Christmas to the NDP’s finance critic, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, saying that the RCMP had launched a criminal investigation into the possible leak of a planned change on the taxation of income trusts announced by Ralph Goodale the previous month. As I understand it, when they did not hear back from Wasylycia-Leis, the RCMP actually phoned her office to make sure she had received the letter. The letter was found and a breathless Wasylycia-Leis revealed it to the world — as Zaccardelli surely knew she would.

  The announcement that an investigation had been launched, which the RCMP soon directly confirmed to the media in the form of a press release, was utterly unprecedented and not consistent with the previous practices of the RCMP, as later confirmed by the official report from the public complaints commissioner for the RCMP, Paul Kennedy, who noted “the absence of a rational and justifiable basis for such disclosure.” His report also established that the RCMP’s press release was specifically amended by Zaccardelli himself to add Ralph’s name, despite the fact that there was not a shred of evidence at the time or since that he had done anything wrong. Any reporter will tell you that in normal circumstances, the RCMP would refuse to answer the kind of questions that they happily briefed on that day.

  There is no doubt in my mind that what Zaccardelli did was improper. The only question there can be about the incident is whether it was an act of ineptitude or of malice aforethought. My own view is that no one c
an be that inept.

  I hope that some day the truth will come out. Was it payback for my decision to call the Arar inquiry? Was it an attempt to curry favour with the Tories, who had been quite critical of Zaccardelli to that point but later backed him up strongly for as long as they could bear when they took office — even in the teeth of public outrage at his questionable testimony before the Arar inquiry? I don’t suppose anyone knows but him. Astonishingly, Zaccardelli refused to cooperate with the public complaints commissioner, refusing to be interviewed, or to provide a statement. The commissioner noted that his excuses for not doing so were logically incoherent.

  In my view, Zaccardelli should have known that the release of this information in the midst of an election campaign — a release that was made in a deliberately political way, creating inevitable insinuations of political wrongdoing and inciting the opposition parties to run those insinuations through a particle accelerator at the public — would have a huge political effect. And it did. Here is what Commissioner Kennedy said in his report:

  It is impossible to state with certainty that the RCMP disclosure was the sole factor contributing to this dramatic shift in voter support. It is not unknown for the fortunes of contending political parties to rise and fall drastically even during the relatively short duration of a federal election. It is equally clear that members of the general public, media and those involved in the political process believed that the RCMP disclosures of December 23rd and 28th had an influence and, in the absence of a rational and justifiable basis for such disclosure, questioned the motives of the RCMP and its Commissioner in making such disclosure.