Canada and Other Matters of Opinion

by Rex Murphy

  In the old days of luxuriant titles, this section of Heart Matters might have carried the scroll, An Apology for the Office of the Governor General of Canada and My Contributions to It, Together with Some Observations on the Worth of Politicians, the Male of the Species, the Conduct of Some Others in Lesser Office, and a Return of Fire to the Last Prime Minister But One, Mr. Paul Martin, for His Imperfect Treatment of the GG.

  Clarkson thinks very highly of the office of governor general, an opinion that any reading of Heart Matters will confirm is not entirely unhinged from the fact that she held it. She seems to believe that this last echo of Canada’s colonial beginnings under the imperial flag has a merit and vitality crucial to the understanding, perhaps even the survival, of the glorious experiment we call Canada. This is a high-voltage estimation of what is at best a decorative, expensive, ceremonial survival.

  In the twenty-first century, royalty has been decanted of all its mystique, seriousness and point. Insofar as the office of the GG is presumed to be a surrogate representation of the “real thing” in Great Britain, of what possible value can it be? The British royals have become vessels of the most ordinary clay, and set an almost alpine standard of dysfunction, vulgarity, selfishness and self-absorption. All regiment is gone. So the office of GG is only a second-hand, downmarket edition of something that has lost its function and place. We have the shadow of the tattered shadow.

  Clarkson romanticizes both the life and function of Rideau Hall, and seems to think its pious protocols and dusty duties are of real power, that the advice of a GG to a prime minister, or where a cabinet should be sworn in, are matters on which the edifice of the modern state may depend.

  All hymns, I suppose, however boring, are lovely if you’re the bishop of the cathedral in which they are sung. And a five-year stint at the top of the social order—one area in which the charisma of royal surrogacy still has cogency—must be a very pleasant interlude. Rideau Hall is still an address to conjure with, and the position of governor general has the considerable charm of being the cynosure of a continuous garden party. The governor general gets to open Parliament, drive around in a barouche, host literati and distribute medals, meet the interesting of foreign nations and take first rank at every occasion of national ceremony.

  There is not one of these duties or recreations that would be diminished one whit, jot or tittle, were it to be performed or exercised by a ceremonial head of state who owed nothing to the Crown and its by now very mixed traditions.

  Heart Matters offers some not encouraging illustrations of Clarkson’s judgment. The first is that there is a Heart Matters at all. So much of the book’s argument stands on the importance of certain traditions and codes that adhere to the office of governor general—from the vital secrecy imposed on those invited to hold the office until the invitation is confirmed, to the necessity of swearing in cabinet officers at Rideau Hall and the propriety of consultations by a given prime minister with the GG herself—that it is a shock that Clarkson has violated the deepest sanction of them all. She has turned publicist while the viceregal cushions are still warm from her imprint.

  Does not discretion adhere to the office so late venerated and vacated? Nannies to Donald Trump may write tell-alls in the age of faux-celebrity (and I think they should be encouraged to do so). I applaud “personal assistants” to tyrannous and mouth-breathing rock stars who launch rockets of steamy prose at the bottoms they so recently, ravenously kissed. Politicians who have been “passed over” by their leaders may strike deadly blows in return. But Her Excellency? Why such haste to ventilate?

  We now know how highly she thinks of Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline, and begrudge her none of that obliging warmth. But the gratitude describes a self-serving loop. Chrétien appointed her, and it would be a rude doyenne of Rideau Hall indeed who did not see the wisdom of the man who set her there. I wonder, now that an ex-governor general has set the illustrious example, how long we shall have to wait for the aides, valets, caterers and assorted functionaries of Rideau Hall to oil up their laptops and give us the view from below the stairs of the Clarkson-Ralston Saul era.

  The loyalty to Chrétien wanders into something like an outright attack on his successor. It is evident that Clarkson does not like Paul Martin, and I am wondering why all of Canada should know this now. She obviously sees Martin, and those who assisted him, as tacky and vulgar. They want a different venue for their swearing-in. Clarkson will have none of it. And when the GG’s wishes prevail over the elected prime minister’s, some of these rude rubes show up at Rideau Hall … in sneakers and T-shirts. Egad.

  Clarkson has great confidence in herself as an observer. This may be a byproduct of her time as a journalist. I am not sure that confidence is buttressed by a passage in which she speaks of her ability to see the large view of things “in the way that Tolstoy saw the whole field in describing the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace.” This passage comes at the tail end of an account of the great PR difficulties that surrounded the expensive and crowded “circumpolar junket” of the GG and thirty-five or so Canadian worthies. Whatever may have been at stake in that ruckus, I feel it’s less in the territory of Tolstoy than of P.G. Wodehouse.

  I find my faith in her judgment further estranged by the near-risible certitude of a few of her observations on politicians and men. She adverts at one point to the clotted speculations of Carl Jung, and I feared for a paragraph of two we were on a Ferris wheel of outdated misogyny.

  If Clarkson believes what she thinks she understands from this Jungian mush, I fear for us all—men, I mean. Apparently, she does. “My personal view is that the world of politics is like this because it is a male world, with male values—the worship of triumphalism, contempt for weakness, and distrust of compassion. All of these are male feelings and attributes …” There goes half the country. This isn’t the world of politics, or the world of journalism, or commerce, or science. It’s a five-cent version of adolescent feminism.

  It might have been useful to have something a little closer to reality and experience, some reflections on politics and journalism, the showbiz quotient of both, and what advantages those who know the media give and take from each other. What did Chrétien receive from Clarkson? Among other gifts, her celebrity. Canadian celebrity may be low-voltage compared to its U.S. archetype, but there is some virtue for the politician who can call upon someone already known to Canadians.

  Clarkson, however, emphatically says, “I despise the idea of celebrity.” Coming from one of our most famous people, this is a curious turn. I may offer it as a personal axiom that people do not choose television for a career because they wish to consolidate their anonymity. Before she became GG, Adrienne Clarkson was a very big name. She was almost as famous as Don Cherry.

  As governor general, she refused to give autographs because “I could not see giving a movie-star kind of quality to an office that should inspire respect.” I fear she freighted the office with a more austere conception of its dignity than it can bear. Authors give autographs, yet literature staggers on.

  And the “movie-star quality” of the GG’s office may be the only real lever to extending its decaying impact in a media age. Clarkson’s successor, Michaëlle Jean, is going to be a powerful presence simply by virtue of the fact that her innate “star quality” now has a stage on which to exert itself.

  Finally, Heart Matters itself will not suffer at the bookstores because it is something of a tell-all written by a celebrity who occupied the nation’s highest constitutional office.

  Heart Matters is, as I have said, a divided affair. The portion of it that is family and personal memoir has considerable charm. It shows those qualities of confidence, application, ambition, intelligence and familial affection that established Adrienne Clarkson as a successful broadcaster and made her a national presence admired by many.

  Its other half, dealing with the significance of Rideau Hall as a fulcrum for national enlightenment, with its laboured esteem for the prime
minister who awarded her with placement within its gilded walls and her aggressive broadsides against the less enlightened one who succeeded him, is a disappointment and a contradiction.

  PAUL MARTIN FIGHTS ON | November 1, 2008

  It is a rather too-perfect illustration of the no-longer-novel concept of the memoir as politics by other means. Paul Martin’s Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics is almost certainly quite the last instalment of the Chrétien—Martin wars, that decade-long internal struggle for mastery of the Liberal Party.

  Mr. Martin and his loyalists ultimately prevailed in that struggle. The proud and rancorous Jean Chrétien was more or less forced, finally, to give Paul Martin his turn. The victory was a pyrrhic one, however, an almost classic illustration of a battle that so wearies the forces of a nominal victor as to turn to ashes at the very moment of ostensible triumph.

  The Liberal Party is still reeling from the effects of that clash, some of whose indirect fallout was the surprising rise of Stéphane Dion to its leadership. Even the Liberals’ dismal showing in the recent election arises from the divisions and loss of coherence suffered by the party as a result of that protracted and bitter feud.

  The Martin-Chrétien fight was something of a Trojan War for the Liberal Party. If Paul Martin has a story to tell, it is surely this: how, from within the party, and while serving as the highest-profile finance minister Canada has even seen, he executed the longest-running coup against a successful three-term prime minister who was himself one of the most aggressive and canny politicians ever to hold that high office.

  I would have liked to have seen much more than the clipped and almost rote summary Hell and High Water offers of that long, ardent campaign. What a yarn it must be. How did a relatively freshman MP, albeit, as son of Paul Martin Sr., one of distinguished political lineage, effectively bring the control of the party’s apparatus under his hands? How, under the Argus gaze and jealous watch of Mr. Chrétien, did he work the slow and detailed magic of his coup? Recollect that when Mr. Chrétien finally yielded, such worthies as Brian Tobin, John Manley and Allan Rock, none of them frail egos or shy of ambition, simply whimpered away from contesting the leadership contest that resulted. Such was the near-total control of the party machinery Martin, and what, in this book, he so endearingly calls his team, had achieved.

  What was it like, on a daily basis, to endure the tense equilibrium between Chrétien and Martin? Hell or High Water gives a few anecdotes of climatic moments when an absolute break was impending: Martin’s top aides insisting he cancel a speech to introduce one by Chrétien is a typical bland example. But even these few have been the stuff of the informed gossip of Parliament Hill for years. And what Martin does tell—naturally, I suppose, since it is his memoir—works mainly to smooth the presentation of himself, and cast Chrétien and his team as angry, petty or paranoid.

  He glides past all this drama, Chrétien growling and breathing fire from his lair, while Martin and his minions (cellphone ninjas) unravel his authority piece by piece. He and his team are portrayed in soft lights—everyone Martin works with is incredibly dedicated, brilliant, puts in superhuman hours or is charged with their leader’s vision of Canada. They are merely “preparing” for the day when Chrétien steps down. It could be a high school soap opera, not the intense, ill-tempered civil war that consumed the best energies of Canada’s “natural governing party” for a decade.

  But this is not the book’s deepest reticence. The one big question is: How did it all fall apart so quickly? How did the man who was so artful on the reach for the top prove so clumsy in staying there? Martin as finance minister, Martin as leader-in-waiting, was projected as the man who would amass huge majorities, extend the Liberal Party into regions of Canada where it had been a toxic presence. He was a wider, more generous-minded public man than those who typically tread ambition’s path, the leader with a humanist vision and the embodiment of a kind of natural ease and decency that was almost prototypically Canadian.

  It will not do simply to record the mischiefs and petty revenges Chrétien designed for his successor, to point to the sponsorship scandal as poison in the well from which no one could recover, as providing anything close to a full accounting of what went wrong. Nor, in Martin’s second election, does the retelling of RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli’s brutal, and almost certainly deliberate, intervention (the income trust leak) explain in any full sense why the lustre had so terribly decayed, or why watching the latter months of his term as prime minister was, even to nonpartisans, very close to painful. The dour, “frightening” Stephen Harper, an infant in national politics, replaced him, a near giant. How did that happen?

  All prime ministers are struck by political storms, all leaders are tested under fire. Something was missing in Paul Martin, whom the nation had viewed as Chrétien without the nasty edge, with a wider vision and a defter touch—so that, ambition satisfied, he suffered the painful disintegration that he did, his reputation transmuted so quickly into the cruel name bestowed by The Economist: Mr. Dithers.

  The levers of power in his hands, what scattered his focus? Having built an agenda remarkable in range and detail—on international affairs, aboriginal issues, medicare, humanitarian intervention—why was its communication so dismal?

  Mr. Martin goes nowhere near really answering these central questions. Hell or High Water is repair work for a reputation—renovation, not revelation. Its prose is bland, far more the catalogues and clichés of a party platform than a book of genuine personal scrutiny. He may be out of office, but he is not out of politics. Paul Martin is still campaigning.

  Finally, on more personal grounds, this could have been an immensely affecting story. How hard must it have been for him, to fulfill a dream so intimately bound up with the story of his own father (elbowed aside by the arrival of that frolicsome novelty, Trudeau), and then to see it vaporize in the few months he unsteadily managed to hang on to power.

  Longer than Kim Campbell and Joe Clark, but it was not merely to best the fruit-fly duration of those tenures that Mr. Martin endured the long climb to feel the “cherry knock against [his] lips” and see it drawn away again.

  It would be hard telling to go to the core on these matters, but it is a real regret that he has not done so. I regard him as possessing, in a manner far more subtle than we see in most high public figures, special qualities of decency, honour and a true, deep fealty to the country he admires beyond all others. It was the glimpse of those qualities, even when he was embroiled in the long wait for the keys to 24 Sussex, that caught the admiration, and fired the expectation, of so many Canadians. I even think it true that many Canadians felt genuinely sorry that he did not really find his way, translate his dream, once he achieved power. I wish Hell or High Water had found the courage and the candour to unfold the real stories.

  There is a lot more to Paul Martin, and a lot more to his singular career, than this too-quick apologia, this last dance with Jean Chrétien, permits us to see.

  ART

  EROS BY ANY OTHER NAME | June 28, 2003

  Now, here’s a mouthful: Public Sex, Art, and Democracy.

  It’s the title of a play that has opened in a Vancouver art gallery. The climax of the play—in the classical, theatrical understanding of the word as well as in its more mundane sexual connotation—is a “Lewinsky.” Prior to the play’s performance, one of its organizers alerted the world that it would feature live oral sex—a first in Canada, so it is claimed.

  On stage, I mean. Or so I surely hope.

  It was also claimed that the performance—the play itself, and the performance within the performance—would be art. I presume that’s why it was getting its first run in an art gallery: to send the right signal. Much as if one stumbled across two oral sex actors in, say, Stanley Park, you might conclude they were engaged in landscape architecture. Conversely however, if the orally incontinent were caught bobbing for apples in the back seat of a parked car, the mind would not float automat
ically to Rembrandt or his peers in the great artistic tradition of the West. You’d probably mutter, unappreciative boor that you are, something like “Couldn’t you wait till you got home?”

  But if two sufficiently randyfied actors, artists, performers—it’s difficult to settle on the right word here—go to it in an art gallery (to the left of the soapstone carving there, and just before you get to our exhibition of Peruvian shawls), I think a cue is being given that the viewer hasn’t been transported to some wet T-shirt festival, but is actually watching something artistic.

  Now, I’m all with King Lear on this: “Let copulation thrive.” But I don’t know—two people naked, busy about each other; throw in a hammock, a monkey with a bullwhip, and a crate of 10W30 crank oil, and it might even be called a party. But in this case, it’s Vancouver, and furthermore it’s an art gallery in Vancouver, and with that combination, all definitions are up for grabs.

  Art appreciation, like sex, can be ticklish. Of course, the high question is: Is copulation, or any of its delightful approximations, variants, and surrogates, “art” because the “artists” charge admission to watch? We had that kind of “art” for years in New York’s Times Square and every low-rent entertainment district in North America for years—twenty-five cents a peep.

  And what of the patrons? Are they “connoisseurs?” As in, “I like the way he’s fondling her back, it’s a ‘quotation’ from Tommy Lee’s early work in the famous home video with Pamela, and I think I recognize some of the foreplay from the Debbie Does oeuvre.” Or are they just your garden-variety skanky voyeurs, albeit sipping Chablis?