After leading an RCMP posse on a hunt for more than a month, the Mad Trapper was shot to death by the Mounties on a frozen bend of the Eagle River. Our pursuits, by contrast, usually ended with my father breaking up and sharing a bar of dark chocolate.
I was eight or nine years old before I had a firm grasp of my father’s career and what he did when he wasn’t at home with us. My mother loves to tell the story of how I referred once to my dad as “the boss of Canada.” But what did that mean exactly? My friends’ parents performed work I could understand—they worked in stores, or looked after people as doctors, or talked on the radio. I could wrap my head around that kind of work. The concept of public service was much more abstract, more difficult to understand.
The subject came up one day when I asked my father something about our house and he replied that we didn’t own it the same way we owned our clothing or books. We didn’t? That was strange. We lived at 24 Sussex, so why wasn’t the house ours? His explanation was that it belonged to the government, which just confused me more. Wasn’t my father in charge of the government? Didn’t that make it all his? Then, in 1979, the Liberals lost the federal election. Almost overnight 24 Sussex was no longer our home, and we packed up and moved a few blocks away to Stornoway, the official opposition leader’s residence. That’s when I understood that the real boss of Canada was the Canadian people.
With time I began to grasp some of the more complex issues my father dealt with, and he made a point of drawing my attention to major events and their importance. For understandable reasons, he spoke to his young sons about the establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. I was ten years old at the time, old enough to be familiar with the basic principles of democracy, including the notion that governments rise and fall according to the voters’ will. In explaining the importance of the Charter, my father, who had envisioned such a document from the days when he had served as minister of justice in the Pearson government of the 1960s, pointed out that some rules were too important for the government to override.
The idea that a majority of the people—or, given our electoral system, sometimes far less than a majority—could use the government’s immense power to restrict minority rights appalled my father. He called this “the tyranny of the majority.” The way he explained it to us as children was to say that, for example, right-handed people, who make up a large majority of the population, shouldn’t be allowed to make laws that hurt left-handed people just because they are a minority.
Dad was a member both of a linguistic minority and of a generation that had seen people harness and marshal the state’s power to do unspeakable things to each other the world over. He had fought his whole life to build and shape, in Canada, a country of unparalleled diversity: of religion, ethnic origin, and belief. For diversity to work, people have to be free. The Charter was his way of ensuring that it would be impossible for any group of Canadians to use the government to unduly restrict basic freedoms for any other group of Canadians. His core value was classically liberal in this sense. It is a value I share, and believe in equally deeply.
In the ensuing years, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms became the vehicle for an unprecedented expansion of individual freedom in Canada. It has been used to strike down arbitrary laws that restricted Canadians’ choices in the most private and intimate aspects of our lives. Thanks to the Charter, Canadians are no longer discriminated against in their workplaces because of their sexual orientation, nor are they prevented from marrying the person they love just because they each happen to be of the same sex. Because of the Charter, women have gained the right to control their reproductive health. Other aspects of the Constitution Act were aimed at the same end. First Nations, for example, have used section 35 to establish in law rights that have been infringed by governments since European contact.
Since entering Parliament in 2008, I’ve often thought about what the Harper years would be like without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Mr. Harper and his party are not fans of the Charter. They refused to celebrate its thirtieth birthday. They rarely mention it, and the Supreme Court has used it to curb many of their most autocratic tendencies. Personally, I believe it comes down to a key difference between liberal and conservative ideas of freedom. The liberal idea is that all individuals, regardless of their background or belief, hold the same basic rights and freedoms, and that the Constitution ought to protect them from the powerful forces that would restrict—and in extreme instances remove—those rights. The conservative idea seems to me to be much more focused on giving people and groups who have power the freedom to use their power however they choose.
I believe very deeply in the liberal idea of freedom. In the spring of 2014, I would announce a firm stance in favour of a woman’s right to choose. It was a big change for some of my parliamentary colleagues. Previously, the Liberal Party considered this right to be subservient to the freedom of an individual MP to vote in Parliament according to his or her religious beliefs. As someone who was raised Roman Catholic, and who attended a Jesuit school, I understand that it is difficult for people of deep faith to set their beliefs aside in order to serve Canadians who may not share those beliefs. But for me, this is what liberalism is all about. It is the idea that private belief, while it ought to be valued and respected, is fundamentally different from public duty. My idea of freedom is that we should protect the rights of people to believe what their conscience dictates, but fight equally hard to protect people from having the beliefs of others imposed upon them. That is the difference between the views expressed by a citizen and the votes counted in Parliament. When MPs vote in Parliament, they are not just expressing an opinion; they are expressing a will to have all other Canadians bound by their opinion, under law. That is where we need to draw a firm line. I am confident that my father, were he around today, would agree.
His job may have been unique, but my dad, whom we called Papa because we always spoke with him in French, was in many ways like most fathers. He would joke with us, play games with us, and, as a special treat, sometimes take us along to work. This usually meant several hours of Sacha, Michel, and me playing tag or hide-and-seek on the third floor of the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings. To this day, I can’t pass certain rooms or stairwells in the building without the memory of those times flooding back to me.
I got my closest look at the day-to-day work my father performed as prime minister not in Ottawa, where he maintained a firm barrier between his roles as both prime minister and parent, but when we travelled around the country or abroad. In Ottawa, aside from our appearance at ceremonial occasions such as Remembrance Day and Canada Day, we had little exposure to his public duties. But when we accompanied him beyond Ottawa, things were different.
When it was my turn to travel overseas with him, I would often sit munching on a breakfast muffin in some hotel while my father received detailed briefings on the day’s meetings from people like Bob Fowler, his foreign policy advisor, and Ted Johnson, his executive assistant. I would sometimes attend evening events as well. This gave me the opportunity to meet international leaders such as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, who gave me a reindeer-hilted hunting knife that I treasure to this day.
Sometimes I had a front-row seat at events of major importance, such as the time I was with him on a tour of Canadian military bases in western Europe in 1982 and a bulletin announced that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had died. The next day we were on our way to Moscow for the funeral.
We were met at the airport by Canada’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Geoffrey Pearson, who briefed my father during the drive to the hotel. Much of the discussion, I remember, centred around the question of who would succeed Brezhnev. Passing through Moscow, I watched evening fall over the dark, sullen city while my father carried on a long and detailed discussion of internal Soviet politics in which he evenly matched a diploma
t who was stationed in Moscow. It was yet another confirmation for the boy I was that my father pretty much knew everything.
There’s a limit to how much a child can process when it comes to arms control or trade agreements. But one thing I learned to appreciate was the concept that in foreign relations, relationships are vitally important. I was struck by how my father’s briefings were often as much about the personalities of his counterparts as about the issues.
This became especially interesting when I was able to watch leaders from other countries meet with my father. Sometimes they seemed so different that I marvelled that they could interact productively with one another. Like Ronald Reagan.
I was nine when the president arrived for lunch with my father at 24 Sussex. It was pretty clear that day that something momentous was happening, because RCMP officers were positioned at ten-foot intervals all around the property, which was more security than I had seen on the lawn before or since.
When the charismatic U.S. president entered, my father introduced me and suggested that the three of us relax in the sun room before the two leaders had lunch. Reagan smiled warmly at me as we sat down and asked if I’d like to hear a poem, which made my father cock his head with interest. He loved poetry and often assigned us verses to memorize from works such as Racine’s Phèdre and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But Reagan had different tastes. Instead of classical verse he launched into Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” (“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon . . .”).
I was enchanted by the verse. My father was somewhat bemused both by the mildly inappropriate subject matter for a nine-year-old and by the predictably appropriate choice of verse by the cowboy/actor president. Still, it made an impact; I was impressed enough to memorize it and other narrative poems that my father would never have taught me, from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” to Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.”
Equally memorable were the times aboard the government Boeing 707 used for international trips. The front section of the aircraft had eight large seats, facing each other in groups of four. Behind them were two long benches, where my father and I slept during long flights. A wall separated this section from the rest of the plane, which was for staff, security, and press. I would sometimes go back to speak to the people I knew, because my father often worked on planes and there were no brothers to play with. But as interesting as the conversations were, I kept my visits to this section brief. Smoking was still allowed on planes then, including government planes, and the opaque fog of smoke that enveloped that area of the aircraft left me coughing.
The most valuable part of these trips with my father was the chance to watch how he made decisions. He was always asking questions and challenging the people around him about their opinions. He would rarely discuss his own views in any detail until everyone else had had their say, which was in contrast with his public image as an almost autocratic decision maker. Any decision made by my father was the result of a process that had involved many voices, and which sometimes had taken weeks or months. The decision-making model I learned during those 707 flights has come to inform my own leadership style.
All of this was the context in which I grew up. What stands in the forefront of my mind, however, was how the five of us lived as a family while in Ottawa, and how devoted my parents were to us.
Despite the demands on his time, Dad was an engaged, hands-on father who took great joy in his children. He found satisfaction in performing parental chores, tending to us in the night when we were infants or repairing our bicycles and assembling Christmas toys when we got older. He spun bedtime stories, en français, bien sûr, about Jason and the Golden Fleece or Paris and Helen of Troy, or scared our pants off with the story of Polyphemus and his cave. In the daylight hours, he introduced us to almost every physical activity available, though team sports like soccer, football, and hockey didn’t appear to interest him. He taught us to sail, to rock climb, to use a gun and archery equipment, to navigate the outdoors, to swim and dive and rappel and, of course, to ski. At Harrington Lake we spent at least four hours each day in some kind of outdoor activity whether it was hot or cold, dry or drenching. My dad had a great saying: “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
He and my mother excelled at skiing. My mother has always been a beautiful skier. As for my father, even on the most difficult hills, he outshone other skiers with his graceful style and aggressive attitude, and until he was well into his seventies he kept up with my brothers and me on the most challenging runs.
Off the skis and out of the canoe, he practised his ballroom dancing and lost himself in classical music and serious literature, sharing these enthusiasms with us as well. We were encouraged, expected even, to know history, Catholic theology, and the basis of philosophy as well as we knew how to make a parallel turn on skis and how to portage a canoe through heavy brush.
The three of us enrolled in judo classes, which helped us learn to fall and tumble, and when I was four or five, my father taught me to box, which later became something I actively pursued.
My mother insisted on broadening our horizons in other directions. In my case, she achieved only varying success. When I was just six years old, she enrolled me in ballet class. I’m a great believer in eclectic interests where culture is concerned, but being one of two boys among sixteen young girls was more than my young ego could take. My mother and the ballet teacher made a concession to my self-consciousness by allowing me to wear pants instead of tights, but it wasn’t enough. I hated the whole idea and rebelled at being dragged to ballet class until the day my mother was forced to literally pull me through the door of 24 Sussex while I kicked and screamed. I seized the door frame and clung to it desperately, refusing to give in to Mom’s pleas until a workman painting a railing near the door, who had watched us for a moment, said, “Come on, lady. Give the kid a break.”
That did the trick. I went to ballet that day, but it was my last visit.
While my mother and father worked very well together as parents, it’s known that they faced many challenges as a couple. My mother’s theory is that she and my father weren’t capable of having a “normal” or productive argument. There was no middle ground, so instead of any sort of gradual meeting of the minds, the dams would burst and both my parents would let loose. Over time, the unpleasant episodes between them multiplied, until their marriage fell apart.
My mother readily acknowledges that my father was an exemplary parent by always making time to spend with his children. In fact, his attitude toward parenting was decades ahead of its time. He almost always found something new that piqued our interest, some fascinating discovery to explore, or just some way to make us laugh and be happy.
Sometimes his active parenting practices came as a shock to his stodgier colleagues. When I was still a baby, Dad often would come home during the day to help care for me, racing upstairs to the nursery before he’d even taken off his coat. To make the arrangement work, he would invite his cabinet ministers to 24 Sussex for a working lunch. On one memorable occasion, he plunked me down in a baby seat in the middle of the table in the dining-room alcove to the amazement of his assembled colleagues. John Turner, my father’s newly appointed finance minister, observed me for a moment and then said, “Don’t worry, Pierre. Kids get a lot more fun and interesting once they get a little older.” Years later, when my dad would tell this story, he still found John’s comment bewildering: for him there was nothing more interesting than watching even a baby discover the world. He revelled in our first words and first steps every bit as much as in our first backflips off a diving board or on a trampoline. From my first memories of my father to my last, his love for us was clear. That fact, more than any other, is the anchor of my childhood.
And let me be honest: lots of things about being the prime minister’s son were just plain fun. Like the special code names that the RCMP gave our family: my dad an
d mum were Maples 1 and 2, my brothers 4 and 5. I was Maple 3. All the major locations in our life had code names as well. My school, Rockcliffe Park Public School, was known as Section 81, and Section 76 was my buddy Jeff’s house. Sometimes the RCMP officers would let my brothers and me take the microphone to exchange coded messages with Mounties in other cars. I remember the pride I felt the day I cracked their so-called secret code: “Alpha Bravo Charlie! You just take the first letter of each word!”
Birthday parties at 24 Sussex were especially enjoyable, a time when we would change the rambling old mansion into a playhouse for a day. Since Sach and I shared a Christmas birthday, in mid-December we would each invite our entire class over. About forty kids would arrive, Dad would retreat to his office, and we would be free to play avalanche tag, a form of hide-and-seek in which every newly found player joins the search party until, at the end of the game, a whole pack of kids are searching for the one remaining hidden kid.
This was the side of my life that my school friends saw and sometimes envied. Occasionally, unexpected things would happen that made jaws drop. I remember a June day when I was eleven years old and playing on the driveway of 24 Sussex with my friend Jeff Gillin. A car pulled up, the door opened, and an elegant young woman stepped out carrying a gym bag: it was Diana, Princess of Wales. She and Prince Charles were touring Canada at the time and I had been told she was discreetly coming over to swim some laps in the pool at the back of the property, and so I decided it would be appropriate to greet her properly.
Jeff and I vaguely sensed that some sort of protocol should be observed, but standing there in our grubby T-shirts and jeans, we hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do. Bow deeply? Salute? Instead, we dropped our bikes and sort of stood there at attention, a child’s version of an honour guard as the princess passed. For me, it was an awkward moment, made worse by the fact that she was obviously a little out of sorts that we had intruded on what was supposed to be her totally secret and private time. And so as soon as she’d whisked past us (with just a hint of an eye roll), I turned to apologize to Jeff for what had happened. Jeff, his eyes as large as saucers, exclaimed, “Oh my God! That was incredible!”
Common Ground Page 2
