It is only natural after losing a leadership race to feel some uncertainty about your relationship with the winner. It was no different for me. My dream of becoming the C.D. Howe of my generation was undimmed, but what I could not be certain of at first was whether that door would remain open. Within a few weeks, however, Eddie Goldenberg came down to the farm in the Eastern Townships and we discussed my future role in the Liberal Party. Eddie’s father, Carl, who had been appointed to the Senate by Pierre Trudeau, had been a friend of my father. I had always liked Eddie, and given his long association with Jean Chrétien, I certainly had no quarrel with his decision to back Chrétien’s leadership bid in 1990. The most important thing for me was that I have meaningful work within the party and eventually in government, and Eddie was clear that this would be the case. Over the next decade, Eddie, along with Chaviva Hošek, who was Jean Chrétien’s policy adviser, would play an important role in lubricating the political and governmental relationship between him and me.
Much of the day-to-day interaction between Chrétien’s office and mine was channelled through Terrie O’Leary, who had replaced Richard Mahoney as my executive assistant after the leadership and continued in that role for many of my most important years at Finance. Terrie would be at my side through many political battles and we would become the closest of friends. She has an extraordinary combination of gifts. She shares my interest and enthusiasm for the details of public policy. But her political antennae are more acute than mine, and her understanding of political communications is formidable. She is an indefatigable worker when she commits herself to something, and a superb organizer and leader of people. Equally important, she is a thoroughly decent person, delightful and funny. I suppose that is part of the reason that I have never minded that she will take me apart when she disagrees with me, not only in private but in a room full of others, if she thinks it is time to give me what-for.
Jean Chrétien and I had a personal relationship that ran the gamut from cool to non-existent, so it was in large part due to Terrie’s relationships with Chrétien’s people that we found a way to make the governmental partnership work. At times, when Jean Chrétien would cut Eddie out of the loop, she would bring him back in, knowing this was important if we were to bridge the frigid river between me and the prime minister. Whatever reservations Eddie had about me and my role in the party and government — deep ones, apparently — he disguised them completely from me during more than a decade that we worked together under Jean Chrétien’s leadership. I took him at face value and we got on with business.
My main concern in the summer and fall of 1990 was to carve out a set of tasks that would occupy me intellectually and politically. I was unprepared for the routine of Opposition life, which I had been spared in my rookie years by the leadership race. I wouldn’t “troll” for media attention, as opposition MPs are supposed to do after question period at the House of Commons. Although I deeply disagreed with many of the Mulroney government’s policies, I also understood, perhaps in part through my father, the complexities of governing and for that reason disliked the ritual denunciation of government actions that our system seems to demand of opposition MPs.
In retrospect, I can say that asking questions in the House of Commons is much more difficult than answering them. In government, if you are any good, you know your issues better than anyone else, and little, if any, preparation for question period is required. In Opposition it is very different. In thirty-five seconds, you need to blast the government, give context to the issue you are raising, and then let loose with a cleverly constructed question that will put the government on the spot. Terrie recalls that I once declined an invitation to have lunch at the American Embassy with Katherine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, because I had to ask a question in the House in the afternoon and wanted to prepare. Terrie, who has a passion for John F. Kennedy, told me in no uncertain terms that I was going, and gave me a list of questions for Ms. Graham, who had been a friend of JFK’s. She was not at all mollified when I came back to the office having gleaned nothing because I could not concentrate on anything else over lunch but my upcoming half-minute performance in the House.
There are a number of real problems with question period. The first is that it has little to do with the eliciting of information and contributes little to needed debate. Second, the first point might be tolerable if it was good theatre. It’s not. Third, question period has two different audiences with two different perspectives. How many times did I leave the House of Commons with my caucus colleagues cheering because of some “brilliant” put-down, only to have a senior citizen (they are the ones who watch question period on TV) ask me on the weekend, “When are you and the rest of those hyenas in Parliament going to grow up?”
I asked for, and received, the role of environment critic. I already had a deep interest in the environment. In the beginning, my interest had been rooted in the conservation of Canada’s wilderness. I thought preservation of the environment was a moral value, whether it was to have a decent and healthy country for children to grow up in or quite simply to be able to fish in rivers where there were actually fish. As I have said, the environment was an important part of my leadership platform. My political ambition remained to go into government as industry and trade minister, in the footsteps of C.D. Howe, but one of the things that had changed since his time was the clear link that had now been established between sound environmental policy and a nation’s economic success. I also knew I already had the bona fides for the industry job from my business background. The environment critic’s job would broaden my experience and deepen my knowledge on a vital issue.
Above and beyond the specific critic’s job, however, I asked to be entrusted with the development of the party’s overall election platform — an idea that met with indifference from my closest advisers, with the exception of Terrie. For twenty years, beginning with Pearson’s defeat of Diefenbaker, the Liberal Party had been the party of government, and so its election platforms tended to be based on policies developed through the mechanisms of government. The specifically political gloss and the day-to-day campaign announcements — the “Gainesburgers,” as the media called them — were drafted by party strategists. They did not reflect a medium-or long-term vision of where the Liberals wanted to take Canada. They were strategies for the campaign, but they were no more than that. As a result, the Liberals had failed to develop a comprehensive vision for the future. The most significant policy position the party had taken during the 1980s — opposition to the Free Trade Agreement1 — had proven politically popular, but it was not grounded in a comprehensive economic or social strategy. The time had come to rethink many of the party’s policies.
Jean Chrétien had run a classic front-runner’s campaign during the leadership, which meant that he had never fully developed a policy platform. He was also cautious by nature, unwilling to be tied down to promises that might come to haunt him in government, which meant he would sometimes resist some of our more ambitious and specific ideas. But he was shrewd enough to see the political value of constructing a more elaborate platform, in part because he understood it would address public concerns about our readiness to govern after nearly a decade out of power. Indeed, he ultimately made the platform we constructed into a defining document of his career as prime minister.
To get the process underway, Jean Chrétien appointed Chaviva Hošek and me as platform co-chairs. I knew Chaviva from the time she had been Ontario’s housing minister and I was the Liberals’ housing critic (during the leadership race) and we had hit it off. Later she became head of the federal party’s research office. She brought with her the resources of her office and, more importantly, her deep convictions on a wide variety of policy issues. She had a profound understanding of how policy might affect the lives of individual Canadians, particularly women. I do not think that when she took on the job, however, she fully understood how ambitious my plans were.
Over the course of 1991, we organized dozens of meetings with Liberals across the country. Often tons of invitations were dispatched, and hundreds of people showed up. Chaviva and I both thoroughly enjoyed the experience of interacting with rank-and-file Liberals as we wrestled with the formulas we might devise for our social well-being and economic prosperity as a country. In addition, we organized many meetings with experts and organizations that had specialized knowledge of specific fields. It was during this period that I met Fraser Mustard, the brilliant Canadian physician and academic, whose pioneering work on early childhood learning deeply influenced me.
In my opinion, the modern Liberal believes in the freedom of the individual and is wary of an all-seeing state attempting to restrict that freedom. That’s why Pierre Trudeau brought in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and why I later sought to abolish its notwithstanding clause. At the same time, the modern Liberal is also a descendant of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who championed the role of the state in providing the means by which individual freedoms are guaranteed for everyone. The dichotomy leads us to continually re-evaluate the role of the state to make it more progressive, for example, by bringing in health insurance and medicare, as my father and Monique Begin did, or by seeking to do the same with child care, as I was to do.
Of course, we could not develop a new platform in a political vacuum. It was crucial to free the party from the grip of the accumulated ideology of the party and set it on a new path. In the fall of 1991, the party held a conference in Aylmer, Quebec. The media at the time, and often since, portrayed the Aylmer meeting as a contest between “business Liberals,” such as Roy MacLaren and me, and “social Liberals” such as Lloyd Axworthy, with victory going to the former. In reality, there were many divergent voices heard at the conference, but a common theme emerged: that globalization was not the property of the left or right but a fact of life with which Canadians had to come to grips. The conference opened the door to rethinking many of the party’s traditional positions.
The Red Book, as the platform ultimately came to be called, was a collective effort involving thousands of Liberals and hundreds of hours of negotiation and discussion among Terrie, Chaviva, Eddie, and me. The language was crafted in part by John Godfrey, a Liberal MP and former journalist whose graceful pen added both poetry and seriousness to the end product. Although I had always understood the gravity of the problem posed by the mounting deficits run by the federal government from Pierre Trudeau’s time through Brian Mulroney’s, it was not until I became finance minister that I fully understood the difficulty of solving it. I still believed, as I think most of my colleagues in the party did, that the main engine of deficit reduction would be economic growth, and not a fundamental re organization and reduction in the size of government. Everyone understood, however, that we needed a credible policy on the issue. Jean Chrétien suggested that we adopt the approach of the recently signed Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union (EU) by tightening the economic relations between the countries of the predecessor European Community. It stipulated that members of the EU should not run deficits greater than 3 per cent of their gross domestic product. Ironically, it was a standard that two of the dominant players in the EU, France and Germany, did not achieve in the years to come. Although once in office I pushed well beyond that mark, reaching a balanced budget and ultimately running surpluses, its importance in the Red Book was to establish a credible goal with a specific timeline that had not just been plucked from thin air.
Meanwhile, I proposed that the Red Book be fully costed. Unlike election platforms since time immemorial, which promised the sky without seriously considering the consequences of implementation, ours would state plainly what we thought a proposal would cost, and how we would finance it while still achieving our goal of reducing the deficit. Demonstrating once again his natural caution, Jean Chrétien was reluctant to be pinned down so specifically. Ultimately, however, he, too, recognized the value of precise costing, as well as its implicit acknowledgement of the trade-offs necessary once we achieved power. We commissioned economist Patrick Grady to develop an economic model to reconcile the numbers and give the document the look, feel, and intellectual heft of a budget as much as of an election platform. I like to think that it embedded our specific campaign commitments in a clear expression of our party’s economic philosophy that included job creation, responsible management of monetary policy as well as decisive action toward reducing deficits, and a careful enhancement of social programs as fiscal circumstances permitted.
I thought at the time that it would set a standard for party election platforms in Canada, and it did for a while. When I look at the 2006 election, however, when the Conservatives were able to take power on the basis of a series of uncosted promises (most of them broken early on), it is clear that I was overly optimistic.
In the midst of this process, in 1992, I also attended the Earth Summit in Rio as opposition environment critic. Prior to leaving, I conducted a round of intensive consultations with non-governmental environmental groups. This was when I met some of the leading activists in the environmental movement, such as Elizabeth May, Louise Comeau, David Runnalls, and Stephanie Cairns, who continued to be friends and advisers for many years. In government, you have a huge bureaucracy on which to rely for advice, but in opposition you find that it is often the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have the most readily available expertise. My contact with these groups convinced me of their enduring value, and even as finance minister and later prime minister, I made it a habit to consult with NGOs before embarking on a foreign trip whenever the subject was the environment or international development.
My companion on the Rio trip was the NDP’s environment critic, Jim Fulton, who is a deeply committed environmentalist. Our role was to be observers and little else. Jean Charest, who was Canada’s environment minister at the time, would meet with us each morning and listen to what we had to say. But naturally it was he and his bureaucrats who went off to the meetings where the actual discussions were held or, as often happens at such meetings, the communiqués previously negotiated were ratified. Of course, there was an extra dimension of interest in the summit for me because Maurice Strong chaired the meeting and had been the driving force behind creating the assembly.
The Earth Summit was in some ways a heady experience and in others a sobering one. Heady in that this was the first time the international community had come together to treat the issues of pollution, biodiversity, deforestation, desertification, water scarcity, and global warming as the common problems of humanity they had become. Yet, as was apparent to a degree at the time and became more obvious in the sobering aftermath, like many international meetings it produced much less than it promised. Media attention was focused on whether George Bush Senior, then president of the United States, would attend the meeting. He did, but to what end? Despite Maurice Strong’s valiant efforts in the years that followed, there was little or no follow-through by world leaders to the high-flown rhetoric in which they indulged at Rio.
This gap between rhetoric and commitment angered and frustrated me, and influenced some of my strong views about global governance. In domestic politics, politicians who fail to keep their promises face the discipline of the electorate if the promise is important enough. No such discipline exists in international forums. Leaders who make international commitments, which in the modern world may be just as important as any domestic promises they will ever make, have little compunction about abandoning them once they’ve smiled for the leaders’ “family photo” and headed home. These broken commitments at the international level bring the whole system of international governance into disrepute, paralyzing the world’s attempts to deal with the hard edges of globalization.
My distaste for this practice later led me to adopt some controversial positions in government. While inside the cabinet, I was critical of Jean Chrétien’s commitment to the Kyoto Accord without any plan to implement it. He did not expect to meet the goals to which the government had agreed, as Eddie Goldenberg has subsequently confirmed. It was in a similar spirit that I resisted pressure from my friend Bono, among others, to join other governments in a pledge to devote 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product to foreign aid. Even the supporters of the pledge understood that most of the leaders who made it had no intention of carrying it out, but they hoped that grand public declarations would put political pressure on George Bush. I believed strongly in the objectives of both the Kyoto Accord and the 0.7 per cent pledge. I just didn’t like the cynicism of promising the earth and delivering nothing more than dust in the eyes.
A few weeks after I returned from the Rio summit, my father’s health deteriorated sharply. He had been frail for several years. Still, he had kept up many of his regular activities, such as attending an annual conference of Canadian and British lawyers and judges at Cambridge University that he had helped to establish as High Commissioner. But we suspected he may have suffered from a series of small strokes because he had developed a tendency to trip unexpectedly, which worried us enormously. I had always maintained close contact with my parents, speaking with them by phone almost every day, and swinging by Windsor to see them whenever I was within an hour or two of their home. But that summer, when Dad was hospitalized after a major stroke, Sheila and I began making the trip to see them even more regularly. Early in September, Dad slipped into unconsciousness and several days later, on September 14, 1992, he passed away. At least we had had time to prepare ourselves and to say goodbye.
My father had been an MP for Windsor for thirty-three years, and had returned there in his retirement years. His funeral was an occasion not only for the family but for all of south-western Ontario. Outside Assumption Church, there was an honour guard of more than seventy Knights of Columbus in their regalia — black suits with red capes. The funeral mass was concelebrated by the bishop of London, John Sherlock, three other bishops, and perhaps a dozen priests. It was delayed a few minutes to accommodate several dozen MPs travelling from Ottawa on an Armed Forces plane that had been kindly arranged by Prime Minister Mulroney. Despite the many political dignitaries, and the crowd of about a thousand people, the funeral had an intimate quality arising from the fact that almost everyone in the room felt they knew my father and had been touched by him in some particular way. I gave the eulogy. I spoke about his French-Canadian upbringing, his Catholic faith, and his dedication to the people of Windsor and of Canada. I spoke about some of his accomplishments at home and abroad: as a father of medicare and of the Canadian Citizenship Act. But mostly I recounted the stories — the many funny stories — that reflected his lack of navigational skills, his exuberant love of politics, and his impish sense of humour. There was a lot of laughter in the church that day, which was what helped me get through it. Later, though, at the cemetery, when his casket was lowered into the ground, I wept.
The Windsor Star published what may have been my father’s most eloquent epitaph. It was an editorial cartoon. It pictured Dad sporting angels’ wings in heaven with St. Peter behind him. He looks around and utters his immortal line: “Is there anyone here from Windsor?” Dad would have laughed. I still have that cartoon framed and hanging in my office.
For my mother, the public display of affection for my dad was a huge comfort at a devastating moment.
When I returned to Ottawa, the prime minister presented me with the flag that had flown at half-mast over the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill the day my dad passed away. For many years after, the flag, mounted on a pole, decorated my parliamentary office. It is now at my home.
I don’t believe that my father’s illness and death affected my political life except in the narrow sense that, absorbed as I was with my family on the one hand and the development of the Red Book on the other, I was aloof from the turmoil that gripped some of my fellow Liberal MPs during this time. Jean Chrétien faced a challenge from some of those within the caucus who wanted the party to take advantage of the public’s outrage over the GST and promise to abolish it. Ultimately, the Red Book contained a commitment to replace — not abolish — the tax, whatever others might have said when ad-libbing their way through the 1993 campaign.
I watched with great interest, as did all of us, Brian Mulroney’s belated resignation as party leader and the ascendance of Kim Campbell, first in the media and then for a time in public popularity. I was not one of those “Nervous Nellies” in the caucus who Jean Chrétien so famously castigated in the spring of 1993 because they feared another Tory victory. Maybe because of my involvement in developing the Red Book, I felt that we were extremely well prepared for the campaign once it came.
In early September 1993, Kim Campbell finally dropped the writ for the election. There was an eerie period at the beginning of the seven-week campaign when the Progressive Conservatives maintained a lead over us in the polls, seemingly defying the laws of political gravity. A week and a half into the campaign, on September 19, we released the Red Book. On Terrie’s suggestion we had arranged the release to the media as a “lock-up” similar to what accompanies a budget. That is, the reporters were given the document but were sealed off from the world for a couple of hours while they read and absorbed the text and began preparing their stories. This is done for a budget so that a superficial read by reporters pressed to get their stories out doesn’t adversely affect the markets. Of course, our platform was unlikely to do that, but the adoption of the lock-up mechanism added to the weight and seriousness of the document and helped ensure that it got more than a quick skim before being consigned to the wastebasket by the press corps.
It worked brilliantly. When the lock-up was over, we held a press conference at which Jean Chrétien was flanked by Chaviva and me. It emphasized party unity as well as the idea that the leader was backed up by a strong Liberal team, an important theme of the campaign. For the most part, reporters took the document seriously and Jean Chrétien used the opportunity to emphasize that the Red Book would create a new form of accountability to voters by giving a specific measure of success once in office.
Unlike in 1988, I had national responsibilities to campaign outside my own riding in 1993. That, perhaps along with a dose of realism, made me more nervous about my own seat than I had been the previous election, even though this time the conventional wisdom was that I would easily win. In 1993 and in subsequent campaigns, I was helped tremendously by Sheila’s grace and skill as a door-to-door campaigner on my behalf, as well as a superb local campaign team that included my sons. Meanwhile, Terrie joined the Chrétien tour. With her detailed knowledge of the Red Book, she was ideally cast as a media contact on the plane and bus tour, where she spent long hours with reporters, answering their questions and stick-handling the issues they raised. No one disputed the enormous value she brought to the campaign tour. Some of the relationships she developed with reporters at the time continued to serve us well for years to come.
Unfortunately, however, she was an uneasy fit with the Chrétien people, some of whom continued to regard anyone with a Martin connection with deep suspicion. At one point, because of this, she was ready to quit the tour, and I had to go down to the bus station in Montreal, where the campaign bus was parked, to meet her and persuade her to stick with it. As the campaign neared its end, she phoned me and asked whether I would cover for her if she told the tour organizers she wanted to spend election night with Sheila and me. She had no intention of doing so, and spent the evening in Ottawa with David Herle and Richard Mahoney. But no matter, there was more than enough for Liberals to celebrate on election night, wherever they were and whoever they were with.
1 It is important to remember that John Turner was not opposed to free trade per se. He was opposed to the particular agreement negotiated by the Mulroney government. I supported free trade, and while I felt the FTA was deficient in important areas I also felt it was the best we could get in the circumstances.