bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 38–39
comm PAUL MARTIN Sr. mee ower SI
GREG DONAGHY
GRIT: THE LIFE AND POLITICS OF PAUL MARTIN SR., by Greg Donaghy, UBC Press, 2015, 496 pp $35.76
A Man of Contradictions: An Uneasy Insider He was a minister unlike any other. His hopes and fears, anxieties and disappointments, were ever on the surface. Neither French — or Québécois — enough for the pundits in Montreal nor English enough for the Anglo-Canadian establishment. A progressive liberal and a traditionalist. A deeply-read scholar and a cynical ward-heeler. Down-to-earth and pompous. A man of contradictions.
Many tales were told about him. In the House one afternoon, he asks about the duty on versivated chickens, an issue in his riding. A member tries to help: “You mean eviscerated chickens”. But Paul Martin, with three degrees and stints at Harvard and Cambridge, insists there is such a term — “You can look it up” — to sceptical laughter from the government benches. Hansard records the event (22 July, 1961) in a greatly abbreviated form; versivated is printed in italics.
He calls one (and many other junior officers) late at night to discuss what he should say in Parliament the next morning. (My father-in-law, in business, overhears one call in our meagre, rented house outside Ottawa and is appalled: “That was the Minister? You must ask for a raise!”’)
The unabashed patronage: arriving at External Affairs, he confuses his departmental assistant for his political aide and cheerfully hands him a list of postmasters to be appointed.
One weekend, he proposes to meet a senior foreign minister dressed in a T-shirt and cotton pants: “Aw, I’ve known him for ages; we’re friends.” Warnings about his visitor’s likely reaction and especially that of any press at the airport finally dissuades him.
At an international conference, he turns and asks what one thinks of Pearson’s speeches, adding “I’ve read them all: there’s nothing in them!”
And yet… And yet… Despite the absurdities, the occasional pomposity, and the famous obfuscations in the House of Commons, Paul Martin was a man of extraordinary achievements, one of the great ministers and politicians of the twentieth century. Apart from Lester Pearson, no-one ever came to the External Affairs portfolio with such deep knowledge of the actors and the issues. Despite the jokes, he kept the respect of his parliamentary opponents, in office and out.
His place in history was assured before he got to External. As a young Secretary of State, he brought in the Canadian Citizenship Act, establishing a Canadian identity shorn of its colonial past. During eight years at Health and Welfare, he framed the bases of our postwar health and social security system with pension improvements, family allowances, hospital insurance, polio vaccination and a range of other measures. During that activist period, he also represented Canada at the UN while Pearson was at NATO. By bold and adroit management of the issue, he broke a long-standing log-jam on membership, having outfaced British and American opposition The package deal brought in 16 new members, balanced between NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the third world. It set a precedent for further expansion.
Martin’s bad luck at External was that his Prime Minister was a famed diplomat whom everyone turned to in a crisis, and that his deputy minister, the deeply conservative Marcel Cadieux — himself on uneasy terms with the Prime Minister — had little time for Martin’s strivings and constant search for press and public approval.
Greg Donaghy recounts all of this, the achievements, the contradictions and the disappointments, in a solid piece of historical research that is well-organised and clearly written. He examines the issues Martin had to deal with at External Affairs, notably nationalist claims from Québec, relations with France before and after the de Gaulle visit, and shifting relations with the United States in the age of Kennedy and Johnson as they gradually fell under the darkening shadow of the Vietnam War.
Two themes run through Donaghy’s account of this period. One is the difficulty Martin had in steering a course through the waves of protest that rolled through the unruly sixties. Rightly cast as a politician of the liberal left in earlier decades, he found himself denounced as an accomplice of warmongers. The other is the tricky balance that operated between Pearson and Martin on many issues, with Pearson stealing the limelight on many occasions, for example, during the Middle East crisis of 1967/8 and by his Temple University speech on the Vietnam War. With the benefit of hindsight, one may say that neither had a monopoly on wisdom.
Donaghy also sets out clearly Martin’s key role, first, in the strategic extension of our relations and programmes in Francophone Africa, second, in the expansion — in size and extent — of the aid programme. He nicely sets Martin’s friendship with Maurice Strong in the context of his attraction to other rogue figures such as Burgon Bickersteth (the famed, first Warden of Hart House at the University of Toronto), and Lord Beaverbrook. Independent, self-made men, they reflected elements in his own character. For Martin himself had climbed up from poverty to his three degrees at the University of Toronto (and a full year each at Harvard and Cambridge) by extremely hard work and tireless self-promotion. Unexampled pertinacity was his key to winning financial support from a wide range of sponsors, Catholic, liberal, bhe was not deterred by occasional turndowns. That prefigured his future.
Martin was perhaps best known in his own time as a street level politician (“Anyone here from Windsor?”). It may surprise some to find that Donaghy is at some pains to draw his intellectual history as a motive centre for his career. Arriving at St. Michael’s College, Martin quickly embraced the liberal Catholic philosophy associated with Jacques Maritain and St. Thomas Aquinas, as it was espoused there. That tradition remained an intellectual (and emotional) anchor all his life, combined with the thought of the great English liberals, notably J.S. Mill. It was Bickersteth at Hart House who led him in that direction. At the other pole of Martin’s personality, Donaghy faithfully records his crass fund-raising and politicking, the career of a retail politician who at times came close to crossing the line.
A number of colleagues will read with special interest the final chapter where Martin has a minor renaissance as High Commissioner in London, after disappointing years in the Senate. Having developed extremely close relations with many British ministers, Martin, one heard, was not abashed about calling them late at night to put Canada’s case to them. He did much to advance it on a number of issues.
Greg Donaghy tells us the tale of a Grit: a Clear Grit and a True Grit combined, the one signifying clean sand without dirt and the other a particularly tenacious character. We misjudged Paul Martin in our day, thinking his replacements would do much better. We were wrong: with all his qualities and contradictions, he was one of the best. It is all there in GRIT: read the book as a complement and corrective to ‘Oom Paul’s’ own engaging memoirs.
Eric Bergbusch worked for 13 foreign ministers from Howard Green to Lloyd Axworthy in the years 1960 to 1996.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 38–39. Read the rest of this issue →
