bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1986) — Fall 1986 // Automne 1986, pp. 18–24
Up the Hill by Don Johnston, Optimum,
1986, $23.95.
One Eyed Kings: Promises and Illusion
in Canadian Politics by Ron Graham,
Collins, Toronto, 1986, 441 pp., $26.95.
The Changing of the Guard: How the
Liberals Fell from Grace and the Tories
Rose to Power by Norman Snider,
Lester, Orphen and Denys, Toronto,
1985, 206 pp., $19.95.
The Race for the Rose: Election 1984 by
Charles Lynch, Methuen, Toronto,
1984, 196 pp., $19.95.
The Canadian General Election of 1984:
Politicians, Parties, Press and Polls by
Alan Frizzell and Anthony Westall with
contribution by Nick Hills, Jeffrey
Simpson and Val Sears, Carleton
University Press, 1985, 139 pp., $10.95.
From my perspective, the most interesting aspects of Don Johnston’s book Up the Hill, published earlier this year, are the insights into the power of the Prime Minister and his office in our present parliamentary system and the reaction Johnston’s book provoked among the inner core of the Trudeau faithful.
The last half of Johnston’s book reads like a rehash of speeches that would have gone down well with the Chamber of Commerce crowd. These chapters may contain logical approaches for dealing with such big issues as rationalizing our tax system, reducing our deficit, re-examining our commitment to universal social programs and coming to grips with the computer age. But the folksy style which might work in a speech to a business audience doesn’t read too well and the second half of the book, which outlines Johnston’s philosophy on major issues, is not nearly as interesting as the first half
Johnston’s personal reminiscences, which are obviously those of a very bright kid being raised in modest circumstances in the Ottawa valley, are quite interesting. His experiences as a candidate for the nomination in Westmount and as a candidate in a 1978 by-election together with his subsequent reelection campaigns are written with a dry but enjoyable sense of humour. However, his perceptions as a leadership candidate are more puzzling than revealing. Almost any observer of that campaign, other than perhaps Johnston’s own supporters, knew he never had a chance but it’s not entirely clear that Johnston knows that. And if he did know that it’s not really clear why he ran. In a leadership campaign your own supporters can always construct a number of theoretical scenarios for “going up the middle”. If the numbers aren’t there, a non-contender usually starts talking about giving the party a choice, and the need to debate issues etc. and Johnston’s campaign followed this pattern. In fact, Johnston ran an excellent but hopeless campaign. The truth is that Jean Chrétien was the only candidate who had any chance of beating John Turner. Ironically, Johnston’s leadership campaign had many similarities to Turner’s losing campaign in 1968, not the least of which was the fact that they each decided to remain on the final ballot rather than swing to one of the two finalists. Turner’s final count in 1968 was 195 votes and Johnston’s in 1984 was 192.
Johnston was probably the most innovative leadership candidate in terms of policy but that was largely due to his willingness to challenge Liberal orthodoxy on such fundamental issues as universal social programs. He also frequently talked about the deficit and most Liberals don’t really enjoy serious deficit discussions as they necessarily involve very tough choices. Johnston’s heresy on such issues, as well as a number of thinly veiled shots at Jim Coutts and Tom Axworthy, account for the negative reaction his book provoked from some of the Trudeau circle.
My reaction to Johnston’s book differs somewhat from that of my good friends Davey, Coutts and Axworthy. As Keith Davey himself has said, “The Liberal Party is a big tent.” It may not be big enough to include the Peter Pocklingtons but it certainly can contain, and in fact needs, the Don Johnstons. After the MacEachen budget in 1981 Liberal stock in the business community probably sunk to an all-time low. From my Toronto constituency alone I received over 600 letters, mostly from businessmen, objecting to the budget. Given Johnston’s background as a senior partner and top specialist in a major law firm, it should not be surprising to anyone that the member representing Westmount was an articulate spokesman within the government for the business community on some very legitimate concerns.
I’ve always thought of the Liberal Party as basically believing in the private enterprise system while retaining a strong commitment to social justice. I think Johnston believes that in recent years the balance between business interests and social justice has tilted towards the latter and he suggests it’s time to re-examine whether those in need might be supported more rationally and cost-effectively by a comprehensive income support system. He may well be right and I see no harm in having a lively discussion of such opinions within the party. However, as anyone who attacks sacred cows will face an uphill battle, Johnston’s dogma is unlikely to prevail.
Finally, Johnston’s chapter on “Who was Pierre Elliott Trudeau” “, which obviously prompted much media attention when published, contains the most interesting insights. Johnston writes with both frustration and pain that by the time the Prime Minister reached his last mandate, control of the government was “concentrated in the hands of Trudeau, his principal secretaries Jim Coutts and later Tom Axworthy, Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Pitfield and ultimately only one member of the Cabinet, Marc Lalonde. “ This is undoubtedly true of the major policy decisions and appointments but Johnston’s beef should equally be directed as much towards the system as those who run it. A majority government of the Canadian parliamentary variety increasingly operates like a presidential system without a counterpart to the American system of legislative checks. A Prime Minister looks for advice to whomever he chooses. That key and inner advice may or may not come from ministers.
NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED AT ALL… NEVER HAVE BEEN Laurent’s day, it clearly came from ministers such as C.D. Howe, Pickersgill, Gardiner, Pearson etc. In Diefenbaker’s time it frequently came from his less lustrious ministers such as Gordon Churchill and David Walker who were also his cronies. Pearson’s first chief policy advisor, Tom Kent, was obviously a key influential advisor but his power didn’t exceed that of key ministers such as Walter Gordon and Jack Pickersgill, in the early years, or Mitchell Sharp in the later years.
During my time in both the caucus and Cabinet I used to watch Mr. Trudeau’s facial expressions and demeanor when an M.P. or a minister was arguing a point of view. There was sufficient facial body language to indicate whose viewpoints impressed him. While Lalonde was in a league by himself there were a handful of other ministers whose views registered with the PM and whose opinions may well have been adopted and promoted by Mr. Trudeau in subsequent meetings with his own staff. But for the most part, big decisions were not made at the Cabinet table and one very good reason had to do with its size. Johnston’s arguments for a drastic reduction in the size of the Cabinet are probably valid.
Johnston cites the acquisition of Petrofina for $1.7 billion as an example of a major issue where the Prime Minister finalized a decision without consulting all the ministers directly involved. He has a valid point but all the Prime Minister did was exercise his prerogative. Presumably Trudeau listened to whomever he wanted to prior to the decision being made and had Johnston been at the hastily called special meeting his views would have been heard. However the decision had clearly been made in principle before the meeting was convened. Ironically, Mr. Trudeau’s attendance and interest in Parliament itself was certainly greater than Prime Minister Mulroney’s and the bloated size of the present Cabinet probably means that the decision making process is, if anything, becoming even more centralized in the P.M.O. than in the last Trudeau government.
In any event Johnston’s book, at least the first half, is good reading. In particular, those chapters where he bares his soul and admits that consensus and harmony do not always prevail within party ranks help humanize the lively art of Canadian politics.
As our bosses are wont to remind us, a career based on service abroad is apt to make the foreign service officer a bit out of touch with developments at home. During the past three years it has been especially difficult to keep up with developments at home: both major parties have changed their leaders and the 1984 election brought a Conservative majority to power for the first time since 1958. Fortunately, there have been a number of books that have examined this sea change to Canadian politics which adequately fill in the gaps left in the press scan and the weeks-late newspapers and magazines, many of which never circulate further than the desk of the Ambassador or post public affairs officer.
HAVE I
DONATO TORONTO SUM
COURTESY PUBLIC ARCHIVES CANADA Charles Burchill Lynch is the doyen of Canadian political columnists and he has been covering our politics on radio, television and in print for half a century. Unfortunately, these impressive credentials do not an objective correspondent make and The Race for the Rose, while written with the usual Lynch panache, should not be relied on as the bottom line although members of the Conservative party research bureau should always keep a copy close at hand. Lynch makes no effort to disguise his utter contempt for the Grits nor his admiration of Brian Mulroney. Indeed he ends the book with the revelation that he had prayed to the Almighty for deliverance from Liberal government. And as he concludes, “I cast my eyes upward once more and said: “Thank you, God, but you went too far.’ ’ As readers of his column are frequently reminded he is also the ’covivant’ of the Conservative whip, Claudy Mailly, the MP for Gatineau. Throughout the book, Lynch places great weight on the influence of politicians’ spouses — doubtless based on personal experience.
The book is a review of the two races occasioned by the resignation of Pierre Trudeau: that for the Liberal succession and that for victory at the polls in September 1984. Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a good Liberal (except maybe Jean Chrétien) or a bad Tory (he does not care for Diefenbaker or Joe Clark but then as he admits “I’m not sure what they were”), the book can be quite fun. On page one Turner is dismissed as “a throwback to the fifties, or the forties”, and described from then as resembling a motley assortment of characters, mostly fictional: a Fonz with class, a combination of the Duke of Edinburgh and Sammy Glick, Robert Young or Charlton Heston, miscast as chairman of the Board, a returning Richard Nixon, somebody out of Scott Fitzgerald, “full of energy, determined to do the proper thing, yet wanting to be one of the boys”
Pierre Trudeau is a cheapskate who never acknowledged his debts, especially to Jean Chrétien, who he “owed more … than to any other minister”. Lynch does not think much of the Trudeau accomplishments. The patriation of the constitution was a Machiavelli-like distraction from. economic problems. The peace initiative was an attempt to repair his own fortunes, “whether his fellow world leaders were ready for it or not.” Successful politicians, he contends, “as much as failed ones, live in a world of fantasy, surrounded by self delusions, some grand, some petty.” For Lynch the mark of Trudeau will always be “arrogance, presumption and contempt for the past” and yet they were also the qualities for which he was most admired, except by the media, who as Lynch confesses, responded in kind without leaving a mark.
Lynch places special emphasis on the role of the political wife, recognizing that politics is the hardest profession of all on marriages, with the possible exception of medicine, and the news business. He should know. In describing the Liberal leadership contest Lynch pays special attention to the marital state of the contenders and thus we learn that there were “no special roles for Geills Turner, or Heather Johnston, or Dr. Lily Munro, or Elizabeth Whelan, much less the estranged wives of Mark MacGuigan or John Roberts.” As for Prime Ministers’ wives, Lynch does not care for the assertiveness of Maureen McTeer, even if it was “the most exciting thing about the Joe Clark menage”, or the “terrible-tempered Geills Turner, tamed somewhat for her role as the wife of the prime minister, skilled in the arts of high-born hospitality, a daddy’s girl from the rich side of the tracks… as testy as Maryon Pearson was, but not as thoughtful nor witty.” Olive Diefenbaker brought a “fawning sweetness” that kept her husband from having been driven around the bend. Mila Mulroney on the other hand, “ was brilliant in her own right, and the intellectual brilliance certainly matches that of her husband.” Along with her gift of multiple languages and “a global way of looking at things… an impish sense of humour and a way with women as well as men” Lynch feels she would have made a good President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada or a good MP.
The Liberal leadership was predictable.
The party chose the man they thought could win but before it was over Lynch says he had covered himself with additional soot and grime and sleaze. But the Liberal defeat was less John Turner’s fault than Brian Mulroney’s personal triumph. Mulroney followed his personal ’game plan’ and to him goes the credit for “brilliant management — a party machine running full tilt from the moment of Trudeau’s February resignation announcement, a battle plan that was followed with scarcely a change to a victory that reduced the Liberal Party to tatters, and shattered the Grit power base in Quebec”
Charles Lynch is a lucky man; secure in the knowledge his prayers have been heard.
A much better, but drier account of the 1984 election is contained in the volume by Alan Frizzell and Anthony Westall. It is intended to be the first in a series on Canadian elections published by the Carleton University School of Journalism. They promise to be as informative and accurate as the At the Polls series published by the American Enterprise Institute under the editorship of Howard Penniman. Alas, this volume lacks the punch of the ’I was there’ Teddy White school of political reporting; academics too often feel they must sacrifice the drama of life and personality on the altar of objectivity.
After an introductory essay setting the stage it contains essays on each of the parties by proficient journalists. Jeff Simpson looks at the Liberals. For him, the ’vincible Liberals’ owed their downfall as much to the party’s disorganization and decay under Trudeau as to the most inept political campaign in recent history. ’The Buttery- Smooth Conservatives’ by Val Sears concludes that the Tories triumph can be largely attributed to their personification as the instrument of change for an electorate hungry for new leadership. To win, Mulroney had “to stick Turner with the Liberalism of patronage, staleness, general public bad temper and relatively bad times.” This he did well, while at the same time promising “jobs, jobs, jobs” ’. The NDP went into the election fearful of oblivion but survived quite handily, writes Nick Hills, because of the clever tactics of party secretary Gerry Caplan and the resiliency of the pragmatic Ed Broadbent.
In the final sections the authors examine the role of the media in the election and conclude that the Liberals and John Turner suffered much more at the pens of editorialists and reporters but that this reportage was fair and balanced – the Liberal Party campaign was disorganized and chaotic. As for the polls, the authors conclude that the Conservatives peaked about two weeks before the election and that after that their slight erosion benefited mostly the NDP. Was 1984 a Watershed election? Will the Liberals cease to be the Natural Ruling Party of Canada? Frizzell and Westall have no definitive answers but they hazard the guess that the Liberals may no longer be able to rely on traditional party loyalty in Quebec and that voting choice may now be more influenced by short-term considerations such as party image, policies and leadership. The Conservatives, for their part, have gained an opportunity to reestablish a sustaining national base that they have lacked since 1911.
Norman Snider is a freelance jounalist who has written for a number of Canadian magazines as well as the Globe and Mail. The Changing of the Guard takes as its starting point the January 1983 Conservative leadership review in Winnipeg where, with only marginal improvement on his 1981 Ottawa showing (66.4 per cent in 1981 versus 66.9 per cent in 1983 against a leadership review), Joe Clark called a leadership convention. Snider then follows the ensuing Tory leadership campaign through its twists and turns, the ’new Tories’ voters that included the busload of derelicts from the Old Brewery Mission and the nine year olds; a race that ended in a fourth ballot victory for Brian Mulroney that hot June 11, 1983. He traces the leadership battle between Jean Chrétien and John Turner that resulted from Pierre Trudeau’s Leap Year day walk in the snow. Snider follows the aftermath of the Turner victory on June
16, his accession to power on June 30 and election call on July 9 and then the campaign between he and Mulroney which culminated in the massive Tory victory on September 4 (PC-211, Lib.-40, NDP-30, Ind.-1). Snider’s neat style is coupled with an observant eye for detail and the peculiar. Thus we learn that while the Tories were fulfilling what political scientist George Perlin calls the Tory Syndrome – a bloodlust for luckless leaders — the cinema in the concrete cathedral that is the Winnipeg Convention and was their melancholy home for three frosty days, was playing a film about a transvestite named Tootsie. Snider likes Clark in spite of a walk “as awkward as a stork on stilts”, a “pouter pigeon’s chest” ege and the amous portionately sier wildly as he nods and shakes hands and nods again… No mere wimp, Joe Clark is Prince of Wimps, King of Mugwumps.” He argues that Clark was done in by what Dalton Camp called a “cashew coalition of nuts and extremists”, men like John Morrison, John Gamble, Carl Youngren and Paul Fromm, the sort of rednecks that in turn called Camp a “judas goat, a black angel and unchristian”. While admiring John Crosbie, Snider argues that he was fatally flawed by his lack of French and that for the English media, in particular, there is “nothing more sacred than Quebec and the French language”. It has become, Snider says, “the ceremonial language of power in Canada, in the same way that Latin was once the ceremonial language of the Roman Catholic Church. “ By equating French with Chinese or German, Crosbie doomed himself.
Mulroney puzzles Snider. So different from the traditional Conservative, at both conventions he has amassed a group of supporters that remind him of a big-city singles crowd: “highrise swingers in their twenties and thirties, for whom sexual variety is part of the good office-worker’s life, along with company paid vacations in the Caribbean, waterskiing and regular promotions. They like rock, good cars, lots of clothes, good restaurants and good sex.” Later, Mulroney was to benefit from his winner’s look as well as the secret lustings of frustrated traditional Tories who longed for the perks of power and a taste of the good life. At the same time, this purse-lipped crowd had found in Joe Clark a convenient scapegoat for all their rage at being deprived of power for so long.
John Turner comes across as a rather sad figure: a combination Tin Man, because he was so rusty, and Iceman because his views were from a bygone era. A stranger in a strange land, watching his campaign for leadership was, Snider says “breathtakingly close to science fiction”. His now familar phlegm-removal argh, led the media to dub him ’Throat Cancer’. His awkwardness, a Liberal party bankrupt in ideas, money and organization and a nation intent on change put an end to the long reign of the Liberal Party.
Snider relies heavily on political theorist Jim Laxer to explain the success of the Liberal party in the twentieth century. It was able, he argues, to referee the competing forces in which there was limited arable land, a harsh environment and vastly different regions. Domestically, the party kept a balance between English and French, business and labour, while holding to the center as the center shifted left. Externally, it kept the North Atlantic triangle in balance, using first the U.S. as a counterweight to British influence and later an internationalist approach relying on that legacy of the Empire, the Commonwealth as well as the United Nations as a counter to the pull south of the 49th parallel. The Conservatives, with their emphasis on Anglo-Saxon traditions, never convinced Canadians they were any more than the party of interregnum. Mulroney, with his working class Irish roots and his complete familiarity with Quebec, represented a major departure for the Tories. Among former leaders, Snider claims that Diefenbaker is the closest in style and background to Mulroney. Ironically, the appeal of Brian Mulroney is largely because he was so different from the average Conservative; in some ways he was the better heir of Trudeau than Turner: “compared with the arriviste dazzle of the Mulroneys, the Turners’ air was that of any well-established, fundamentally decent upper-middle-class couple. Unlike the Mulroneys, who clearly relished all the things that money could buy and the perks of high office, the Turners were clearly long accustomed to the comfortable, stolid life of the high bourgeoisie of Rockcliffe, Forest Hill and Westmount.”
Snider’s last chapter is titled after George Grant’s famous tract – Lament for a Nation. Dismissing as comic the adventures of former ministers Coates and Blais- Grenier, the baubles with tape cassettes and errant reporters by SSEA Clark, the mislaid documents and taped conversations involving Minister Wilson, Snider found less amusing the cutbacks to the CBC and Canada Council, and the effort to curb the sacred trust of universality. As bad as the Liberals were, Snider concludes that a New Gilded Age is at hand and that “it seemed Canadians had traded a bad government for one that was different, but little better; in some ways considerably worse.”
While Snider writes a good story, the gem in this quartet is Ron Graham’s One Eyed Kings. Graham’s skill as an observer and his talent as a wordsmith are felicitously combined to produce an almost gripping tale of Canadian politics in the first half of this decade. The book takes its title from an old Greek proverb meaning ’In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’ and used thereafter by such worthies as Erasmus, Frederick the Great and H.G. Wells. For Graham it aptly describes his view of our rulers and we who put them there. His portraits of our prime ministers, the cornerstones of his story, are titillating and impudent. A disciple of the Lytton Strachey school of biography, he takes obvious delight in dissecting our leaders. Voyeurs of the genre will find it a delicious treat — it rivals Christina McCall-Newman’s Grits and Jeff Simpson’s Discipline of Power as the best treatments of our recent politics.
As a journalist for the monthly Saturday Night during this period Graham had the time and the opportunity to observe these men and their governments (“Joe’s Legacy” Saturday Night, September 1983; “The Second Coming of John Turner”, Saturday Night, September, 1984). The transcripts of a piece on Jean Chrétien — “Is this Man the Next Prime Minister?” (Saturday Night, March 1981) formed the base for Straight from the Heart, the best-selling memoirs of our former SSEA. Graham’s own book owes much to these earlier profiles.
If there is a hero amongst these Prime Ministers, it is Pierre Elliot Trudeau. He overshadows all his successors. For most Canadians, he remains THE Prime Minister.
His 16 years as First Minister were only exceeded by Sir John A. MacDonald and Mackenzie King. For Graham, Trudeau is the contemporary father of Confederation and he compares him to Roosevelt in describing his effect on the country. Under Trudeau, the most direct threat to confederation since Joseph Howe sought secession for Nova Scotia, was arrested. His governments permanently altered the country in language, rights, regional sharing and government.
Graham is at his best in his character descriptions. He attributes Trudeau’s success to “his self-discipline … It lent him mystery, dignity, and an intimidating strength on which much of the public and most of his colleagues could place their hopes for the future, their fears in times of crisis, and almost any interpretation they chose. With the high cheekbones of an aboriginal shaman, the penetrating intellect of a Jesuit priest and the unpredictable behaviour of a Zen master, Trudeau seemed to require mystical explanations. His fans spoke of him as a savior or a sage; journalists called him a magus, magician, and a sorcerer in order to account for his capacity to confound, enchant, and survive; and his worst enemies concluded that he was the very Anti-Christ because the license plate of his Mercedes sports car was numbered 666, the sign of the Beast in Revelations.”
Trudeau, says Graham, is a nineteenth century liberal, cherishing the freedom of the individual, the decentralization of power, and democratic rights – the main principles of the Charter of Rights. As leader, he set the agenda and became the lightning rod for dissatisfaction. Reborn in 1980, he was determined to achieve national unity and that took precedence over good economics and good politics. The Canadian federation would be a model for states based on more than one ethnic or linguistic community.
Trudeau, Graham writes, sought to redress the balance of power in Canada, too much having slipped to the provinces, whose premiers lacked a sense of national vision. This was the motive underlying the National Energy Policy and the revision of the equalization and established program payments. It was not Canadianization or self-sufficiency, but rather an attempt to right the fiscal imbalance between the provinces and the federal government and give Ottawa a bigger say in those issues, like health, education, culture, transportation and energy, that mattered most to Canadians. In the end, however, Graham says the country needed a rest. As necessary as Trudeau may have been, his time had passed. And so he left, unmourned because of his arrogance and pugnacity, but respected for his strength and determination.
Joe Clark and John Turner receive rather curt treatment from Graham. It is not so much because he does not like them, rather his approach is one of sympathetic indifference for the two men who risk being remembered in the same breath as that other pair of forgettables: Sir John Abbott and Sir Charles Tupper.
Titled ’The Who’s Farewell Tour’, Graham starts the section on Canada’s 16th Prime Minister in like vein: “Joe Clark began the 1980’s in tears and things were going to get a lot worse before they got better”. (The section was written before the apparent media rehabilitation of our SSEA). Joe Clark is described by Graham as “what Canadians feared they were – earnest, nice, honest, predictable, and rather dull.” Juxtaposed beside Trudeau, who was “what Canadians wished to be – sauve, intellectual, and spontaneous” ’ this “fumbling, pompous reflection of themselves” fell short. Clark eventually fell victim to those who believed he would never be more than a “born loser, eternal wimp, condemned forever to be a figure of tragedy or fun”.
Growing up in small town Alberta, Graham says Clark developed a vision of Canada, not dissimilar to that of earlier Prime Ministers, in which the strength of the country depended on these small communities. This did not mean the Prime Minister was a headwaiter to the premiers and did not speak for Canada. Clark’s idea “community of communities” was misunderstood when described on the national stage and interpreted as caving in to the provinces and weakening the central government. It was the kind of Canada which permitted strong national government with strong representatives from the regions in the cabinet — like the days of King and Jimmy Gardiner. However, his short time as Prime Minister taught him about the greed of the provinces, the need and desire of most Canadians for strong central government and the growing weakness of the federal government to manage the economy.
Graham pays tribute to Clark the party-builder and praises his organizational skills in broadening the party’s base, forcing it to recognize, if not embrace, French Canada and liberalizing its policies beyond the confines of traditional Conservative narrowness. He singles out for special praise Clark’s role during the constitutional battles — virtually alone at first, he persuaded his caucus to stall the package and search for a less confrontational deal, and in time he won some concessions. In contrast, Graham says Mulroney bought it in five minutes and he cites Senator Lowell Murray (our new Minister for Federal Provincial Relations) as explaining that “Brian tends to be pretty simplistic when it comes to strategy. He goes for the big splash” and bought the constitutional deal because “he was so thrilled by the bravado of it all. That position would not have served us very well.”
Awkward, ungainly and funny-looking, Clark gains Graham’s sympathy and respect for his old-fashioned virtues of honesty and public spirit and good will. He compares Clark to the unheralded surveyors who methodically charted the west. Clark, he says, “looked as valiant and foolish as the small-town boys who had strutted whistling to their deaths in the mud of Europe for their own vague and noble principles, a brave little soldier to the end, just an ordinary Canadian.”
John Turner tries harder. At everything he has done, Graham says the 17th Prime Minister has always tried to measure up to the ambitions he, his mother and the mother church have set for him. But beneath what Graham calls his “classic beauty, his falcon stare, his stern voice, his athletic postures, his tailored suits, his preppy family, his important connections, and his record of achievement” there lay an uptight, highly-strung individual who since childhood had had the need to succeed driven into his soul. Stumbling into the leadership campaign the Crown Prince of the Liberal party was considerably more rusty than legend would have it. His waffling on French language rights was unacceptable in French Canada and won him no support among anglophones who had long since made their peace with the new realities. The ’boys in the press corps’ were no longer pals or male, and his mano-a-mano style was as out of style as his tactile bum-patting. The cue-cards were mocked; while he was photogenic when captured with the still lense, on television his sweating brow and throat-clearing ’arghhh’ did not in still confidence. The first English debate where his weak defence of the Trudeau-induced patronage appointments permitted Mulroney to completely skewer him.
If Trudeau is the book’s hero, Brian Mulroney is the villain, “an Irish Duddy Kravitz… who had climbed his way to a stone mansion on the top of Westmount by hustle, street smarts, blarney and self-made luck.” His smooth patter is compared to that of a well-heeled vacuum-cleaner salesman. But beneath the fancy orations, twinkly eyes and baritone sincerity, lay a darker side, that of an icy, mean-spirited, cynical politician full of “cool plottings, nervous insecurity, fits of rage, and vows of vengeance.” Hardly kind words about a man whose sensitivity to criticism is well reported. Small wonder that Graham reports Mulroney spending a portion of a dinner party at Stornaway ranting and swearing, “His (Graham’s) time will come!” (In the postscript at the end of the book, Graham relents somewhat and admits that he has underestimated Mulroney. He evaluation.)
For Graham, Mulroney’s essential flaw is his untrustworthiness. While his wild exaggerations are a part of his exuberant charm, Graham says that too often they leave beind “a trail of suspicion, contradiction, and broken promises. It wasn’t that Mulroney lied. He said everything with heart-felt, oozing sincerity; he really believed what he said as he said it; but in another room a moment later, he could say the opposite with the same heart-felt, oozing sincerity, the same real belief.”
Winning the election, claims Graham, was owed less to Mulroney than to the rustiness of John Turner and the decayed Liberal machine, the overwhelming popular clamour for change, and the disciplined and highly efficient Conservative election organization. Graham has special praise for the skill of the former President of Camp Associates Advertising Ltd., Norman Atkins. A man who, in Graham’s phrase, “manoeuvered about a notoriously brutal world” yet “exuded sheepishness, had a grin as wide and heart-warming as a Halloween pumpkin’s and usually sounded both woeful and vulnerable. Heavy, ill at ease, with a face as big as a harvest moon and a grace to his step that showed why the former high school quarterback was still a terror on the tennis courts, he looked enough like Al Waxman that one wondered if the King of Kensington hadn’t wandered onto the set of Quentin Durgens MP.”
While the press was concentrating on the Liberal party succession throughout the spring of 1984, Atkins took Mulroney on the road, away from prying eyes of the national media, and made him into the Candidate by introducing him to flattering make-up, convincing him to quit smoking and putting a check on the hyperbole. His every move was carefully scripted, when Mulroney let slip his infamous “no whore like an old whore” crack about our former ambassador designate to Portugal, Bryce Mackasey, he ordered contrition and a public apology. When it was over, and the Conservatives had won their record majority, Atkins got his reward. First, a major share of the government’s tourism advertising, worth about $24 million and in July 1986 a summons to the Red Chamber, the ultimate reward for the backroom pol. Atkins was recently named Chairman of the Tory election preparation organization.
Graham is not impressed with Mulroney as Prime Minister. He wonders about the effect on the middle and working classes of raising taxes and cutting back social benefits while maintaining and extending corporate tax concessions. The Wilson budgets have not addressed this problem (although tax reform unveiled in July 1986 should alter the difference between corporate and individual tax rates); as Graham points out the well-to-do have a half million dollar capital gains exemption, the oil industry got about $2.5 billion with the introduction of the Western Accord and there is still no minimum tax. Graham condemns the subsidies extended to Domtar and Hyundai and laments as waste the money lost in the CCB and Northlands Bank bailouts. He doubts the wisdom of the tax man’s pursuit of delinquent Newfoundland fishermen, while at the same time granting the Reichmanns a half billion dollar tax break in the Gulf purchase, and selling de Havilland to Boeing in a “bargain-basement sale”
The bow to Reagan’s America leaves Graham cold. He is doubtful about the real rewards of dismantling FIRA and the NEP as well as generally giving the Americans “the benefit of the doubt”. Detailing Mulroney’s Saul-like conversion on free trade, Graham recounts how in the 1983 leadership campaign Mulroney called on his experience as the then President of an American branch plant who shut down a plant in Schefferville to attack John Crosbie’s advocacy of the scheme, saying, “This country could not survive with a policy of unfettered free trade. We’d be swamped. We have in many ways a branch-plant economy in certain sectors. All that would happen with that kind of concept would be the boys cranking up their plants throughout the United States in bad times and shutting their entire branch plants in Canada. It’s bad enought as it is.” Graham says Mulroney came to change his mind after conversations with the investment community, former U.S. ambassador Paul Robinson, Peter Lougheed, senior advisors and bureaucrats. Graham is doubtful of the success of the scheme saying that even if he can manage a deal by 1987 and then take it to the people over the heads of the premiers, he lacks the advantage Trudeau had with the constitution: there is no consensus that the goal is either beneficial or desirable. For Graham, the outrage of the shoe industry when the Tories lifted the import quotas on certain shoes in November 1985 is a taste of things
National reconciliation was a centerpiece of the Mulroney campaign but Graham fears that too much compromise to provincial interests will damage confederation. In the field of foreign policy, Graham argues that submitting to the demands of the provincial premiers for ’full participation’ in the trade negotiations is dumb politics and risks the exclusive federal control in international affairs. In the same way, he is concerned by the Mulroney deal to permit Quebec a seat at the Francophone summits. Admitting that giving New Brunswick equal status was clever, Graham worries that it set a doubtful precedent for the trade negotiations and all future international negotiations, like the GATT, which involve a modicum of provincial interest. On the domestic front, Graham is similarly concerned about the long term effects of bowing to provincial claims on resources, whether offshore Newfoundland or in the West. He points out that the ink was barely dry on the Atlantic Accord when Newfoundland’s Brian Peckford was demanding more concessions from Ottawa on regional development and the fisheries. Paying danegeld rarely works and Graham feels Mulroney is learning, to his chagrin, as did Clark before him, that the provinces are a greedy lot. And by saying that the provinces can do a better job at regional development or that aircraft companies were better in the hands of American multinationals Graham thinks Mulroney is subtly undermining his own image as leader of a strong, central government.
The PMO has always been subject to criticism but this was usually offset by recognition as to its effectiveness and the intelligence of its operatives. Graham caustically argues that despite its massive increases in budget and numbers, Mulroney places a higher premium on cronyism than talent because they were the ones that “had propped him up during the dark times; they understood and tolerated his tantrums and his petty vengeances; and they flattered him with their devotion. Together they were bound by the sense of being underrated outsiders who trusted and respected each other more than anyone else.” He notes the Big Blue Machine was kept out during the first two years (the appointment of Atkins to the Senate and Dalton Camp to the PCO would indicate this is changing). The danger of this attitude, warns Graham, is the creation of a bunker mentality where if you are not seen as on-side, your loyalty is suspect.
In what could almost be a political obituary Graham offers a final critique of Mulroney: “Flying rather erratically by his political instincts and trying to keep in the centre by swooping back and forth and from left to right, he confused and annoyed his ministers, his bureaucrats, and the people of Canada. His improvised inconsistency, his mercurial emotions, his obsession with fighting the last election and then the next one, and his suspicion of ideas seemed to confirm the impression that he had no purpose for power except to keep it”.
In concluding, Graham offers the Prime Minister some advice: “develop a thicker skin, a taste for wielding a sword in public, and a more coherent vision for the sake of the country as well as his own good. Reacting to every challenge with ad hoc policies, quick surrenders, and oversensitive emotions might steal ground from the opposition and buy temporary peace, but it would do little for the structural flaws that every analysis agreed were sending Canada into a gradual decline or impending crisis.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1986) — Fall 1986 // Automne 1986, pp. 18–24. Read the rest of this issue →
