bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, p. 44
WHICH REMINDS ME … A MEMOIR by Mitchell
Sharp. University of Toronto Press, 1993.
$35.00.
In Canada, there are three basic types of political/bureaucratic memoirs. The first is a pastiche of self-serving vignettes dictated into a tape recorder and carefully stitched together into a readable but not very informative whole by a professional writer. Most have a short shelf life before passing quickly into well-deserved obscurity.
The second is the work of individuals who themselves have strong analytical and writing skills and who manage to put together a story that not only affords a look at the inside machinations of government and politics but also a credible, even compelling analysis of why and to what purpose. There are fewer of these. The first volume of Mike, Lester Pearson’s memoirs, springs to mind as does Radical Mandarin by Escott Reid. Both were a pleasure to read, satisfied both the historian and public policy analyst in me, and left a lasting impression.
The third kind falls somewhere in between. They are the efforts of politicians or senior officials with a clear gift for writing and analysis but a reluctance to make full use of their critical faculties and power to observe. Dana Wilgress’s Memoirs and Arnold Heeney’s The things that are Caesar’s: Memoirs of a Canadian public servant fall into this category. In both cases, it seemed that the authors never forgot their mothers’ dictum that if they could not say anything nice about someone, it was better not to say anything at all. While an admirable piece of advice for growing up with the right social graces, it is hardly an appropriate point of departure for the memoirist.
Mitchell Sharp’s Which Reminds Me … reminded me as much of Heeney’s as of Pearson’s memoirs. Like Pearson, Sharp writes well and has thought things through to the point that he has developed an intellectually satisfying account of events. Unlike Pearson and more like Heeney, however, he is reluctant to follow through and explore some of the less obvious aspects of the story and thus add to our understanding of the complexity of public policy. As the book makes clear, Sharp’s career provides a wonderful backdrop for a penetrating account of the many changes and challenges Canada faced during the last fifty years. It is not everyone who had the opportunity to participate in the establishment of so many critical national and international institutions and policies, from trade policy through tax and social welfare reforms. Sharp was unique in being able to bring the insight and experience of both a senior mandarin and a successful businessman to the task of governing Canada. The opportunity to contribute to our understanding of this era, however, is not as fully realized as it might have been. As a result, I learned less than I had hoped. Historians will mine it for corroborating footnotes but few will change their interpretations or accounts of Canada’s postwar political or economic history.
In his Foreword, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien suggests that “upon finishing the book, the reader will understand that Mitchell Sharp, uniquely among politicians, possessed remarkable integrity, competence, sincerity, and modesty.” No doubt, but that is not the reason most people read memoirs. Instead they are looking for insight as to why things happened, how the memoirist made a difference in how they happened, and how the past has influenced the world in which we find ourselves today. That kind of insight is in disappointingly short supply in Which Reminds Me….
The short essay on the role of senior mandarins which brings his account of his first Ottawa career to a close provides a good example. It is an excellent essay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Sharp suggests that the relationship between ministers and senior officials was more congenial and productive in the 1950s and 1960s than today, but stops there. I would like him to have gone on a little further and explored why. After all, there is a whole historiography of Canada based on the theory that relations between mandarins and ministers during that period were altogether too cozy while another school of thought laments the politicization of the public service in the 1980s. Sharp could have contributed to that debate but chose not to.
Another instance where sincerity and modesty get in the way of candour and setting the record straight is the reasons for his abrupt departure from the public service in 1958. John Diefenbaker, in his own memoirs, asserts that Sharp resigned after being confronted over an indiscretion related to Diefenbaker’s curious effort to introduce the third option fifteen years before it became Sharp’s own rallying cry. Diefenbaker’s memoirs are notorious for their self-serving inaccuracies and Sharp’s own account — a combination of disagreement in principle with some of the policies of the new government, personality clashes and the offer of a good prospect in the private sector — rings much more truthfully. Missing, however, is any reference to Diefenbaker’s accusation.
Which Reminds Me … will not suffer the fate of most political memoirs. It will be read and it will stay on the shelves of many libraries, private and public. It deserves to be. It is well written and provides some useful background and information on public policy in Canada. But it will always be read with a certain sense of disappointment. It could have been so much more. A life as full and usefully lived as that of Mitchell Sharp cannot be fairly summarized in 270 pages. I’m glad he tried, but I wish he would try some more.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, p. 44. Read the rest of this issue →
