Hell or High Water Read online

  To Sheila

  Contents

  ONE An Ordinary Childhood

  TWO Young Man and the Sea

  THREE Down to Work

  FOUR My Own Boss

  FIVE Drawn to the Flame

  SIX Run for the Top

  SEVEN Opposition

  EIGHT “Good Morning, Minister”

  NINE Three and a Half Months

  TEN The Big Budget I

  ELEVEN The Big Budget II

  TWELVE Time … and Generations

  THIRTEEN Tipping the Balance

  FOURTEEN Into the Virtuous Circle

  FIFTEEN Taking on the World

  SIXTEEN Getting Quit

  SEVENTEEN The Next Level

  EIGHTEEN Taking the Reins

  NINETEEN Sponsorship

  TWENTY Taking the Lead

  TWENTY-ONE Sharing the Wealth

  TWENTY-TWO Green and White

  TWENTY-THREE Into Africa

  TWENTY-FOUR Acts of God and Humankind

  TWENTY-FIVE From Gleneagles to Hong Kong

  TWENTY-SIX Friends and Traders

  TWENTY-SEVEN Tough Calls

  TWENTY-EIGHT To Govern Is to Choose

  TWENTY-NINE Keeping Faith

  THIRTY Flying in Turbulence

  THIRTY-ONE Last Election

  THIRTY-TWO Fast Forward

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  An Ordinary Childhood

  My mother was born Eleanor Alice Adams in the village of McGregor about ten miles southeast of Windsor, Ontario. There were fewer than fifty people in McGregor, which was not much more than the place where the highway crossed the railway tracks. There were a couple of dozen houses, a church, and a general store that belonged to my grandparents.

  I guess McGregor was too small to be fussy about social distinctions, because my mother was the product of what in those days they called a “mixed marriage.” Her mother, Amelia, had been born a McManamy, from Irish-Catholic stock. Her father, Edgar, was a Protestant. Now, Edgar was a wonderful man, but it was Amelia who was the dynamo in the family. At some point before the Depression, she moved the family business to Windsor, where she established a small pharmacy and eventually a second. With hard work and determination, my grandmother managed to lift the Adams family out of poverty and give it a tenuous grip on the middle class, which somehow survived the 1930s. In time she was able to buy a farm near McGregor and a cottage in the village of Colchester, which is where I spent my summers as a child and is the place I still remember as my childhood home.

  The cottage was shared by my mother and my Aunt Mame and their families. It was not a grand place at all. I still remember when the outhouse was replaced with indoor plumbing. Originally, there was just one big bedroom upstairs, which was later divided in two. An addition downstairs created another bedroom. Church benches once belonging to a great-uncle who had been a Methodist circuit rider sat in the living room, a constant reminder of the Protestant side of the family. We had an icebox, and I remember Clyde Scott, who brought the ice wagon around to refill it. All my life I have referred to the refrigerator as the icebox, and long before the age of Google and the BlackBerry, my sons would look at me and say, “My god, what century are you from?”

  Behind the cottage was a potato patch my Uncle Vince had ploughed under and rolled by hand to create a makeshift tennis court soon after the cottage was built in the 1920s. This was not a fancy clay court; when it rained, it turned to mud, and it was my job to take the hand roller and restore the court to playable condition and mark out the lines again with lime.

  The cottage was on a street perpendicular to the main road, on the other side of which was a field we called “the park,” running to the cliff overlooking Lake Erie. During the day, the calm waters lapped at the shore, as the giant lake freighters passed five or six miles off in the shipping channel. By night, there were often huge winds and lightning storms the likes of which I’ve never seen again. For me, it was a magical place. Many years later, I took Sheila back there and asked her to marry me.

  During my childhood, there was no beach. In fact, high water was causing cliff erosion. My mother used to tell us that when she was a young girl, they could go through the park and down some stairs to a beach and walk along the sand and rock about a quarter-mile to the Colchester dock, which seemed miraculous to me. Later, when I was at Canada Steamship Lines (CSL), and I happened to be in the area, I looked out and saw to my astonishment that the beach had reappeared, recreating the fabled scene from my mother’s childhood. One of the captains at CSL said that the low water was unprecedented, and I told him that no, actually, this was untrue; it is a cycle that recurs every three or four decades. He challenged me, and we went back and checked the records, and sure enough I was right.

  Besides me and my sister, Mary Anne, who was born when I was five, there was a large cast of cousins who populated the cottage and with whom we grew up almost as a single family. Mame’s son, Michael, was a few years older than I was, and I still regard him as a brother. My Uncle Vince’s daughters — Jane, Ann, Pat, and Amy — were fixtures at Colchester as well. My mother was often the main parental presence at the cottage because Dad was usually away in Ottawa, Aunt Mame had inherited responsibility for the drugstores, and Uncle Vince ran the farm. Even back then, farming was a precarious profession, so Vince also worked as a shipper at Chrysler, while his brother, my Uncle Clare, worked at Ford and sold eggs on the side.

  Many people assume that because my father was a cabinet minister, my early life was saturated in politics and cosseted by privilege — far from it. Throughout my childhood, for Mary Anne and me our mother was the dominating presence in our lives. Even after we moved to Ottawa and started school, she was the constant presence that made our childhoods ordinary in the best sense, protected from the crosswinds of politics and from the temptation to think we were something special just because we had slid down the banisters in the Parliament Buildings. She was in so many ways the free-spirited complement to my dad’s buttoned-down world of achievement and ambition. She had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music, and it was she who gathered the family around the piano in Colchester, accompanied by my Uncle Clare on violin, while Mary Anne and my cousins drowned out my own reedy voice in a sing-song of Stephen Foster tunes. And it was the fear of her wrath that set me on a short-lived attempt to run away from Colchester to China after hitting Roseanne Cole on the arm with a stone and making her cry. It was my mother’s presence that created the glow of good fortune around my childhood that I still feel today.

  My mother was the more easygoing of my parents, and the one many people said I took after. My sister, Mary Anne, was deeper than I was, more sensitive, more introspective, then as now. She took after Dad, which meant that on those occasions when he was around and playing his walk-on part as family disciplinarian, there were bound to be clashes.

  Our neighbours in Colchester were not politicians or public servants, as they might have been in Ottawa. This was the age when a working man at an American auto plant could afford a summer home. Many of the people on our street were autoworkers or other working people from Windsor and Detroit. The cottages were jammed close together, and when the Detroit Tigers were playing, the game would be on everyone’s radio. You could walk right down the street without missing a pitch.

  Our American neighbours seemed wealthy by Canadian standards, and it was through their eyes that I had my introduction to the American way of life — not only the prosperity but also some of the social conflicts. These were the families that felt squeezed at work and in their Detroit neighbourhoods by the great Afro-American migration from the South to the industrial heartland, and as a result they sometimes gave vent to racial attitude
s that were foreign to us. It was those rising tensions that eventually led Detroit to explode — like many other American cities — in racial violence during the 1960s. In my high school and college years, I marched for civil rights in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan, often alongside the sons and daughters of our Colchester neighbours who did not share their parents’ views. Once, I attended a rally where Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke — though he was just a tiny figure in the distance from where I stood, the crowd was so large. More frequently, I marched with small groups of a hundred or two hundred through working-class suburbs such as Flint and Lansing, where we were often outnumbered by angry crowds flinging racist catcalls — and worse — our way.

  My father, as I have said, was often away, and as a result, I have been asked many times how it was that we came to be so close. The answer is that it is not always the quantity but the quality of the time you spend together that binds son to father and father to son. When he was in Colchester, Dad and I would often go off into Lake Erie, or to Lake St. Clair, and laze away hours together with nothing more to disturb us than the nibbling fish. When Dad put down his fishing rod and went back to business, I was usually delighted to go along for the ride.

  Sunday, for example, was seldom a day of rest in the home of Paul Martin, Member of Parliament for Essex East. No, Sunday was a day for meeting and greeting constituents. The area around Windsor, with its booming auto industry, was a magnet for workers of every background: Croatian, Italian, Polish, Serbian, German, Estonian, and Lithuanian. Many were European refugees who had arrived after 1945. One of the first things they did upon settling was to form churches, and, luckily for my father, many of those were Catholic. Add that to the French-Canadian population in the area, which was also quite large, and my father had a wealth of choice when deciding where to attend Mass on a Sunday morning. One week it would be St. Anne’s in Windsor, the next week Annunciation in Stoney Point, and so on throughout the riding, as we distributed our public prayers as broadly as possible.

  For me, these summer Sundays were a chance to spend time with my dad. In the winter, in Ottawa, where we moved when I was eight, I was busy with school and he was busy with parliamentary and government business. In those days, the House of Commons often sat in the evening, and MPs had to remain within the sound of the division bells in case there was a vote. On weekends, my father usually took the long train ride down to Windsor, leaving me, Mary Anne, and my mother behind in Ottawa while he tended to his constituency. And since my father was also a minister in the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King, and later of Louis St. Laurent, he often had to travel across the country and abroad.

  But a Sunday in the summer — that was special. My father was not a formal man, but there were certain expectations of an MP in those days. So, even in the sweltering summer heat around Windsor, he wore a suit and tie, and donned a hat — a Homburg, I think. He and I got into the large grey Buick with running boards that jutted out beneath the car doors and headed out on the road. My father was a terrible driver, because the driving was less important than spying a familiar constituent by the roadside and waving. Or picking up a hitchhiker, and engaging him in a discussion, not so much about politics as about who the fellow was and to whom he was related. Adding to the danger was his deep and abiding belief that you should look at someone when you talked to them. This habit was even more alarming than his passengers realized, since it was not obvious to everyone that he had sight only in one eye. When he looked politely at his passenger, the responsibility for avoiding collisions had really defaulted to others using the road.

  In those days, the Catholic Mass was in Latin, so the service was quite familiar whatever the ethnic association of the church. The sermon might sometimes be in a language I did not understand, though I do not remember that being a cause of great sorrow to me. The only complaint I had was about some of the Eastern European churches, whose services seemed to go on and on; I thought Dad should pick churches with shorter Masses. After the Mass, Dad would join the priest in greeting the parishioners as they filed out.

  My father was a voracious reader, mostly philosophy, history, and biography; but he was also extremely sociable — an unusual combination. He was outgoing and loved being with people, but his meanderings around the constituency were also motivated by political necessity. Essex East was extremely diverse and by no means a safe Liberal seat. He won it from a Conservative, and although it remained in Liberal hands for several decades after he retired, it eventually passed to the New Democratic Party (NDP). Thus, political uncertainty made him one of the first MPs to develop sophisticated riding organizations, getting letters of congratulations out to newlyweds and notes of condolence to the bereaved. Not everyone in his era did these things, but he felt it was necessary. He often said that without the support of the people of Essex East, he would never have had the opportunity to play on the national and the world stage, and he never took that for granted. In his travels around the country and the world, he became famous for asking: “Is there anyone here from Windsor?” He loved it, but he had no choice.

  In that way, I later realized, I was like my dad: I often had to push myself to get up and go to the many social occasions that politics demands, but once I got there I almost always enjoyed it. Being with your constituents is the greatest tonic against the cynicism that sometimes infects the common portrayal of politicians. Most people really do appreciate the work of those they elect. Folks would come up and say, “Oh, it’s so good to see you!” They didn’t know what you had been doing, but they knew you had been working for them. My dad took huge strength from this, as I did later on.

  My father was legendary for his ability to recollect the names of constituents, which arose out of his affection for people. But everyone’s memory has its limits, and no one can recall sixty thousand names. So he developed some tricks to get around the awkward moments. “Paul, you remember our friend,” he would say, which by so obviously dumbfounding me would usually provoke the constituent to introduce himself, saving the occasion for all concerned — except me, of course. From time to time, Dad also suffered one of those embarrassing encounters that afflict all political figures, when they approach someone who hasn’t the faintest idea who the great person is. He had a trick for this situation too. “Well, Paul,” he would say, “I think we should go now, don’t you, Mr. Martin?” I often wondered whether that wasn’t the reason I was named after him.

  After church, there was usually a picnic or a summer fair to attend. We’d head off in the car to one of the nearby villages — St. Joachim, Stoney Point, or Belle River. It was no imposition to be taken to a country fair. Much of the time, I was expected to hang around close to my father, though I could also sneak away for a while to watch a horse-pull or a ploughing match. Every politician will tell you that one of the challenges of political life is that while there are very few occasions for exercise, there are many, many opportunities to eat. My father faced an internal struggle at practically every social event, at which there were tables of fresh-baked treats hot from the kitchens of the local ladies.

  As we left one event, my father would ask directions to whatever was the next. This was another opportunity to talk with a constituent, but it did not, so far as I could see, involve an actual exchange of information. Back in the car, we would launch off once again into the unknown, exploring obscure nooks and crannies of the riding not because of my father’s desire to track down even the most remote voter but because even after decades of plying the roads of Essex East, he still had no idea where most of them led.

  Later in my life, people often said to me: “You grew up in such a political family; you must have understood all about politics.” But that wasn’t the way it was. A doctor’s child doesn’t necessarily know all about medicine just because he accompanies his father on hospital rounds. My only political involvement as a child was touring around the riding with my dad. I wasn’t interested in politics; I was interested in being with him. And if I was p
laying baseball when he set out, well, I would stay and play baseball, like any kid would. As I grew a little older, politics began to have a different significance in my life. Most parents have their own ways of keeping their kids in line. In my house, it was: “If you get in trouble, it is going to be in the headlines in the Windsor Star and your father’s going to lose the next election.” Unfortunately, there would be a couple of occasions when I would test this proposition.

  Politics also impinged on my childhood in that I was forever being told by my father before meeting someone new: “You’re about to meet a great man; this is someone who has done great things.” And paradoxically, as a result I have never been much impressed with important people. There were so many of them in my childhood, and to tell the truth, not all of them lived up to their advance billings, certainly not in the eyes of a kid.

  One occasion when this attitude of mine surfaced later became part of family lore. When I was about sixteen years old, my father took me to the opening of the new post office in Belle River. Dad had worked hard to get the post office, and so there were a lot of speeches about how important this building was — the greatest human achievement since St. Peter’s in Rome, it was generally agreed. And for this, my father’s praises were properly sung. A day or two later, I went with him to New York, to the United Nations, where he had been instrumental in the first breakthrough in the admission of new member-nations. There had been a rapid increase in the number of countries in the world after the Second World War as the former European colonies gained statehood. However, their entry into the United Nations was often blocked by one or the other of the great powers — principally the United States and the Soviet Union — who did not want to see the voting balance in the General Assembly tilted one way or another. For the new member-states ushered into the world assembly in considerable part through my father’s efforts, it was a great day. I sat with the Canadian delegation and heard my father praised by country after country in speeches from the podium. When it was all over, someone asked me what I thought of all these people saying what a great man Dad was, to which I was heard to reply: “Well, it wasn’t bad, but the speeches were better in Belle River.”