Books in Canada
NO HOLDS BARRED
My Life in Politics
by John C. Crosbie
with Geoffrey Stevens
McClelland and Stewart,
ISBN 0-7710-2427-4
John Crosbie is the Mulroney cabinet minister held in the highest
regard by both the general public and journalists. He is the only one,
with the exceptions of the egregious Kim Campbell, and Erik Nielsen, who
resigned in 1986, to have published memoirs. His book makes agreeable
reading, but it contains few revelations and will be a minor
contribution to Canadian political history. Its main interest is the story of an unusual political career.
Crosbie's
entry into politics was effortless. He was easily elected Deputy Mayor
of St. John's in the fall of 1965 but only seven months later, when he
was 36, Joey Smallwood simply appointed him to his cabinet and
practically appointed him to the Newfoundland House of Assembly. Not
for him the years of going to mind numbing meetings and working in
campaigns and trying to make connections from which most politicians
emerge and which leave them too intellectually stunted to make any
contribution to government. Politics was government to Crosbie and as a
young lawyer in St. John's and a Crosbie he could enter government in
Newfoundland at the top. He plays down the wealth of the Crosbies, who
certainly had their financial reverses, but they were Newfoundland's
most prominent business family and had been active in politics since
the days of his grandfather, who had been Newfoundland's Minister of Finance from 1924 to 1928.
Crosbie was an outstanding
student at Queen's University and Dalhousie University Law School and
won a Viscount Bennett Fellowship to study at the London School of
Economics. Unfortunately he was to study law at LSE and gave it up
after Christmas because "They weren't really teaching me anything new
or different...". If he had returned to his undergraduate interest in
politics and economics at LSE he might have learned to think more
deeply and critically about those subjects to the benefit of his
politics and his book.
Crosbie's father had warned him against
getting involved with Joey Smallwood. Crosbie's two years under the
madcap, corrupt, petty tyrant he depicts were frustrating but they
launched him on his political career and enabled to him to make
important contributions to the reform of Newfoundland government.
Resigning with Clyde Wells over Smallwood's eagerness to pour
government money into John Shaheen's doomed Come by Chance oil
refinery, he sought the Liberal leadership but was frustrated again by Smallwood's trickery and corrupt domination of the party. He sat as
an Independent Liberal until June of 1971 when he joined Frank
Moores' Tories, serving four years in his government before his
election to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1976.
In
helping to clear up the mess left by Smallwood and bring in long
overdue reforms Crosbie was able to do the good work in government that
he entered politics to do. In his first taste of power in Ottawa, as
Joe Clark's Minister of Finance, Crosbie was frustrated by politics.
The budget that he presented in December 1979, and which led to the
government's defeat, was a worthy effort to address Canada's growing
financial problems so far as Clark's stupid raft of election promises
permitted. In contrast to Crosbie, Clark, who had beavered away at
politics from his early teens, had no idea what government was about.
Policy was for Clark just another kind of political equipment like
buttons and posters and a campaign bus. Crosbie is scathing about
Clark's promises but admits to sharing his inept political judgment
that they should govern as if they had a majority and that the Liberals
would not risk an election. Thus he must share a small part of the
blame for Trudeau's disastrous last government.
Crosbie's
account of his nine year in Mulroney's government is superficial. He
gives little sense of how he worked and what difference he was able to
make. He recounts his difficulties with Mulroney's underlings. He had
none with Mulroney himself. He complains that twenty-five to thirty
hours of cabinet or committee meetings every week left little time "to
think or act intelligently on issues...". His account of his
activity in his four successive portfolios seems to confirm this.
His
most important work was as Minister of International Trade in piloting
free trade legislation through Parliament and speaking up for it and
initiating negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement,
but his account of this is simply a series of anecdotes. Whether he can
take as much credit as he claims for the establishment of the World
Trade Organisation history will tell, but it was a worthwhile Canadian
initiative.
As Minister of Justice Crosbie presided over the
kind of supposed progressive reforms that seem to happen regardless of
politics and he takes pride in them and the number of bills that he got
passed as proof that on "social and human issues" he is an "intelligent
liberal". But his account of his work shows no great thought or
awareness of the contradictions in his positions. The review of all
existing legislation lest it might conflict with what it was imagined
the Supreme Court of Canada would make of Section 15, the equality
section, of the Charter was basically a technical job. It amounted to
making parliament subject to academic theories of equality that are
always abstract and dogmatic but not always coherent. It would have
been better simply to wait for legislation to be challenged and defend
it before the courts, unless, without speculating as to what the courts
might do, it was simply thought to be bad legislation. Crosbie was gung
ho for expanding the powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission to
cover alleged cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation and for women in combat roles in the armed forces and most
other correct causes. On the other hand he introduced precise
anti-pornography legislation that would have been made mincemeat of by
the courts if it had not died on the order paper after the usual outcry
from arts groups, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women
and others.
Crosbie finally says that he is a Newfoundlander
first and he unashamedly fought for Newfoundland's interests in Ottawa.
But he does not seem to see any future for Newfoundland beyond
its
dependency on money from Ottawa: equalisation payments for the
Newfoundland government and Employment Insurance scamming for its
people, and the kind of big projects that obsessed Smallwood. He calls
the development of the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland his proudest
accomplishment in politics. He devotes a chapter to it and his two
successful efforts to save it. He is contemptuous of his critics but he
does not explain what exactly Ottawa's role was or why it should have
had any role in financing the project.
Though Crosbie's
manuscript was cut to a fraction of its original length with the help
of the distinguished political journalist Geoffrey Stevens and the book
is easy reading, it is still too long without managing to get into
enough detail to come to grips with many of the issues Crosbie faced.
Incidents and arguments are repeated and trivia, like a trade mission
to Boston are recounted. The early chapters of the book setting out his
family background and his struggles with Smallwood are the best. The
book is as much reflections as memoirs but these, while thoughtful, are
too casual to be persuasive.
Many of his digressions concern the
difficulty of intelligently addressing public issues in the face of
political correctness and public suspicion of politicians encouraged by
the media. From time to time he launches a tirade against media bias
and the wilful gullibility of the public. His observations are not
altogether unfair, but these are problems that must be faced up to. It
does no good to dismiss them with humourous abuse, calling journalism a
"grubby little craft". Crosbie has no answer to these problems. The
only answer is to show leadership, as Crosbie did to the extent his
positions permitted. He earned respect for it. Many politicians have
contributed to public suspicion by their unprincipled conduct. Crosbie
could say something about this, but he is too genial to draw sharp and
insightful portraits. Even Smallwood is finally proclaimed " a great
Newfoundland patriot". He is far too generous to Joe Clark and claims
to like and admire Trudeau, whom he voted for in the 1968 Liberal
leadership convention.
Crosbie is most fondly remembered for his
humorous sallies in the Commons and on the hustings. He retails many of
these, but however successful they were when launched and however well
they filled the need for media sound bites and served Crosbie and his
party they mostly seem pretty lame in cold print. Crosbie complains
that he was a victim of political correctness when his jokes were
denounced as sexist and that the media stereotyped him as a buffoon.
But he consciously developed his public speaking style to overcome a
native shyness. It worked very well for him and he obviously enjoyed
it. The uproar from feminists never did him much harm and if he was not
always taken completely seriously, he had no one but himself to blame.
Twice
in the book Crosbie calls the Liberals "brothel keepers". Colourful as
the phrase is, coming from someone who was a Liberal until he was 41
and sought the leadership of a provincial Liberal party, it does not
convey a serious contempt earned from a lifetime's experience. Crosbie
calls Trudeau a "worthy adversary'' and Sheila Copps a "worthy
antagonist". Whether they conceived as high a regard for him, future
memoirs will show, but for Crosbie his exchanges with two people he
should regard as particularly vicious and responsible for great damage
to the country seem not to have been much more than a jolly game.
Crosbie
would have won the 1983 Tory leadership convention if he had been able
to speak French and most likely would have become Prime Minister. At
the end of the book he reflects on "the importance of being number
one". A Crosbie government would undoubtedly have made a difference.
Good political leadership is so scarce in Canada that the frustration
of Crosbie's ambition must count as a serious loss. As this book shows,
when someone of Crosbie's intelligence, talent and disinterestedness
makes his way into politics but not to the top, there can be
disappointingly little to show for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment