Oliver's Twist (13 page)

According to Kenny, Trudeau was serene and graceful in defeat, telling his devastated staff that the sun would rise the next day and “we will enjoy our lives.” After handing in his resignation to the Governor General a few days later, he hopped into his open 190 SL Mercedes convertible, threw his arms up, and shouted, “Free at last, free at last,” stealing a line from Martin
Luther King. In private, however, he seemed lost and even lonely. He buoyed himself by maintaining the conviction that he would be back in office. To most observers, this seemed a delusion. In a capital obsessed with power, the conventional wisdom was that his time was over.

Many Liberals who once would have begged to touch the hem of Trudeau's coat now were writing him off. Some felt safe in letting old complaints and grievances about him surface. No doubt he felt the hurt of the long fall from power, but he tried not to show it. When I had dinner with him after he'd moved into Stornoway, the Opposition leader's residence, I found the tables stocked with the house matchboxes from 24 Sussex Drive. He said he had brought them with him to save the Treasury money when he moved back. It was clear to me that he was uncomfortable, however, and I felt sure he would step down as Liberal leader.

Not long after, I got a call from Trudeau asking if I could come over to his office and bring a cameraman. I found him in a rare emotional state. He had decided to quit, he informed me, because he wanted to spend as much time as possible with his sons. He would give me the only television interview on the matter, an extraordinary coup. Shortly after the camera started to roll, I heard a dreaded click from the film magazine. The cameraman had forgotten to reload; we were out of film. Would Trudeau do it all over again, please? No, he would not, and moreover the confessional moment when he was prepared to talk about the overwhelming demands of political leadership had passed. He knew he had revealed his vulnerability and was not about to make the same mistake again. Trudeau's official announcement of his intention to step down as Liberal leader
came in June. Most Canadians believed they had seen the last of him and turned their attention to the newly elected Tories.

It has always been my motto to “stay in with the outs” because the outs have a way of coming back. A crop of younger Conservatives—Don Mazankowski, Ray Hnatyshyn, and John Crosbie—refused to wallow in self-pity and recrimination after their defeat back in 1974, and I was glad to give them airtime while they warmed the Opposition benches. They were a canny lot who knew how to get under the skin of the Liberals, and they made for good television in the process. Like unindicted co-conspirators, reporters cultivate and befriend politicians who are out of power in a way that is impossible with those in the ruling party. I cannot say, though, that Joe Clark was on my radar.

One day in February 1976, I was working in the hot room at the House of Commons when I received a phone call from the office of a Member of Parliament I had never heard of. The Conservative Party national convention had just convened in Ottawa and my caller was a flack from the office of Joe Clark. Clark was a little-known MP from Alberta whose bid for the leadership the press corps regarded as a joke. Did anyone want to do a one-on-one interview with Mr. Clark, was the offer. I covered the mouthpiece and shouted out the question to the room. Laughs and jeers. “Too busy,” I said—a telling tribute to my prescience and that of my colleagues.

The main contenders were Brian Mulroney and Claude Wagner, two Quebecers who despised each other. Wagner was a former Liberal who had run for the leadership of the provincial party, losing to Robert Bourassa. The Conservatives recruited Wagner and he accepted monies from a secret slush fund to make the move, a fact he denied to Mulroney. Wagner was stiff
and formal in contrast to Mulroney's garrulous Irish personality. At the convention, they became locked in a balloting impasse, their respective supporters refusing to change their votes. This allowed Joe Clark to come up the middle and pull off one of the most stunning leadership upsets in history.

A few days later, Clark visited his new office in the Opposition leader's suite in the East Block and I stood beside him while one of my colleagues tossed on his desk the
Toronto Star
with the headline “JOE WHO?” across the front. Joe laughed, but it would be years before he could live down that nickname. His receding chin became a symbol of his supposed timidity as a leader, and he was taunted for his physical awkwardness, his wife's refusal to take his name, and the fact that he had never held a permanent job outside of politics and had no real interests other than a devotion to public policy.

I soon discovered Clark to be better than his critical press: always a thoroughly decent, thoughtful person without an ounce of mean-spiritedness. Yet many looked upon even these admirable qualities as evidence of a weak character. He couldn't win.

Shortly after he took the Tory leadership, Clark decided to do a tour of British Columbia, perhaps the most disastrous ever seen in Canadian political circles. The party organization failed him completely. En route up the coast, in one small town after another, scheduled events never happened. On more than one occasion, when our Otter float plane pulled up at the local docks, not a soul would be there to greet the new leader. Reporters called taxis for the whole group to get us into one town or another, where more often than not Clark would go unrecognized at public events. When he met with the media, Clark initially insisted that the local press be allowed the first
questions. At one stop, the town's reporter savaged him with charges that he was a loser who wouldn't survive in the job. Clark, smiling, turned to the national press, and pleaded for some actual questions.

It was in northern British Columbia, where the reception was no better, that Clark locked horns with Mom. I had chronicled this rolling debacle night after night on the national news. Finally and mercifully, we neared the end of the trip, which by sheer coincidence was to wrap up in Prince Rupert. Clark hoped to rescue himself with a final news conference at the Rupert airport. Mom, of course, was there to see me off and sat with me in the press section.

When I stood to ask a question, Maureen McTeer cut me off with an ill-tempered declaration: “There goes Craig Oliver already, crapping on my husband again.” I sat down speechless, but not Mom, who had probably had more than a few drinks by this time. She warned McTeer to shut up and leave her little boy alone, or she would come over and do her serious harm. Clark intervened to cool his wife and I did the same with Mom.

The Vancouver media loved it, presenting the confrontation between a reporter's mother and the Opposition leader's wife as a front-page story. Joe Clark made it worse for himself when he denied that Maureen would ever use the word
crapping
, as the journalists had reported. Their audiotapes proved otherwise and kept the story going for another day. Always the first to do the decent thing, Clark sought me out to apologize, but the incident had made the national news. When I got back to Ottawa, I ran into Trudeau in a Commons corridor. “You have never scared me for a minute,” he said, “but I sure don't want to run up against your mother!”
In 1979, the prime minister's mantle came too soon for Joe Clark. Being a political leader is like being the lead canine in a dogsled team. You have to be tougher and smarter than all the other dogs and fight to keep your position every day. It was an open secret in Ottawa that there were two hard-core Conservatives whose mission it was to bring Clark down: MP Bob Coates and Coates's chief of staff, Rick Logan. A third individual, Pat McAdam, who worked for Conservative MP Gordon Taylor, was also put on salary at Iron Ore of Canada where Mulroney was president, though his main occupation was to organize against Clark on Mulroney's behalf. These genial assassins regularly graced the press club or the press gallery hot room, leaking the latest plot against Clark to the eager scribes. It was not in Clark's character to become as mean, cunning, or duplicitous as some of those who opposed him.

Clark had savoured his election victory for barely twenty-four hours before he undermined his own credibility. During the election campaign, he had promised unwisely to move the Canadian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. All of us knew such a move was impossible; it was an affront to the Arab world that would have cost Canada dearly, and a serious reversal of Canada's long-running policy on the issue. Of course, the move was bitterly opposed by our own Department of External Affairs, whose mandarins made no secret of their view. We all assumed Clark would drop the campaign rhetoric and gradually let the idea die.

At his first news conference as prime minister, Clark had the opportunity to backtrack. I raised the issue in the opening question. But he insisted on his determination to follow through, adding for good measure that it was time the bureaucrats at
External got the message and understood who was in charge. The neophyte was displaying a touch of arrogance. A wiser and more confident leader would have nuanced the issue. Clark felt the need to prove his toughness, but he had stumbled right out of the gate. Eventually former PC leader Robert Stanfield was appointed to make recommendations—“Stanfield of Arabia,” we called him—and of course he told Clark to forget it.

Clark's able Cabinet soon settled into middle-of-the-road progressive administration, six seats short of a majority but governing well. Sadly, Clark himself was running far behind his party in popularity and respect. The Tories had inherited a large deficit from the free-spending Trudeauites, and a critical policy objective was to bring the budget and the economy back on track.

Then came December 13, 1979. That day I had lunch in the parliamentary restaurant with Don Mazankowski, then minister of Transport and a man widely respected for his unshakeable good nature and personal integrity. Mazankowski told me the government was heading for a vote that night on Finance Minister John Crosbie's budget. This short-lived document was an early effort at deficit-reduction and might have saved Canadians considerable misery in future years, but it was hugely unpopular. If he wanted to, Maz said, Clark could dodge the confidence vote, but the government intended to allow itself to be defeated. I was dumbfounded. The Liberals were running high in the polls in Quebec and Ontario and the Conservatives' gambit seemed suicidal. Maz appeared to doubt the wisdom of the decision, but he was nothing if not loyal. Clark's brain trust apparently judged the polls wrongly and believed they could beat the Liberals and win a solid majority.

That night they were defeated on a budget vote in a raucous
Commons session. Clark's many detractors claimed he lost because he couldn't count, but it was worse than that. Clark and his circle knew they would go down and they let it happen. Ironically, one of the least arrogant men I ever met in politics was defeated by his own hubris.

Equally ironic were the repercussions for the country, for without the Conservatives' miscalculation, Trudeau would never have had a chance to return to power. Most people forget that Trudeau had announced his resignation as leader and had no intention of returning. After the Commons defeat of the Conservatives, Keith Davey went to Trudeau on bended knee and begged him to stay on as leader for one more trip to the polls.

I spent every moment of the 1980 campaign with Clark, a heartbreaking exercise that went from bad to worse. The reporters travelling with him, including me, taunted him unmercifully. Certain of Clark's qualities had become fixations in the minds of his travelling press, and we sought out comments or situations that fitted those and made for an easily understandable story. Unfortunately, he helped us out. We all had a field day when he made a speech in Prince Edward Island—“Spud Island”— about “potato power.” Small errors or gaffes that would have been ignored elsewhere were magnified and given far more space in the narrative than they deserved. Meantime, Trudeau's return to the field was warmly welcomed and on his plane a largely adoring press crowd allowed him a comparatively free ride. It didn't hurt that some of Trudeau's key aides were literally in bed with principal reporters.

As the Clark campaign gradually slid off the rails, an ugly mood took hold. Near the end, on one late-night flight from Halifax to Vancouver, the press corps bottomed out. We had
loaded up with lobsters and wine before leaving, and within a few hours everyone was roaring drunk. The floor of the plane was littered with empty bottles and lobster shells crunched under foot. At one point, a reporter forced his attentions on an airline hostess in her compartment in the back. Two of us had to drag him off the distraught woman. She was allowed to leave the campaign plane crew, but no one ever disciplined the journalist.

In an all-too-familiar example of Tory infighting, even Clark's allies in the provinces turned against him. On a visit to the Ontario premier, Bill Davis, Clark's aides tried desperately to persuade us that the two leaders were equals. But one of the premier's top aides had been assigned to tell us privately in what low esteem Clark was actually held by the Conservative government of the country's largest province. They would, he indicated, even welcome a return of the Liberals to power. I spent a whole night drinking with Southam News columnist Charles Lynch and the New Brunswick premier, Dick Hatfield. Hatfield regaled us with stories of how the party intended to “put Clark on the cross and crucify him” after he lost the election.

The nadir was Clark's interview in Vancouver with the redoubtable talk-show host Jack Webster. In his rough Scottish brogue, Webster started the interview by stating flatly, “Yer finished, Joe Clark. Yer finished and ya know it.” It was, in a sense, a moment of truth. Anyone on the bus who might have been uncertain about the election outcome was uncertain no longer. From then on, the accepted wisdom was that we were travelling with the loser.

On the morning of February 18, the last event of the Clark campaign took place on top of the CN Tower in Toronto. As a magnificent sun rose over Lake Ontario, a girl sang the most
popular song from the musical
Annie
. The words were perfect: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow ...” Maureen McTeer began to cry, Joe Clark's eyes were wet, and most of their hard-core supporters were choked with emotion. We flew that day to Clark's Alberta riding for the election night results. I told our viewers that Clark had been graceful in defeat. More than that, I had never seen him display bitterness or anger or self-pity throughout the whole ordeal.