Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (3 page)

His signature—apart from the trademark headgear—is the monumental X-ray of our rich and mighty, the early Canadian Establishment. They are the Dragons of the current title, the remote unknown eminences behind or beyond the landscape of Canadian journalism—unknown, that is, until Newman appointed himself their naturalist.

The powerful can be shy. They must be courted to reveal themselves. The story of how he came to lure the reticent rich of the Canadian elite to his journalistic laboratory is not the smallest of this book’s many pleasures. For example, he won the keystone interview for
The Canadian Establishment
, with John Angus (Bud) McDougald, by haunting the company of everyone who knew him, and floating to them wild and wilful misapprehensions of Mr. McDougald’s financial worth and business dealings. Everywhere Mr. McDougald went, he was hearing of this “journalist” with the crazy estimations of his worth and
practice. It took Mr. Newman the best part of a year to win it, but an invitation to Mr. McDougald’s Green Pines estate was finally forthcoming. Mr. McDougald had figured out “the trick,” but admired the guts behind it.

Mr. Newman’s writing had its serious intent. It was not, nor was it ever meant to be, just gossip. He was propelled by a thesis: “I would document my theory that most of our destinies were governed by a shadowy group of financial manipulators I called The Canadian Establishment. I would define and detail their origins, interconnections, rivalries, prejudices, values, strengths, mercenary motives and operational codes. This would not be a bloodless audit of their common strains—this would be a journalist’s exposé of who they were, what they did, and how they got away with it.”

Not quite Gibbon recalling the origin of his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(“musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”), but there is something of a symmetry of intent here, in the sense of scope and mission, however dissimilar the canvas. Our Caligulas are smaller.

Mr. Newman seems to have come upon his distinct terrain early on. After a stint on
The Financial Post
in Toronto and Montreal, he got work at
Maclean’s
in its glory days. His colleagues included Peter Gzowski and Christina McCall (his soon-to-be second wife); Pierre Berton was a senior editor, and celebrated editor Ralph Allen guided the whole rich crew. It was then that he produced his first
book, a dozen profiles of prominent businessmen,
Flames of Power
, published on his twenty-ninth birthday.

A handful of zesty reviews, including one in
The Wall Street Journal
, rocketed sales and confirmed him in what turned out to be his vocation: sketching the personalities, aspirations and connections of this country’s moneyed elite. He found he loved writing. And he learned he loved success in writing even more.

“Success turns a writer into a praise addict… . It becomes a drug, terminally unsettling to mental balance, a price I would willingly pay for the rest of my life.”

A comment from one of the luminaries profiled in
Flames of Power
, E.P. Taylor, breathed the note of patterned ambivalence with which Mr. Newman’s subjects came to regard him: “Well, we all know Newman is a goddammed Communist, but I’m not taking him off my Christmas card list yet.”

He would rise to the editorship of
Maclean’s
, and there would be many mighty detours from his dedicated trolling of the guarded waters of Canadian capitalism’s master sharks.
Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years
, his second book, was the one that made him. It was a pioneering piece of political journalism. It went for the guts and flavour of politics, spoken in a candour and detail that have become so commonplace it is difficult to see how original and daring they then were. It was also, typically, a monster of research and patient assembly. A thousand interviews, frequent meetings with real insiders, seventeen
rewrites, ten galley proofs, and the close, creative oversight of Christina McCall went into its making. Mr. Newman doesn’t produce careless books.

Renegade in Power
was a publishing home run. John Diefenbaker kept six copies, one annotated on every page, while swearing he had never read it. That he resented it profoundly is understatement’s understatement. In the Diefenbaker Centre at the University of Saskatchewan is a note, in the Chief’s own hand, the kindest sentence of which reads, “He [Newman] is the literary scavenger of the trash baskets on Parliament Hill.”

Newman sets a rich board, but for many I predict the crowning soufflé will be the chapter on Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. If the subtitle of Newman’s memoir—
Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power
—has to earn its keep, the chapter-essay on the Blacks will more than do it.

Mr. Newman has a unique purchase on this great fable of our time. He claims, not without daring, to have “invented” Conrad Black. I suspect the Lord of Crossharbour assiduously asserts that the patent on the great miracle of himself is his and his alone. But Mr. Newman, as
Maclean’s
editor and as the earliest biographer of Lord Black, was one of the first amplifiers of the Black persona and had singular access at the initial stages of Lord Black’s acceleration into fame, fortune and folly.

Mr. Newman’s account is superior to others because he is neither clinically neutral (a rare stance in accounts of The Conrad) nor dripping with glee (a much more crowded
assembly) over Lord Black’s current miseries and mischiefs. In the early stages of the now-familiar rise, Mr. Newman saw much in Lord Black to admire—the potential to shatter the conventionalities of the dull Canadian business world, intellect in tandem with aspiration. This threads his account with something close to anger that Lord Black turned out to be just another acquisitive egomaniac, one with an absurd itch for archaic status, and distinguished only, as it turns out, by a more generous vocabulary than less-fluent compeers in the greed game—the CEO of, say, Enron.

When Mr. Newman is angry, his light touch and wicked pen take on a degree of flame and sharpness that make for wonderful writing. His thumbnail cameos approach a Muggeridgean callousness. Of Lord Black: “Conrad had turned himself into a latter day Citizen Kane. He looked like a young Orson Welles but behaved like an old William Randolph Hearst.”

Of Barbara Amiel: “Even in repose, she was always posing, playing the femme fatale in her own movie. While she kept insisting it was her mind not her body that merited attention, it was widely suspected she was Mother Nature’s little helper.”

There are many, a wicked many, more. In the caustic-asides department, Mr. Newman is one with Keats: “Load every rift with ore.”

Mr. Newman has gulped a lot of life. He has a taste for panorama, but it never overrules detail and individuality, the quirks and quiddities of each personality. This makes
him an excellent diarist. He has a zeal for taking in the illuminating anecdote, and a flair for reproducing it in print.

I have remarked on the frightening industry and variousness of Mr. Newman’s career, but there must be time to remark on the writing. He is, on the evidence of this book, a very cheerful fellow. It might seem undistinguished to call
Here Be Dragons
a “happy” book, but it is. His observations and
obiter dicta
are crafted, keen and frequently funny. They save the book from the slightest shadow of tediousness and self-absorption. He is not afraid to boast of his accomplishments, personal or professional, romantic or scribal, but does so with insouciance and charm. He has enjoyed his ride, is bemusedly dazzled by his success, has savoured his talents, clearly loves writing, and values the wiles and stratagems that gave him entry where others (
Hic Sunt Dracones
) feared to tread.

He has a style that can work these various effects and responses. It can dispense an anecdote, sketch a character in a mini-essay, turn lyrical at moments of reflection or nostalgia, and is by turns pungent and relaxed, bare for story, barbed for impact. The many, many books, the editorships and articles, have sharpened a considerable talent. He has the instinct of a gossip wedded to the mind of a true chronicler: one who sees the arc of an age through the multitude of its particulars and personalities.

And, finally, he writes against the profound echo of what, as a child, he glimpsed and his parents felt and fled: the horror of the Second World War, and the catastrophe
of the Holocaust. I have said he is cheerful, and my guess is that this is the cheerfulness of someone who has seen all that is the worst of us, felt some of it in his own Jewish legacy from those dark times, and determined there were only two faces with which to stare back at the world: an angry one or a determinedly embracing one.

He chose the latter, obviously. He is both a student of the world and—in one of his own terms—a jester. The world here is mainly, as I have said, ours, Canada. He has done a fine job of seeing a consequential part of it, has fashioned some of the very tools others in his trade now deploy. He has inflected the public record of this country, and he has lived a mixed, charming, various, replete life. He has known everyone who is anyone and passed on the highlights of that ranging acquaintance to his readers.

He has earned his cheerfulness.
Here Be Dragons
is a much more than worthy picture of ourselves, and a work of genuine wit and insight.

I hope it’s not awkward to bring this up, but the office of the governor general is a ceremonial post.

It’s useful to remember this, if for no other reason than to scatter the cloud of incense hanging over the installation of Michaëlle Jean this week. The jaded cynics of the
national press corps went into full rhapsody mode, with reviews of her speech that whizzed past being merely complimentary and only halted at reverential because, I suppose, there was no higher place to go.

My
Globe and Mail
colleague John Ibbitson came as close to producing a swoon in print as, outside the delicate prose of the romance novelists, it is possible to do. Of Ms. Jean he wrote, “She is the becoming Canada,” a tribute made more plangent by being set off against the “old faces [and] old men” of those who hold real office in this country, one of whom—old face notwithstanding—actually appointed her.

Over at
The National Post
, the remorseless logician Andrew Coyne, who a few weeks back greeted the appointment of Ms. Jean with as blistering a denunciation as I can recall, started his piece with a surrender notice. “You are my Commander-in-Chief” was the least fervent whisper of his
billet-doux
.

All that was missing from some of the commentary was a burst of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Lawrence Martin, in
The Globe
on Thursday, essentially positioned Ms. Jean, so late of two citizenships, as a new Joan of Arc of federalism.

Her arrival on the scene would topple the separatist dream, “turning the André Boisclairs of the world into ghosts.” (At the time of this writing, in October 2005, Mr. Boisclair was considered the rising star of separatism. He became leader of the Parti Québécois in 2005, but resigned in 2007 when the PQ came third in the provincial
election.) Her speech, according to Mr. Martin, buried all the controversies that attended her appointment, even the one with her dressmaker. It’s a rare speech that quiets the Haberdashery Wars.

This is the kind of unleashed adulation that is normally on display only in the backyard of MuchMusic when Jessica Simpson or Shania Twain pay a visit to the teenagers, and recalls nothing in the political world so much as the ancient transports of Trudeaumania.

And, lest it be forgotten in the sunrise glow of Michaëlle Jean’s installation, every major speech she gives from now on, she will give as a figurehead. The voice will be hers. The words will be those of the prime minister who has dictated them. It is called the Speech from the Throne only in deference to the chair she occupies. Neither the chair nor its occupant bears blame for the prose.

Some of the response to our new governor general is easy to account for. She has immense and genuine charm. She is attractive and intelligent. As a good friend of mine from Newfoundland once said of another impressive woman—and this is a high compliment—“There are no flies on her, and if there are, they’re paying rent.”

Another reason is simple contrast. The real, as opposed to ceremonial, leadership of this country is woebegone and mediocre. There is something very saddening in the recollection, during the leaders’ debate in the last election, of just how many in the press and the public thought that the separatist leader Gilles Duceppe was the best performer.

Mr. Duceppe is no Cicero; that he could be thought to have outshone Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton speaks more to the dreariness of their presentations than to the sparkle of his.

The citizens of this country have a very lively and enduring suspicion that it is one of the most favoured and fortunate nations on the Earth. But they will have to stagger their brains to remember an occasion within the past twenty years or so when any of our national leaders gave some memorable and convincing articulation of why it should be considered so.

The new governor general’s speech was astonishing not in its content. In fact, in terms of one of its major themes—that the time of the “two solitudes” is past—it was seriously off-key and anachronistic. To dismiss the concept of two solitudes would have been a great line in a speech by a governor general thirty years ago. But the concept, like the phrase, is a pure museum piece.

So it wasn’t the speech itself. It was the spectacle of someone at the level of national leadership at least attempting, finally, to give voice to the worth of the country, and doing so with some confidence and conviction, that dazzled spectators and commentators alike.

In the week of David Dingwall, the year of Gomery and sponsorship, the decade of no real opposition politics, even one note of something that spoke to themes larger that “gotcha” politics, partisan frenzy and the daily horrors of Question Period took on an aura of substance and nobility by default.