Oliver's Twist (30 page)

“Elvis Presley is dead!” he announced. I appreciated once again that in the real world, news priorities differ.

Around the campfire one night on the Thelon River, Trudeau asked me why I had not yet taken my son on an Arctic trip, surely a tremendous adventure for a young man. Coming from anyone other than this dedicated father of three sons, I might have taken exception to the implication that my canoe partners were more important to me than my own child—a hurtful notion, though I doubt Trudeau intended it that way. But he was right, I thought. Perhaps it was time for what was then called a “bonding experience.”

It took two years to put together, but in 1981 I organized a shared family trip with former finance minister Don Macdonald, his daughter Althea, and his courageous wife, Ruth, who was fighting the cancer that eventually took her life a few years later. David Silcox joined the group with the teenaged son of a friend,
Ian McPhail, who would be close in age to fourteen-year-old Murray. Denis Harvey, eager to escape his desk in Toronto, also threw in with us; it was the first trip we made together.

We had chosen the Coppermine River, a mecca for northern canoeists. This stunning Barren Lands river finds its source in the Great Slave Lake region and gathers steam as its heads northwest into Coronation Gulf on the Arctic Ocean. About nine miles south of its mouth lies the famous Bloody Falls, where in 1771 explorer Samuel Hearne recorded the ambush and murder of a group of Inuit by his Chipewyan guides.

Two years before our trip, a canoe team led by a friend of mine had found a body on a sandbar at the end of the Rocky Defile rapid on the Coppermine. My friend learned later that the victim had dumped in the rapids, but his companions could not find his body. They headed downstream to summon police, and in the meantime the body surfaced and was found by my friend's party.

Conscious of the hazards, David Silcox and I planned to run the empty canoes of the inexperienced paddlers through the trickiest rapids, leaving the others to portage with their packs. We would be an odd crew, not knowing one another well and all travelling with private purposes of our own. Unlike the friendly though ever-competitive all-male outings, this trip proved to be a more relaxed venture, thanks largely to the presence of the two women. Watching three young people discover the magic of the Arctic and the midnight sun renewed my own sense of awe at an environment that I'd almost come to take for granted. If I missed the intense camaraderie of the club's wilderness excursions, I found focus enough in my personal agenda.

This was a chance to restore some balance in my relationship with Murray, with whom I had not lived since leaving home when he was five years old. I had done my best to stay connected, taking him on European holidays, spending every Christmas with him, even when it meant sleeping on the couch in my former wife's apartment, and phoning him every week. Now when I tried delicately to raise my fears of losing him, his reaction was the wry amusement one might reserve for a daft uncle. I was worried about a problem that did not exist, he told me to my surprise, and that was that.

An incident on that trip gave me the confidence that father and son did share a mutual understanding; indeed, it brought a sense of overall cohesion to our disparate party. I made a bad judgment about heading into a wide lake-sized section of the river one afternoon. In spite of a stiff wind, the river seemed calm enough to go for it. Halfway across, the wind shifted hard behind us and the river erupted into whitecapped rollers, threatening to broach anyone who lost control of the stern. Ninety percent of fatalities on canoe excursions occur not in rapids but during crossings of large bodies of flat water. We had no choice but for every man, woman, and teen to dig in hard for the far shore, and I so instructed the crews.

When we'd completed the passage, Don Macdonald was understandably upset with me for putting his family in such peril. I had to accept his criticism, but could not help but appreciate the effort that all had shown in pulling together. I found in Murray a determination and strength I had not known. He saw a father who could do more than simply babble on television.

Later we were winded for three days, unable to leave camp. Don constructed a sheltered fireplace on a narrow rock ledge
ten feet above the river. He warned all of us not to step back too far, lest we lose our footing on the ledge. Not more than a few minutes later, there was a great splash when the six-foot-six giant forgot his own advice. That night Don, who had also served as defence minister, showed everyone how soldiers under fire roll over the ground on their elbows. Thousands of kilometres from anywhere, we tried it ourselves, rolling about with gleeful abandon on the tundra. Next morning, two bottles of Scotch were missing. Only the evidence of screw-tops around the fire convinced us adults that we had consumed all the Scotch. All in all, the voyage was one of the most memorable of my paddling career, and everyone who was there fondly and gratefully recalled its joys for years after.

Every trip holds memories, but at a campsite halfway across an unassailable set of rapids on the Hood River, I experienced one of those moments of understanding that come all too infrequently in a lifetime. I awoke in my tent at three in the morning, and in the half-light of the midnight sun I hiked a few hundred yards up a granite-strewn bluff high above the river. While I sat there in a silence so profound as to be almost indescribable, I could appreciate why the natives of the western plains regarded their landscape as an extension of the Great Spirit. To them the plateaus, mountains, prairies, and rivers were the embodiment of that spirit, and they held them sacred.

It came to me that there was a timelessness to this place, but also a terrible vulnerability. Warnings of environmental depredation suggest that the rivers may not run forever, nor the pack
ice anchor us to the pole. If we fail to protect the Arctic, we are doomed; the North calls on us to acknowledge and preserve the interconnectedness between ourselves and the land that lies at the heart of our very existence.

Looking back toward our campsite, I saw in our little group a metaphor for the country. One misstep could have swept any of us away had we tried this adventure on our own; it had taken the skills of all to ensure the well-being of the whole. We are a nation of survivors, but we need each other to do it.

9

UNCIVIL
WARS

Of all the prime ministers I covered, shadowed, or otherwise harassed for more than a half-century, Jean Chrétien was the most impressive when judged by the objective measure of victory at the polls. His record is unassailable, and although he was the ship's captain when the sponsorship scandal broke in 2002, he was never implicated personally. His pressure on a government banker to rescue an investment in a golf course and hotel in his hometown are largely forgotten today. Since leaving office in 2003, Chrétien has grown in stature and reputation, just as Pierre Trudeau did. The difference is that Chrétien was regarded with immense affection in his heyday, whereas Trudeau commanded awe and respect.

Even former political rivals acknowledge Chrétien's achievements. This was brought home to me at an Ottawa Senators hockey game shortly after Stephen Harper's Conservatives came to power in 2006. Chrétien was in the stands that night, as were several newly appointed members of the Harper Cabinet. I was surprised to see these eager ministers arrange themselves in a respectful queue to shake Chrétien's hand.
Later, I chided Monte Solberg, who had just been named immigration minister, reminding him that he wasn't supposed to pay homage to the man who had kept the Conservatives in Opposition for so long. It was not about personal homage, Solberg said. “We were admiring three consecutive majorities. After all, that's how those of us in politics keep score, and he hit home runs.”

Chrétien's detractors say he had it easy because the political forces against him were divided—Progressive Conservative vs. Reform/Alliance, Green Party vs. the NDP—or regionalized, as in the case of the Bloc Québécois. He was able to take his Liberals up the middle between a fractious right and a weak left and win every time. Those detractors are not crediting the fact that Chrétien kept his opponents off balance and successfully played to public suspicions of what the Conservatives in particular might do once in power, all the while calibrating his own policies to the public's fickle mood.

Jean Chrétien created a persona for himself as the “little guy from Shawinigan” and had enough modesty to his biography that he was allowed to play the part of a common man even after he became a millionaire. His slightly garbled speech patterns only added to his Everyman appeal. Listeners sometimes strained to follow an indecipherable pronouncement, then smiled in relief when Chrétien ended with a solid point and a witty and insightful one at that.

What I saw in Chrétien was a fellow survivor. His father, a tradesman in a rural Quebec town, had struggled to give his nine children an education. Jean spent years at a gritty boarding school where, as he is fond of telling people, he had to win a fight every day on the ice rink or in the playground. He was
single-minded and hard driving in pursuit of a law degree from Laval University and became a dedicated worker for his hometown Liberal organization, battling the corrupt local ward healers of the Duplessis regime. Inevitably he was elected to Parliament—at the age of just twenty-nine.

When I first met Chrétien in 1974, he was a junior minister in Pierre Trudeau's Cabinet and, even then, a popular political figure with the public. A close friend of mine, Judd Buchanan, mentored Chrétien, who would eventually follow in Buchanan's footsteps as minister of Indian Affairs. Chrétien and I saw a lot of each other on the social circuit and he became a likeable regular at my annual Christmas parties. He spent time listening and absorbing information, rather than attempting to dominate the conversation. He was clearly aware that Parliament Hill reporters could influence his career, and he was quick to tell self-deprecating jokes about his poor English. Nonetheless, he seemed to me almost preternaturally shrewd and seriously ambitious. Like the best populist politicians, he could analyze complex issues with street-smart intuition.

In those early years of Cabinet tenure, Chrétien ingratiated himself with the more powerful ministers and with their canny deputies, many of whom would be surprised years later to find themselves working for him. Among the elites close to Trudeau, Chrétien was regarded as a charming hick, with his thick accent and down-home humour—certainly an intellectual lightweight. My sources in the Cabinet told me that Trudeau did not hold Chrétien in particularly high regard, although he recognized him as a loyal ally with genuine political value in Quebec, if not beyond. Judd Buchanan, however, believed Chrétien had the potential to win over
English-speaking Canada, where voters found him sincere and unthreatening.

Perhaps Chrétien's greatest asset then was an immense self-confidence that allowed him to have the courage of his convictions. He hired strong staffers and knew when to follow their lead, and he did not mind being underestimated in the short term. He was looking ahead to the future. Some in the Trudeau entourage—although not the prime minister himself, it must be said—lived fast and loose lives in those years. Plenty of attractive young women, not to mention abundant booze and drugs, were available to any upwardly mobile young man so close to the seat of power. Possibly his basic nature would not have allowed it, but Chrétien did nothing that could later come back to haunt him.