In Delacourt’s story, Martin laid out his maritime bona fides. As a boy growing up in Windsor, he’d spent hours watching the lakers churning by on the Detroit River. At 13, his first summer job was on a fishing boat near the family’s Lake Erie cottage. Later, he paid his way through college as a naval cadet sailing the Beaufort Sea and toiling as a deckhand aboard ships hauling cargo between Norway and Jamaica. Those details provide illuminating addenda to the already many-faceted Martin myth. Yet for a man about whom so much has been written—and on whom three books are due to appear this fall—surprisingly little of substance is known.
His handlers seem to want to keep it that way. In Ottawa, one journalist friend is rumoured to have vetted a campaign press list, noting beside some reporters’ names, “Don’t go near.” Others who have written unwelcome accounts have received blistering emails or telephone blasts from his leadership brain trust. And when the cbc’s Disclosure examined csl’s offshore practices, Martin refused to be interviewed, even off the record and off-camera—an unprecedented rebuff. That tight rein on information is not new. Three years ago, when freelancer Guy Lawson profiled him for Saturday Night, Martin’s team sent out instructions to potential interview subjects: “If asked about Mr. Martin’s personal holdings,” it read, “suggest that this article is about the Finance Minister and not the entrepreneur. Offer no further comment.”
Paul Edgar Martin, known in satirical sheets these days as “Junior,” is even credited with a catalytic role in the birth of one of the country’s defining social policies. He was only eight years old when Paul Martin Sr., then Mackenzie King’s newly appointed minister of health and welfare, was summoned out of a cabinet meeting and told his son had been stricken with polio. Rushing home to Windsor and seeing Paul Jr. unable to speak convinced Martin Sr. of the need for universal health care.
Martin’s earliest memory is of his father taking him by the hand, at age three, to visit the Parliament buildings. He remembers scampering through the brooding panelled corridors and sliding across the gleaming marble floors. At the Martin dinner table, insider anecdotes about the great names parading through the headlines were served up with the meat and potatoes. Who else’s father could recount a trip to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch to sign the Auto Pact, only to discover the U.S. president raiding the fridge at dawn in his pyjamas while checking out bombing reports from Vietnam?
By the time Martin was a teenager, the family had moved to Ottawa, but virtually every weekend, his father went back to Windsor to tend to riding affairs and press the flesh in coffee shops and autoworkers’ union halls. Often, he took his kids, Paul Jr. and Mary-Anne, on the long overnight train ride across Ontario. A brilliant man whom former Liberal cabinet minister John Roberts counts as “one of the best-read men I’ve ever known, next to Trudeau,” Martin Sr. learned to hide his intellect under the guise of a gladhander—a pose that would eventually prove his undoing. “The tragedy in his life was he developed a sort of persona he thought he had to have to be successful in politics,” Roberts says, “and eventually he grew into it.” For years, Paul Martin Jr., winced whenever journalists reported his father working a room in no-matter-what-country, demanding, “Anybody here from Windsor?” That may account for his own long ambivalence about a political career—and, when he finally capitulated, his initial ineptitude at mainstreeting. “He’d ask, ‘What’ll I say?’” recalls former Trudeau aide Patrick Gossage, who helped coach Paul Jr. for his first parliamentary race in 1988. “He didn’t have the charm of his father. Now he’s got the charm and the twinkling eyes down pat. He’s so polished I’m sure raindrops would hit that little Simonized shield around him and bounce off.”
In his memoirs, Martin Sr. makes clear that he tried to groom his son for politics, only to find him determined to make his own mark. But in retrospect, Paul Jr.’s life seems a filial fugue: He abandoned his own choice of courses to study philosophy, as his father suggested, at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. Then he followed in his father’s footsteps to prepare himself for a legal career, which Martin Sr. considered the only suitable stepping stone for public life. Even The Windsor Star noted on the occasion of Martin’s September, 1965, marriage to Sheila Ann Cowan, the daughter of his father’s law partner, that it was patterned on his parents’ wedding twenty-nine years earlier, almost to the day.
One story has become a staple in the Martin mythology. In 1960, when he was still at U of T, Maurice Strong, who would become Martin’s professional god-father, offered him a summer job as a roust——about at Ajax Petroleums, an Alberta gas producer Strong had just taken over. As Martin tells it, he got bored and went awol to party at the Calgary Stampede. On the way home, he smashed up the company truck and ended up being sacked. Strong cautions the story makes betteranecdotal fodder than fact: As soon as he learned of the firing, he offered Martin his job back. “It wasn’t a bad lesson,” Strong says, “but it was not at all hostile.”
Roberts remembers the young Martin as an idealist, chafing to work in the Third World or at the UN, where his father had been the official Canadian delegate at the opening session. The summer before his bar exams, he landed a job in Luxembourg working for the European Coal and Steel Community, a precursor of the European Union. It was there, watching the first rustlings of globalization, that he made a weekend pilgrimage to Geneva to consult Strong, by then president of Montreal’s Power Corporation.
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