Paul Martin had a different vision, a different idea of Canada. Looking beyond national borders and debates, he saw enormous change. The Cold War had ended, Western democracies appeared ascendant, and globalization was becoming a fact of life. Given Canada’s relatively small internal market and its export-driven economy, protectionism was not an option. At the same time, economic diversification was essential. Getting the fiscal house in order would make Canada less beholden to the fluctuating demands of foreign economies and make possible further spending on social programs.

Martin believed that to be a player on the emerging global map, Canadian federalism had to be flexible enough to allow provinces to pursue national goals in their own way — it needed a nationalism without walls. The West had to be encouraged to grow, and economic policy would have to focus on wealth creation as well as redistribution. Key concerns had to be Canada’s growing deficits, crippling accumulated debt, and skyrocketing interest rates. Brian Mulroney’s economic record had left a gaping hole that required urgent attention.

Nonetheless, Liberals chose old style over new ambition. In retrospect, Martin never had a chance. Despite a rapidly changing world, there is always in the Canadian body politic an incipient conservatism: embrace the world, maybe, but cleave strongly to “Canadian values,” to the security of our social safety net, to our differences with the United States. Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative Party had tied Canada to the American colossus through free trade, but they had also overstepped: Mulroney had offended Canadians’ deeply felt sense of distinctiveness by being too cozy with Ronald Reagan. It was time, said federal Liberals, for an economic nationalist and social progressive; it was time for Jean Chrétien, the most able candidate in the Trudeau tradition.

It wasn’t Jean Chrétien who turned me into a Martin supporter — Chrétien was clearly a talented politician. It was the grip that Pierre Elliott Trudeau had on the Liberal Party and the consequent lack of focus on the economy. Then, and perhaps still. It is not that the current front-runners to lead the party don’t have economic platforms worth considering — they do. It is that, from the beginning, the economy and the position that a strong economy allows a country to play in the world, has not been central to their campaigns. Indeed, the focus has been on the personal and professional backgrounds of the candidates — who is best suited to debate Harper and ultimately to defeat him. On the policy front, the emphasis has been on foreign affairs and even constitutional reform, even though to win an election, economic stewardship is paramount. The Liberals contesting the leadership represent an impressive array of talent, but for a long while it seemed as if they were grasping for euphoric Trudeau moments, rather than listening to the quiet industry of Paul Martin. Happily, this began to change after the delegate-selection meetings, when the prize became positioning for the leadership convention. On December 3, 2006, may the candidate with the most detailed and forward-looking economic plan emerge as Liberal leader.

The Liberals were an effective opposition between 1990 and 1993, and their culminating gamble paid off. In the 1993 election, just after the writ was dropped, the Liberals issued their “Red Book,” a full account of the policies they would pursue and how they would govern. Antipathy to Mulroney had grown, the electorate was tired of constitutional battles, and the Liberals won 177 seats. The Tories, under a beleaguered Kim Campbell, were reduced to two seats. They had been crushed — the old alliance of Quebec nationalists, fiscal conservatives from Ontario, and social conservatives from the West had splintered. The principal authors of the “Red Book” were Chaviva Hosek, the director of the Liberal caucus research bureau, and Paul Martin.

Ever the shrewd tactician, Chrétien rewarded Martin by installing him as finance minister. So long as he was the keeper of the country’s books and continued reducing the deficit, Bay and Howe Streets remained content and the right had little leverage. Chrétien was free to do what he did well: retail politics. Martin wanted the top job, to be sure, but if he had to bide his time to get another shot at the title, then so be it.

It was, in fact, mostly a good marriage and not the private hell for Martin that media watchers who ache for political theatre insisted was the everpresent reality. Through the late 1990s job growth soared, the deficit disappeared, and Martin’s reputation as an economic manager became fixed in the country’s mind. There was work to do — balance the budget, see that education and research and development were properly funded, and pursue his internationalist vision by regularly meeting with the world’s other finance ministers. Martin was building profile.

With the right divided, no effective opposition could be mustered to call the Liberals on 1993 policy promises that they did not act upon. The big scare remained Quebec secession, an agenda promulgated by the Bloc Québécois in the federal House of Commons. There is no doubt that the Liberals miscalculated the anger felt by Quebeckers after the rejection of the Meech and Charlottetown accords, and the hair’sbreadth escape in the 1995 referendum caused federalists to begin preparing at once for the next round. But the evidence coming from Quebec and the rest of the country after the referendum was clear: we are quite determined to talk about other things. This is why Martin was cautious about the Clarity Act. He worried that it represented an unnecessary provocation.

Many expected Martin to rise to the prime minister’s chair in 2000. It did not happen. Chrétien loved the job, and the party’s polling numbers remained solid. But Chrétien did not appreciate the growing levels of support within the party for Martin. The cleavage began manifesting itself, but it was less fratricide, as some had it, and more a battle of ideas about the future. Martin would have to wait three more years.

I joined Paul Martin’s team in Finance as his chief of staff in early September 2001. On Tuesday, September 11, I entered the Ottawa office for the first time. Moments before, the second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Everything changed, and it didn’t.

Despite polls clearly indicating that the desire for change had deepened, in the 2000 election Canadians showed greater confidence in the Liberals than they had in 1997. The Liberals were delivering regular surpluses, and with the austerity measures largely behind them — program cuts to eliminate the deficit and start to chip away at the debt — the party could now better address social and environmental concerns. Secession talk in Quebec had waned. The Bloc Québécois had won only thirty-eight seats and had lost its official opposition status to the Canadian Alliance, which had copped sixty-six seats, though just two in Ontario and none east of Ontario. The ndp received just 8.5 percent of the popular vote. It, along with the PCs (twelve seats), was in danger of becoming irrelevant.

Still, there were holes in the Liberal record. Canada’s foreign-aid spending bespoke an insular country, not a growth leader among the elite industrialized nations. Spending on infrastructure, transit for cities, post-secondary education, and research and development were all sorely needed and, in the face of surpluses, demanded. While neither the right nor the left posed an immediate threat, the Liberals had to recognize growing discontent out west and contend with mounting pressure from the health care field, from environmentalists, and from a growing big-city movement led by Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray and Toronto city councilor Jack Layton. Liberals could not take soft-left support for granted.