Hell or High Water My Life in and out of Politics

by Martin, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780771056932
• ISBN10: 0771056931
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-27
• Publisher: Emblem Editions

Summary

Paul Martin was the Prime Minister we never really knew in this memoir he emerges as a fascinating flesh and blood man, still working hard to make a better world. "The next thing you know, I was in a jail cell." (Chapter 2) "From the moment I flipped his truck on the road home to Morinville. . ." (Chapter 3) "When I came back into Aquin's headquarters I had a broken nose." (Chapter 4) These are not lines that you expect in a prime ministerial memoir. But Paul Martin who led the country from 2003 to 2006 is full of surprises, and his book will reveal a very different man from the prime minister who had such a rough ride in the wake of the sponsorship scandal. Although he grew up in Windsor and Ottawa as the son of the legendary Cabinet Minister Paul Martin, politics was not in his blood. As a kid he loved sports, and had summer jobs as a deckhand or a roustabout. As a young man he plunged into family life, and into the business world. After his years as a "corporate firefighter" for Power Corporation came the excitement of acquiring Canada Steamship Lines in Canada's largest ever leveraged buy-out, "the most audacious gamble of my life." In 1988, however, he became a Liberal M.P., ran for the leadership in 1990 and in 1993 became Jean Chretien's minister of finance, with the country in a deep hole. The story of his years as perhaps our best finance minister ever leads to his account of the revolt against Chretien, and his time in office. Great events and world figures stud this book, which is firm but polite as it sets the record straight, and is full of wry humour and self-deprecating stories. Far from ending with his defeat in 2006, the book deals with his continuing passions, such as Canada's aboriginals and the problems of Africa. This is an idealistic, interesting book that reveals the Paul Martin we never knew. It's a pleasure to meet him. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Paul Martin was born in Windsor in 1938 and educated at the University of Ottawa and the University of Toronto. In 1965, he earned his LL.B and married Sheila, with whom he had three sons. After a successful business career as Chairman and CEO of Canada Steamship Lines he entered politics as a Liberal M.P. in 1988. After running for the leadership of the party he became minister of finance from 1993 till 2001, becoming prime minister in 2003. He resigned as party leader after the 2006 election, but continues to work in the public sphere.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

An Ordinary Childhood	p. 1
Young Man and the Sea	p. 20
Down to Work	p. 35
My Own Boss	p. 48
Drawn to the Flame	p. 66
Run for the Top	p. 81
Opposition	p. 95
"Good Morning, Minister"	p. 108
Three and a Half Months	p. 118
The Big Budget I	p. 130
The Big Budget II	p. 144
Time...and Generations	p. 154
Tipping the Balance	p. 165
Into the Virtuous Circle	p. 175
Taking on the World	p. 195
Getting Quit	p. 220
The Next Level	p. 237
Taking the Reins	p. 256
Sponsorship	p. 274
Taking the Lead	p. 287
Sharing the Wealth	p. 299
Green and White	p. 316
Into Africa	p. 327
Acts of God and Humankind	p. 342
From Gleneagles to Hong Kong	p. 354
Friends and Traders	p. 368
Tough Calls	p. 384
To Govern Is to Choose	p. 397
Keeping Faith	p. 411
Flying in Turbulence	p. 426
Last Election	p. 439
Fast Forward	p. 454
Acknowledgements	p. 471
Index	p. 479
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

An Ordinary Childhood

My mother was born Eleanor Alice Adams in the village of McGregor about ten miles southeast of Windsor, Ontario. There were fewer than fifty people in McGregor, which was not much more than the place where the highway crossed the railway tracks. There were a couple of dozen houses, a church, and a general store that belonged to my grandparents.

I guess McGregor was too small to be fussy about social distinctions, because my mother was the product of what in those days they called a “mixed marriage.” Her mother, Amelia, had been born a McManamy, from Irish-Catholic stock. Her father, Edgar, was a Protestant. Now, Edgar was a wonderful man, but it was Amelia who was the dynamo in the family. At some point before the Depression, she moved the family business to Windsor, where she established a small pharmacy and eventually a second. With hard work and determination, my grandmother managed to lift the Adams family out of poverty and give it a tenuous grip on the middle class, which somehow survived the 1930s. In time she was able to buy a farm near McGregor and a cottage in the village of Colchester, which is where I spent my summers as a child and is the place I still remember as my childhood home.

The cottage was shared by my mother and my Aunt Mame and their families. It was not a grand place at all. I still remember when the outhouse was replaced with indoor plumbing. Originally, there was just one big bedroom upstairs, which was later divided in two. An addition downstairs created another bedroom. Church benches once belonging to a great-uncle who had been a Methodist circuit rider sat in the living room, a constant reminder of the Protestant side of the family. We had an icebox, and I remember Clyde Scott, who brought the ice wagon around to refill it. All my life I have referred to the refrigerator as the icebox, and long before the age of Google and the BlackBerry, my sons would look at me and say, “My god, what century are you from?”

Behind the cottage was a potato patch my Uncle Vince had ploughed under and rolled by hand to create a makeshift tennis court soon after the cottage was built in the 1920s. This was not a fancy clay court; when it rained, it turned to mud, and it was my job to take the hand roller and restore the court to playable condition and mark out the lines again with lime.

The cottage was on a street perpendicular to the main road, on the other side of which was a field we called “the park,” running to the cliff overlooking Lake Erie. During the day, the calm waters lapped at the shore, as the giant lake freighters passed five or six miles off in the shipping channel. By night, there were often huge winds and lightning storms the likes of which I’ve never seen again. For me, it was a magical place. Many years later, I took Sheila back there and asked her to marry me.

During my childhood, there was no beach. In fact, high water was causing cliff erosion. My mother used to tell us that when she was a young girl, they could go through the park and down some stairs to a beach and walk along the sand and rock about a quarter-­mile to the Colchester dock, which seemed miraculous to me. Later, when I was at Canada Steamship Lines (CSL), and I happened to be in the area, I looked out and saw to my astonishment that the beach had reappeared, recreating the fabled scene from my mother’s childhood. One of the captains at CSL said that the low water was unprecedented, and I told him that no, actually, this was untrue; it is a cycle that recurs every three or four decades. He challenged me, and we went back and checked the records, and sure enough I was right.

Besides me and my sister, Mary Anne, who was born when I was five, there was a large cast of cousins who populated the cottage and with whom we grew up almost as a single family. Mame’s son, Michael, was a few years older th

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Excerpted from Hell or High Water: My Life in and out of Politics by Paul Martin
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