Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (19 page)

By contrast, Bill Clinton—quicksilver Bill, the man of a thousand reflexes, intellectual, at home equally at the most highbrow symposium or riffing on a Hollywood stage—has a personality as large and volatile as some weather systems. But it’s Mr. Bush, the nullity, the man empty of personality, who charges millions with the most profound and negative emotions. The response is all out of proportion to its stimulus. It is irrational.

The Bush paradox is the central fact in world politics today. It has one equally curious rider. The world’s real villain, Osama bin Laden, very largely gets, by contrast, an emotional bye.

Some are indifferent to high office, and some few seek it merely on a whim.

There are others for whom ambition has all the force of a carnal mania.

The drive for power is manifold. It can exist purely for its own sake—to be the one person who’s in charge, to be at the top of the heap—for the delicious thrill of outstripping
everyone else. For others, power exists but as an instrument for doing things, to work great change for a common good. This set, alas, is a small one, but politics earns whatever good name it may claim because these few exist.

And then there are those who burn their life’s energy, marshal all their cunning and intelligence to achieve acclaim, because they
need
to. They need the office. It fulfills them. And there is no set of whom we should be more wary. The politician who seeks to erase a sense of personal inadequacy by a scuttle up the ladders of power is undergoing a kind of therapy by means of the ballot box.

People sense this dynamic. Was there ever, in modern times, a more needful politician than Richard Nixon? There were many things that were enigmatic about Nixon, but his need for the office of the presidency, his compulsion to achieve that rare summit and, from its eminence, look back and down in scorn and triumph at what he called his “enemies,” is not among them.

I am reminded of a counter-example from our country: Robert Stanfield, the best friend modern Canadian politics has ever had. Mainly for the example, both of character and actions, of the public man who is not compelled to seek office, who is not the silent slave of his own ambition. Stanfield once had a chance to topple the Trudeau government, and declined to do so—an act of grace in an arena largely unmarked by graciousness, and a moment of great personal discipline and self-denial.

Stanfield and Nixon probably represent the extremes of
the range. Most of those who seek office operate from a medley of motives on a line stretched between utter compulsion and total disinterest. Brian Mulroney is up there, shivering closer to Nixon than to Stanfield. This is not said to abuse him. Mr. Mulroney was a Grand Canyon of openness compared to the Watergate exile, and infinitely less cloistered—genuinely cheerful and sociable, where Nixon was saturnine and solitary. Where they meet is in the need to excel, to find in the occupancy of high office overwhelming approval and distinction. From the hail of observations made by Mr. Mulroney, now tumbling onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers from Peter Newman’s taped tell-all, it appears that, for Mr. Mulroney, distinction is not just a matter of having been prime minister—it’s being better and smarter and shrewder than everyone else who was on the scene with him or just before him.

Vegematics have fewer blades than a telephone call from Brian Mulroney. Pierre Trudeau, Lucien Bouchard, Kim Campbell, Clyde Wells—they are all diced and sliced with an energy and thoroughness that, in some cases, is actually painful to read—and, in some cases, is inaccurate and malicious as well. Clyde Wells, for example, may have many flaws of character, but to select as his damning deficiency that he is unprincipled turns the man completely upside down. Principle is Clyde Wells’s oxygen.

Kim Campbell did mess up her campaign, but the great tsunami that washed over the Tory party, and left poor Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne alone on the beach after the vote,
had been set roiling by the anger Mr. Mulroney stirred before he left office. Mr. Mulroney prefers not to see that some of his setbacks, and some of the abiding dislike some Canadians still carry toward him, were stimulated in part by his own actions and his own character.

But the desire to be the tallest tree in the forest is not an excuse or a reason for taking a chainsaw to every other tree. He is not content with having been elected prime minister—twice. Others must be diminished, so that he stands taller. At least that’s the message of the tapes.

But the tapes, raw and unedited, are at the very best problematic. They are in the idiom of private conversation—hence their unfettered flow and pungency. Mr. Mulroney may have signed off on them, but they retain the flavour of a person talking to a confidant. They are true in the sense that he says what he says, but taking the private manner and loosing it raw between two book covers adds a force and an impact that doesn’t properly belong to them. They have been transposed from one medium to another. They have been translated from a sphere of assumed intimacy to the public record. And this amplifies the negatives for Mr. Mulroney in a way that is not fair to him.

The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe, and the word “regiment,” on which it turns, here carries a meaning of “authority,” “sway,” “rule” and, quite possibly, something close to our modern terms “status” and “prestige.” Regiment in this context is a constellation of all of these meanings.
The authority of a real king was always a fasces of tangible power—command over life and death, the control of armies, unquestioned rule—and the invisible but equally mighty influences of dread and reverence.

It’s no news that kings (or queens) aren’t what they used to be. Their regiment has decayed and vanished. Modern-day royals, most emphatically the set at Buckingham Palace with which Canada has historical and constitutional associations, exist in a twilight of anachronistic significance, tabloid-feeding celebrity and lower-rank pop-star acclaim.

All of which may be disappointing to those who struggle to hold the monarchy in esteem, and may be poignant, too, but none of it is news to the least-engaged consciousness. It raises the question now, more forcefully than at any other period, about our “ties” to the monarchy, of the value of those ties, particularly the utility and prestige of the one office in our country still bearing the imprimatur of its royal origins: the governor general.

The case for the governor general is what I take to be the burden of Adrienne Clarkson’s
Heart Matters
. It is a memoir of Clarkson’s interesting and distinguished life. It is a divided book. Its earlier pages are, at times, an affecting recounting of her family’s progress from difficult beginnings and wartime peril, their arrival in Canada, her growing up, the complex, painful, yet always affectionate relationship with her mother, her pride in her father, and his pride in her.

But from the moment the book takes up her adult career, from the days of CBC’s
Take 30
all the way through
to
Adrienne Clarkson Presents
(to my mind, a real foreshadowing of how she saw herself in the governor general’s office), the book takes on a drier, brisker tone. We depart from subdued recollection and memoir to more bristling justification and defence.

In the old days of luxuriant titles, this section of
Heart Matters
might have carried the scroll,
An Apology for the Office of the Governor General of Canada and My Contributions to It, Together with Some Observations on the Worth of Politicians, the Male of the Species, the Conduct of Some Others in Lesser Office, and a Return of Fire to the Last Prime Minister But One, Mr. Paul Martin, for His Imperfect Treatment of the GG
.

Clarkson thinks very highly of the office of governor general, an opinion that any reading of
Heart Matters
will confirm is not entirely unhinged from the fact that she held it. She seems to believe that this last echo of Canada’s colonial beginnings under the imperial flag has a merit and vitality crucial to the understanding, perhaps even the survival, of the glorious experiment we call Canada. This is a high-voltage estimation of what is at best a decorative, expensive, ceremonial survival.

In the twenty-first century, royalty has been decanted of all its mystique, seriousness and point. Insofar as the office of the GG is presumed to be a surrogate representation of the “real thing” in Great Britain, of what possible value can it be? The British royals have become vessels of the most ordinary clay, and set an almost alpine standard of dysfunction, vulgarity, selfishness and self-absorption. All regiment
is gone. So the office of GG is only a second-hand, downmarket edition of something that has lost its function and place. We have the shadow of the tattered shadow.

Clarkson romanticizes both the life and function of Rideau Hall, and seems to think its pious protocols and dusty duties are of real power, that the advice of a GG to a prime minister, or where a cabinet should be sworn in, are matters on which the edifice of the modern state may depend.

All hymns, I suppose, however boring, are lovely if you’re the bishop of the cathedral in which they are sung. And a five-year stint at the top of the social order—one area in which the charisma of royal surrogacy still has cogency—must be a very pleasant interlude. Rideau Hall is still an address to conjure with, and the position of governor general has the considerable charm of being the cynosure of a continuous garden party. The governor general gets to open Parliament, drive around in a barouche, host literati and distribute medals, meet the interesting of foreign nations and take first rank at every occasion of national ceremony.

There is not one of these duties or recreations that would be diminished one whit, jot or tittle, were it to be performed or exercised by a ceremonial head of state who owed nothing to the Crown and its by now very mixed traditions.

Heart Matters
offers some not encouraging illustrations of Clarkson’s judgment. The first is that there is a
Heart
Matters
at all. So much of the book’s argument stands on the importance of certain traditions and codes that adhere to the office of governor general—from the vital secrecy imposed on those invited to hold the office until the invitation is confirmed, to the necessity of swearing in cabinet officers at Rideau Hall and the propriety of consultations by a given prime minister with the GG herself—that it is a shock that Clarkson has violated the deepest sanction of them all. She has turned publicist while the viceregal cushions are still warm from her imprint.

Does not discretion adhere to the office so late venerated and vacated? Nannies to Donald Trump may write tell-alls in the age of faux-celebrity (and I think they should be encouraged to do so). I applaud “personal assistants” to tyrannous and mouth-breathing rock stars who launch rockets of steamy prose at the bottoms they so recently, ravenously kissed. Politicians who have been “passed over” by their leaders may strike deadly blows in return. But Her Excellency? Why such haste to ventilate?

We now know how highly she thinks of Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline, and begrudge her none of that obliging warmth. But the gratitude describes a self-serving loop. Chrétien appointed her, and it would be a rude doyenne of Rideau Hall indeed who did not see the wisdom of the man who set her there. I wonder, now that an ex-governor general has set the illustrious example, how long we shall have to wait for the aides, valets, caterers and assorted functionaries of Rideau Hall to oil up their laptops and give us
the view from below the stairs of the Clarkson-Ralston Saul era.

The loyalty to Chrétien wanders into something like an outright attack on his successor. It is evident that Clarkson does not like Paul Martin, and I am wondering why all of Canada should know this now. She obviously sees Martin, and those who assisted him, as tacky and vulgar. They want a different venue for their swearing-in. Clarkson will have none of it. And when the GG’s wishes prevail over the elected prime minister’s, some of these rude rubes show up at Rideau Hall … in sneakers and T-shirts. Egad.

Clarkson has great confidence in herself as an observer. This may be a byproduct of her time as a journalist. I am not sure that confidence is buttressed by a passage in which she speaks of her ability to see the large view of things “in the way that Tolstoy saw the whole field in describing the Battle of Borodino in
War and Peace
.” This passage comes at the tail end of an account of the great PR difficulties that surrounded the expensive and crowded “circumpolar junket” of the GG and thirty-five or so Canadian worthies. Whatever may have been at stake in that ruckus, I feel it’s less in the territory of Tolstoy than of P.G. Wodehouse.

I find my faith in her judgment further estranged by the near-risible certitude of a few of her observations on politicians and men. She adverts at one point to the clotted speculations of Carl Jung, and I feared for a paragraph of two we were on a Ferris wheel of outdated misogyny.