Fire and Ashes (8 page)

I think back now to the Knights of Pythias Hall in Springhill, Nova Scotia, the Sam Hughes Legion Hall in Lindsay, Ontario, or the Floata Seafood and Chinese Restauarant in Vancouver’s Chinatown. These and countless others were the scuffed-up venues of our country’s democracy. On the walls there were the flags and banners, the portraits of the Queen and former prime ministers together with the insignia of the local Lions or Rotary Club. When you walked in, there would be tea and coffee urns together with sandwiches on a table at the back, banquet chairs spread out in a semicircle around a podium and the party faithful ranged in front of you, many retired and semi-retired, the farmers in baseball caps, the union men in T-shirts with their union local on them, the women in sensible dresses and shoes. There was an air of quiet decency about them and a polite skepticism that you were there to overcome. They were the delegates and they had the power.

Four times a day, sometimes more, during that long leadership campaign, I would stride into one of these venues and soon be shaking hands with complete strangers, trying to figure out who they were and what they wanted to hear, giving a short stump speech, taking questions,
signing some posters and then moving on to the next airport, the next hall, falling asleep in the next hotel room at the end of a long day.

To get a hearing with them, you had to know what they wanted to hear. The professionals call it “reading the room,” and when good politicians read a room right, they will have the audience in the palm of their hand. When they get it wrong, they will die a slow death up there under the lights. I died my fair share of deaths until I learned to unlearn everything I had known up to that point. I had to unlearn being clever, being rhetorical, being fluent, and start appreciating how much depends on making a connection, any connection, with the people listening to you. I learned to find some story from my own life that would tell them, in so many words: I
know
you and you know me. In Quebec I would talk about the dairy farm my uncle and aunt (mostly my aunt) ran in Richmond. In the Maritimes I would talk about my great-grandfather from New Glasgow and my grandmother born in Fredericton. These roots, which had been a little abstract to me before, became real to me now. Out west, I talked about my dad’s time laying track in the Rockies. I did what all politicians do: I tried to make my story their story.

In appealing to delegates, I was also talking to members of a party that had just been thrown out of office and was struggling to regain its confidence and sense of direction. I told each delegate in every room that I was the candidate of change and renewal. I was untainted by the scandals that had damaged the party brand. But I was also a loyalist, with Liberal roots going back forty years. It was a delicate line to walk. I was running to lead a party whose culture of intrigue disgusted me, but I was seeking votes from loyalists who wouldn’t vote for me if my disgust were too plain. I needed to convince them—handshake by handshake, answer by answer, smile by smile—that I had what it took, that I was prepared to work for it and that they could trust me.

Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I had a bad habit of looking down and away when people talked to me. I’d always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical, delivered by your eyes and your hands. Whatever you say, your body must communicate the message: you can trust me.

Now that I was in the fray, I admired the masters of the art even more, and I thought back to a master class I had been given in politics in 2001. I was steering Bill Clinton through a room at the Davos meetings at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. I was amazed at his ability to remember names—and not just names but whole family stories—as he squeezed this hand, leaned in to kiss that cheek, locked his gaze on another’s, and kept moving, baling them in like a combine harvester. When I met President Obama later on, I will never forget the grip on my elbow, the quick mention of a book of mine, a reference to a mutual friend, Samantha Power, and his casual grace, together with the capacity to make you feel, when you were speaking, that you were the only person of interest to him in the room.

These are ancient arts, the skills that are commended in Baldassare Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
, written in the early sixteenth century and based on his experience at the court of the Duke of Mantua. The word he used to describe the key talent in politics was
“sprezzatura.”
It is also without an exact equivalent in English but basically means the gift of making people feel at ease in your company. Castiglione’s advice speaks down the ages:

“Uncontrived and effortless”: the great politicians make contrivance look uncontrived. All of the human skills in politics involve artifice, but the artifice must be concealed with ease and grace. This artificial graciousness can be learned with time and experience, but it cannot be taught. It’s not a technique or a routine. There is no executive leadership course that will give it to you. It is a form of gracefulness in human behaviour that is more akin to athletic ability than technical intelligence. If natural grace isn’t there to begin with, it can’t be acquired or displayed with any conviction. When we call a politician a “natural,” we mean she has this mysterious ability to make a connection with others, to make them feel at ease, to make them feel special. All naturals get better with practice, but unless it comes naturally, it doesn’t look real. What must be real is not so much the smoothness for which politicians are both envied and despised, but real curiosity and interest in people’s stories, in the way they tell them and the meaning they are trying to convey. Of all the qualities that go into
sprezzatura
, I would rate listening, being able to deeply listen to your fellow citizens, as the most underrated skill in politics. For what people want in a politician, what they have a right to demand, is to be listened to. Often, listening is all you can do. Their problems may not admit of a political solution, or at least not a solution you can devise. People will accept that you cannot solve their problems if you give them all of your attention, looking into their eyes, never over their shoulder at the next person in line.

I was learning all of this for the first time, and I was up against some stiff competition, rivals for the leadership who were strong
candidates with longer histories in the party than mine, all of them with lots of experience with the arts and skills of politics, all of them with the ability to put a name to a face and call in old favours.

As we travelled the country, I learned that people’s inner map of political concerns begins with the local and widens out to the provincial and national. It is an inner map that pays no attention to constitutions and jurisdictions. People would always ask me questions, and if the question was about the local hospital shutting down or a daycare centre closing in their community, you couldn’t duck it by telling them that none of it was under federal jurisdiction. People won’t listen to you on national issues unless you display literacy about local ones, and the literacy test was tough to pass. We were once in Esterhazy, a small town in rural Saskatchewan that both Zsuzsanna and I had visited before we entered politics. It’s a place on the plains where the Hungarian pioneers came in the 1880s to settle the land, and there is a haunting graveyard on a hill outside of town where some of them are buried. My wife, being Hungarian, pronounced the town’s name the way she did back home, with a short
a
, but when I did so from the platform, there were frosty looks from the crowd. They all pronounced it with a long
a
. Your ability to connect with people could turn on a detail as small as the right vowel sound.

The intensely local nature of politics often left me wondering what exactly we did share as a people and as a country. It is the politicians’ job to speak for what we share, but at first there didn’t seem to be much in common at all.

This felt especially true in Quebec. I had thought my French was pretty fluent, but it was tested when I was campaigning for delegates in those rural parts of the province where the majority speak only French and have such a strong accent that it can be hard to understand. Establishing trust in a second language can make you feel as if you’re
talking long-distance on a bad line. Besides, my French was more Parisian than Québécois, a fact the nationalists in the province kept pointing out. It took me a while to get comfortable and to feel I could command a hearing. My wife said that I changed when I spoke French: I made more expansive gestures and I hammed it up a bit more.

Quebeckers have wanted many things from our national politics, but it all comes down to one big thing: recognition of their distinct identity as a people. It remains an amazing achievement that a French colony of sixty thousand souls defeated by the British in 1759 has grown into a dynamic, close-knit and passionate community of nearly eight million people. But for all their success, they never forget they are an island of French speakers in a continent of three hundred million English and Spanish speakers.

Our party had a visceral connection to Quebec. The party’s real founder, Wilfrid Laurier, was the first French-Canadian prime minister, and since Laurier, three Quebeckers—Louis St. Laurent, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien—have served as party leader and prime minister. Our vocation as a party had always been national unity, drawing French and English together in common cause, but corruption scandals had been draining away our credibility in the province and we were losing seats to the separatist Bloc Québécois on the left and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives on the right. Even the New Democrats, long marginal to Quebec politics, were making inroads into the Liberal vote in the province.

Regaining our credibility in Quebec was crucial if we were to return to power. At every stop in Montreal, Quebec City, the little communities on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and the farmland on the south shore near the American border, I reminded delegates that Quebec was the place that took in my Russian family and gave them refuge. I talked about the graveyard overlooking the St. Francis River
where they were all buried and how I wanted it always to be part of my country. It had always seemed to me that offering Quebec more powers within Canada was both divisive and beside the point. The real issue was to demonstrate a conviction that the country as a whole was unthinkable unless Quebec and Quebeckers were at the heart of it.

In late June of 2006, when Quebeckers were getting ready to celebrate their holiday, the Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a journalist asked whether, given what I had written about nationalism in my book
Blood and Belonging
in the 1990s, I thought Quebec was a nation. It was neither an innocent question nor an academic one. The separatists in Quebec had been insisting that they were a nation, and that as such, they deserved an independent state of their own. Two referenda had been fought on these issues, and the separatists had come within sixty thousand votes of winning the last one in 1995. In
Blood and Belonging
, thirteen years before, I had written: “Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state.”
²
But nations, I went on to say, can
share
the same state and I believed we always would. Of course Quebec was a nation.

No sooner had I finished the interview than I experienced the extraordinary difference between words spoken by a writer and words spoken by a politician seeking national office. That single remark triggered a countrywide debate. Some columnists called me brave, others an idiot savant. All my competitors in the leadership race were forced to declare their own positions, some for, some vehemently against. For a time, Quebeckers, especially young ones, flocked to our banner because we had seemed to recognize them in a way our party had not done before.

In politics calling a fact a fact can be the equivalent of pulling the pin out of a hand grenade. As far as I was concerned, it was a fact that francophone Quebeckers have a national identity: they’ve always identified both as Quebeckers and as Canadians. It doesn’t make their
loyalty to Canada less strong, but it makes it more complex. The genius of our politics lay in the fact that we had never imposed a single national identity on anyone. We were not a country founded on
e pluribus unum
—out of many, one—but instead a complex quilt of overlapping identities. We had created a country in which you could be Quebecker and Canadian in whatever order you chose. What I rejected about separatism was not the pride in nationhood but the insistence on a state, the belief that Quebeckers must make an existential choice between Quebec and Canada. This was a choice most Quebeckers had always refused to make, for the very good reason that they felt some loyalty to both. They wanted to be Quebeckers and Canadians in whatever order they believed right. It was a kind of moral tyranny on the part of separatists to force them to choose between parts of their own selves. After much travail, I said, we had understood that countries must be built on freedom of belonging. From this followed our system of federalism. We could not centralize power in this country, I said, because we could not centralize identity.

No sooner had my words been uttered than English Canadians began asking whether I was putting the national unity of the country at risk, while nationalist Quebeckers wanted to know when I would recognize their nationhood in the Canadian constitution. I replied that I was against opening the Pandora’s box of our constitution. Our habit of turning every political question between Quebec and Canada into a constitutional negotiation was a serious mistake. Aha, said the Quebec nationalists, all your talk about the nation means nothing. I’d planted my stake in the ground on the national unity issue, and now it was time to pay the consequences.