Customer Reviews

Hell or High Water: My Life in and out of Politics

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Paul Martin is the most highly respected finance minister in Canadian history. I was mostly interested in the recipe: how did he control the federal budget? How did he set the priorities? How did he get cabinet cooperation? How did he manage provincial expectations? I was also curious about his business career and what he thinks of the financial mess that preoccupies us now. I normally hate politics...but I actually liked the anecdotes, the war stories and the humour.

He comes across as an ambitious pragmatic man with noble goals in a vicious snake pit!

While former prime minister Paul Martin's autobiography reveals very little that is startlingly new, it does provide a decent profile of the life of a prominent career politician dedicated to serving the Canadian public at the highest level possible. What I found most fascinating about Martin's reflections on his life in Ottawa over five decades (including the time he spent in the nation's capital as the son of another famous politician) was his ability to develop and pursue a vision for a stronger Canada on the economic world stage. He doggedly stuck to forcing the country to adopt a serious fiscal restraint program in the 1990s so it could be more able to afford better social programs like national daycare and improved health care. His life as a highly-successful businessman, turned politician, is a story that comes with many interesting twists and turns, but all invariably leading him to eventually becoming PM, a role in which he could best encourage constructive national change. Undoubtedly, Martin was well equipped for the job of finance minister during those troubling deficit years, as witnessed by his determination to turn around government spending before it sank the country. However, in his run for the top, he admits that he lacked a certain political savoir faire as to how to handle his enemies within the party. His many disagreements with Chretien and the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party came back to haunt him big time during his brief tenure as national leader. Reading between the lines, I get the distinct feeling that Martin never quite understood how to be politically adept when it came to outsmarting those who had it in for him. His head was always somewhere in the clouds over matters such as resolving international issues like Third World debt, when he should have been more diligent in handling organizational matters on the ground in key Quebec ridings. To this day, I still find it astounding that he, as finance minister, knew nothing about the Sponsorship program until it became a full-blown scandal in 2004. While a real team player at the global level, Martin definitely lacked Jean Chretien's savvy in knowing the domestic political terrain. Many of his prominent political supporters and advisers seemed to connect with him on a world plane that was so far removed from the daily moil and toil of Canadian politics. I like this book for its honesty, humility and instructional value on what the dark, dirty world of politics can teach us about ourselves. Martin, while I would never have voted for him, is a decent man who strove very hard to make Canada a better place to live, but failed because, like Hamlet, he did not hone his political survival skills. This is a book written by a proud - not arrogant - Canadian who resorts to a lot of useful reflecting about the things he did achieve on behalf of all Canadians.

Paul Martin's attempt at an autobiography ranks low in terms of recent similar works by Mulroney and Chretien. While the first part of the book gets the reader's hopes up, with some great insight into Martin's life in business and education, in addition to heartfelt stories about his father and mother, the second part is painful at points. It is clear that according to Martin, his tenure as finance minister was mired by attempts by former PM Chretien to undermine him constantly, and the parts dealing with his time as Prime Minister seems to be a litany of excuses for why things did not get done, and how everyone else was to blame.