Prime ministers and public administration.

Dutil, Patrice

"This morning I got a panicky message from Ottawa"

--Allan Gotlieb (p. 423)

Memoirs 1939-1993. By BRIAN MULRONEY. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 2007. Pp. xi, 1121, bibliographical references, index.

My Years as Prime Minister. By JEAN CHRETIEN. Toronto: Albert Knopf Canada. 2007. Pp. 435, index.

The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. By JANICE STEIN and EUGENE LANG. Toronto: Viking Canada. 2007. Pp. xv, 348, index.

The Way it Works: Inside Ottawa. By EDDIE GOLDENBERG. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 2007. Paperback edition. Pp. 402, index.

Washington Diaries 1981-1989. By ALLAN GOTLIEB. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 2007. Paperback edition. Pp. 647, index.

Canada's eighteenth and twentieth prime ministers published their memoirs within weeks of each other in the early fall of 2007. For Brian Mulroney, this is a literary first, delivered almost fifteen years after his departure from office. For Jean Chretien, it is the sequel to his 1985 memoirs Straight from the Heart (Toronto: Key Porter Books) and so focuses mostly on his prime ministership. Both books prove to be highly readable for various reasons, bur must be evaluated within the standards of autobiography rather than scholarship. They are necessarily subjective and self-serving, and researchers looking for grand revelations in these pages will be disappointed. Students of public administration looking for insights and impressions on how the modernizations of the federal public service were perceived and understood will find some reward, however, especially when these memoirs are placed in the already growing literature on those twenty years of mie. The newly released paperback editions of Goldenberg and Gotlieb--two proven bestsellers--as well as Stein and Lang's examination of the central issues in Canadian foreign policy since 9/11, offer opportunities to compare insights into how these two fin de siecle prime ministers viewed and worked with public administrators.

Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien have a great deal in common, yet their memoirs show how they are very different men. They were born within five years of each other in modest Quebec families, far from economic, political or cultural power centres, and both graduated in law from Laval University. Both set modern political records of sorts. Brian Mulroney won the greatest number of seats, in 1984, and was the first "Conservative" to win clean back-to-back majorities since Macdonald. Jean Chretien won three majorities in a row: something no one had done since Mackenzie King. Finally, both men changed the policy of their parties in at least one fundamental way. Brian Mulroney turned his back on the old protectionism of his party and fully embraced free trade with the United States. Jean Chretien turned his back on the Liberal idea of "big" government and rolled back government involvement in the economy by slashing programs, cutting jobs, and reducing transfers.

But the similarities end there. Chretien married young and pursued a political career in the Liberal Party as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He was an MP before Mulroney finished his studies. The latter chose an altogether different route, first pursuing his career as a lawyer in Montreal, then as an executive at Iron Ore Canada. When Mulroney was finally elected to the House of Commons, Chretien was a twenty-year veteran and had been a minister of the Crown for sixteen. Yet, Mulroney became prime minister at the age of forty-five; Chretien was almost sixty. The enormous gap in personal style and experience would play a great role in how each man would approach the job of prime minister. Mulroney, like most Progressive Conservatives, came to government with a deep suspicion of the bureaucracy but learned to work with it and indeed depend on it. Chretien assumed the prime ministership well aware of the limitations of the public service and, if anything, grew to depend on it less and less.

The different approaches to power colour their accounts. Mulroney's memoirs have an air of discovery about them; they are remarkably well written and surprisingly engaging. The book combines reflections on his personal and political past with a rich dose of material culled from both private and published sources. Mulroney made effective use of an excellent researcher in Arthur Milnes, a reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, who dedicated years of work to this book. Milnes mined the prime ministerial papers and scoured the published records of people Mulroney encountered to bring certain realities to light or to confirm suspicions and impressions. (The book features six pages of a "select bibliography," as well as a comprehensive index.) Mulroney inevitably deploys some of his legendary charm in his writing as he invites the reader to share some briefing notes, speaking points, and personal memos he wrote on certain occasions (though he indicates he kept no systematic diary). Readers are thus in the debt of two hard-working individuals who have produced what are, in this reviewer's opinion, the best memoir of any Canadian prime minister and one of the best in the Canadian genre.

Jean Chretien chose a different strategy to compose his book. As with Straight from the Heart, he used a process of dialogue with Toronto writer Ron Graham. The Chretien voice is unmistakable: the certitude, the laser-beam focus on what is priority, the cheesy romanticism. While this may work in politics, it is less successful as a literary device. The shortcuts in the logic and the paucity of detail give the book an almost technical veneer. The elegant Graham style is there also, particularly when Chretien finds himself on the defensive.

Readers familiar with biographies of Mulroney (1) will not be surprised by the content of the first part of the book. It covers the years from his childhood, to his bold entrance in national politics in 1976, when he presented himself as candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. Few people had then heard of the thirty-seven-year-old lawyer from Montreal, but a few details emerge in a different light that would explain his sudden and easy rise to prominence. Mulroney was born a political animal and found inspiration in the "strong men" that dominated politics when he grew up: Maurice Duplessis and John Diefenbaker, and there are traces of both the politics and ideas of these men in Mulroney's approach to governing in the 1980s. From Duplessis, Mulroney inherited a certain idea of Quebec's place in Confederation as a strong partner but with a freedom to manoeuvre to protect vital cultural interests. From Diefenbaker, Mulroney drew on a number of traits, including affection for things northern (eventually leading to the Nunavut agreement) and an approach to international affairs that emphasized strong ties to the United Kingdom and openness to the developing world. On the United States, it has to be said, Mulroney parted company with the old chief.

His memoirs give no clear idea as to why he chose the Progressive Conservative Party as his political home--it was simply the place where he had the most chums. It was as a student at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia in the late 1950s that Mulroney made the friends and contacts who would eventually carry him to power twenty years later. Mulroney's account bears witness to the great pleasure he had in cultivating friendships, associations and partnerships. That ability--matched surely in the prime ministerial league only by John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier--would shape his approach to politics and policy-making. (It also got him into a lot of trouble, but readers will find no mention of Airbus, shady characters or illegitimate business in this book.)

The Liberals did make overtures a few times, but Mulroney declined without hesitation. From his earliest days, he was anti-Liberal. He had some sympathies for the Pearson Liberals but found the Trudeau projects to be ruinous to Canada, teeming with lost opportunities and woefully incomplete. He uses his memoirs to get a lot of things off his chest about the Left and the media, but the bitterness is inescapable when he turns to the politics of the Liberal Party. Pierre Trudeau, the members of the Liberal "rat-pack," who hounded him mercilessly through his first term, and both Chretien and Martin (who, he argues repeatedly, both benefited the most from his policy and program initiatives) come in for regular beatings.

Mulroney's memoirs allege that nothing came to him without hard work and pluck. He was indeed creative in his liaisons, worked long and inflexible hours to overcome hardships, and evidently proved sensitive to those around him. The qualities that endeared him to friends and business associates, however, also made him hypersensitive to slights. Countless are those who are singled out for their perceived hypocrisies, and some public servants do not escape his wrath. One official--and future lieutenant-governor of Ontario--unexpectedly makes an appearance: "Just before we arrived in South Africa, Canada's high commissioner in Pretoria was astonished to receive instructions from Ottawa that he was to provide Mila and me with no assistance as we went about arranging with our friend Nelson Mandela," he writes in a rare mention of his life after 1993. "That instruction came from James Bartleman, foreign advisor to Jean Chretien. We met with Mandela anyway" (p. 882).

Mulroney came to power with few ideas but the intention of slashing political patronage and cutting down the bureaucracy, or, as he proclaimed on the campaign trail, to "give pink slips and running shoes." He failed spectacularly in the first task, and his government suffered numerous setbacks with its over-secretive approach to appointments and lobbying. He did cut down on the bureaucracy, notably by privatizing dozens of government corporations. He appears in these memoirs to take his time in making decisions and, at some moments, to be gullible and a bit naive in relying on characters who did not deserve his support. Mulroney in fact learned an important lesson within two years of attaining power: many of his political friends were causing him endless headaches (he consistently shuffied his cabinet to try to get the right mix), and his own administrative deficiencies needed the experience of capable, non-partisan hands. In an interesting chapter, entitled "Clearing the Decks," he recounts his recognition, in late 1985, that the PMO was not working properly. He turned for advice and found that the best people he could find were in the public service. "I don't need a strategist," he said to Derek Burney, a career official, (2) "but I need someone to organize my office. I want to focus my time on major issues like free trade and tax reform, not tainted tuna. You know those major issues and you can help" (p. 505).

Chretien does establish some of the more important differences between his approach to the job and Mulroney's. "A great deal of my success," he writes, "was due to the fact that I deliberately chose to undersell and outperform rather than oversell and underperform" (p. 16). Mulroney tended to do the opposite as he trumpeted bold objectives and often fell short.

Both prime ministers include very interesting chapters on their daily routines that inevitably reveal much about their outlooks and practices. Chretien rose early and exercised every morning. Mulroney would rise at 6:30 and go through the papers--he never exercised. He would see the kids off to school and then call the clerk of the Privy Council (in order, Gordon Osbaldeston, Paul Tellier, Glen Shortliffe) and the chief of staff. He would then receive a guest--foreign visitors, cabinet ministers, party officials or friends--for a working breakfast (the 1980s, it will be recalled, was the decade of the "power breakfast").

Chretien, after a quick breakfast, headed to the suite of offices on the third floor of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. (Unlike Mulroney and Trudeau, Chretien shunned the Langevin block). From 9:30 to 10:00, he would meet with his chief of staff Jean Pelletier and the clerk (in order, Glen Shortliffe, Jocelyne Bourgon, Mel Cappe, Alex Himelfarb). Mulroney also left 24 Sussex in time to arrive at the office by 9:00. He would meet again with the clerk and the chief of staff to preview the day.

For both men, Tuesday mornings were reserved for cabinet. On typical days, Mulroney would repair to lunch at 24 Sussex, again with the clerk, the chief of staff or parliamentary colleagues, to discuss policy questions, political problems, forthcoming travels. He would shave again, change shirts, and get ready for Question Period "full of feigned outrage and unrequited indignation in both official languages ... there were moments of genuine detailed passion, real importance, even danger during these sessions and these moments I treated with genuine concern. The rest was showtime" (p. 999).

Chretien's Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays were filled with meetings with ministers, advisers, officials and staff. He writes that he preferred to deal with "problems" immediately and liked to deal with people face-to-face. He would return to 24 Sussex for lunch and was back in the office at 1:30 to meet the team that readied him for Question Period. He entered the house for the 2:15 show. "I enjoyed Question Period too much and loved the challenge it provided," he writes. "Far from being a dreaded burden, it had become an exciting part of my life" (p. 106). He returned to the office at 3:00 to finish the day with the usual round of meetings, including with MPs--mostly opposition members--who wanted to discuss issues. At 6:00, he would come back to 24 Sussex, have a "quiet dinner," and, after receiving another delivery of homework at 8:00, he would work two more hours reading briefing papers, listening to some Bach or Chopin. The day would finish off reading a history or biography on an American or European subject--"anything to do with Canada seemed too close to my job to be relaxing" (p. 122). He was in bed by 11:00, making a point of never reading a newspaper or watching the evening news. Mulroney's day ended differently in that it was filled with meetings, featured music from the likes of Yves Montand, watching the evening news, and a final nightcap call to the clerk.

Wednesday was caucus day: "the most important day on my calendar," writes Mulroney (p. 998). On Wednesdays, he would actually start the day with breakfast with a few backbenchers at 24 Sussex and then would meet with the entire caucus until 1:00. Chretien is less exuberant and a bit condescending: "The MPs felt good knowing they could make their pitch directly to the prime minister and maybe boast back home that they had changed the course of Canadian history" (p. 36). He saw it as an opportunity "to remind caucus members that they couldn't always get what they wanted or that a certain minister had acted in accordance with government policy" (p. 37).

On political-administrative matters, the two prime ministers again differ. Chretien is quick to underscore the help he received from his staff--Gerard Pelletier, Eddie Goldenberg, Chaviva Hosek, Peter Donolo, Patrick Parisot, Jean Carle, and many others. They were Chretien's inner sanctum and he met with them regularly. He consulted with Pelletier on a daily basis and with Goldenberg at any time of the day, it seems. "Everyone was influential," he writes, "because everyone was good--anyone who wasn't good didn't stay long" (p. 20). It is interesting that he only mentions in passing the four clerks of the Privy Council who served under him. Reflecting on his reliance on a very strong cast of operatives in the PMO, he writes that "crises and confrontations were to be avoided or downplayed rather than manufactured or blown out of proportion. I had no interest in creating any more problems than we already faced simply to set myself up as the messiah who was going to solve them. But if there were problems that had to be tackled, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get at them" (p. 16).

Mulroney is lavish in his praise of public servants, and many are named, from Derek Burney to the various government photographers who documented his public life. "Canada has an excellent public service, and my government was well served by them at all times," he writes (p. 426). But there were limitations. Mulroney relied on the bureaucracy to execute policy, not to generate it. He often disagreed with it, particularly when it came to foreign policy. When he suspended aid to the Soviet Union in light of the attempted coup on Gorbachev, he writes that he "dispensed with the advice of the ever-cautious bureaucracy who had warned me that Canada should be prepared to work with whoever was in power in Moscow" (p. 873). He was not the first prime minister to have a high regard for some individuals in Foreign Affairs, * but, with little time for its general advice, he was also not the last. Trudeau was singularly non-plussed by the advice emanating from Foreign. Chretien gives it little attention in his memoir, and, judging from the Stein-Lang volume on Canada in Afghanistan, neither did Paul Martin.

Allan Gotlieb, a career Foreign Affairs official when he was noticed by Pierre Trudeau in the 1960s, brings his own astute perspective in Washington Diaries 1981-1989 on the Department of Foreign Affairs and how things generally worked in Ottawa during his stay in Washington as Canada's ambassador in the 1980s. His rich chronicle--his service straddling the Trudeau and Mulroney governments--offers tantalizing snapshots of Washington salons, the workings of the embassy, and of his most memorable personal and professional friends. He writes that Charles Ritchie, an icon of the Canadian diplomatic corps, urged him to keep a diary from the beginning. Gotlieb had already published a short account of his years as ambassador, but this book stands proudly in the same league as Ritchie's own delectable and insight-loaded logs. (3)

Gotlieb's memoirs are important for Canadians, and I suspect will eventually be for Americans also. For students of public administration, they are a treasure-trove of insights into the doubts and confidences of prime ministers, the policy process, the in-fighting, secretaries to cabinet, political insiders and cozily headquartered bureaucrats. Gotlieb retells his life at a critical juncture in Canadian-American relations, when decisions on defence, the Soviet Union, the cold war, free trade, and environmental issues were debated, made, unmade and then re-made. He offers a valuable guide to the nuts-and-bolts of networking in the American capital (the book's index is a veritable Rolodex of opinion-makers) as he hosts endless receptions, attends many more, buttonholes opinion leaders, and cajoles Ottawa into seeing the wisdom of his approach. While his admiration for Trudeau is not diminished by his experience in the U.S. capital, Gotlieb does not hesitate to condemn Ottawa's approach to Washington and the prime minister's personal pursuits in foreign affairs: "[H]e stayed too long. His economic policies looked backward, not forward. He had fallen in love with his own image as a peacemaker. He had become a tiers-mondiste. And a Soviet apologist. He left us united but weak and full of false beliefs about ourselves" (p. 221).

Gotlieb (and everybody else) expected that Mulroney would have him replaced quickly, given his strong personal ties to Trudeau, but he soon discovered that he was wrong. Gotlieb had already seen many qualities in Mulroney while the latter was leader of the Opposition and evidently enjoyed working with him through the following four years. Like the prime minister, he often betrays nothing less than acute anger at the recommendations coming out of Foreign Affairs. Gotlieb presents a prime minister who is fully engaged in policy and administrative matters and entirely committed to the personal diplomacy required of him in international affairs. Mulroney was eager to dissipate the confusions and suspicions that fogged Canadian-American relations and was convinced that this could only be realized by engaging the Reagan administration through a combination of personal connections with the American president and an aggressive approach to the presidential entourage. Mulroney played his part very well, developing as good a connection as possible with a man thirty years his senior and with whom he had absolutely nothing in common. Cynics have called it simple pandering. In Gotlieb's hands, the Canadian demarche is structured and focused. For sure, it is not without its bumps, scrapes, bruises and embarrassments, but the frustrations are evened out by consistent success in meeting Canadian interests, both with the Reagan and then with the George H.W. Bush administrations.

The respect is returned by Mulroney in his own memoirs. In fact, Mulroney reserves his highest compliments for the ranks of the senior bureaucracy. Beyond Burney and Gotlieb, he awards particular praise to many, but the most to Paul Tellier (clerk of the Privy Council from 1985-91) as "superb" and as "an advisor who had been part of every major decision my government had taken" (p. 911). It is telling that in his listing of compliments he received upon leaving office, Mulroney cites with particular warmth Gordon Osbaldeston's congratulations: "Those were just the words a retired prime minister needed to hear" (p. 1014).

Mulroney was declared the most accomplished prime minister (after Pearson) in 2003 by the Institute for Research in Public Policy. (4) Unfortunately, he does not explain much about the many administrative decisions that made the accomplishments possible. The difficult decisions that allowed the government to balance its operating budgets by squeezing departments and agencies are not recounted. The various privatizations, for instance, of twenty federally owned enterprises (starting with Northern Transportation and ending with Telesat Canada, but including Canadair, Air Canada--and much of the groundwork for privatizing CNR in 1995) are not mentioned, nor the new approaches (and deep frustrations) that beset the budgeting process. The efforts to give public servants "pink slips and running shoes" are not related. The policy process surrounding the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) is glossed over. The broad ambitions of Public Service 2000, the creation of Nunavut, the important decisions on the environment (to the point where Environment Canada was poised to become a de facto central agency in the late 1980s) are ignored. The revealing (for students of public service, anyway) Al-mashat story is not chronicled. If Mulroney was searching for a new bureaucracy, to borrow Donald Savoie's phrase, (5) there is not much hint of it here. No matter. The book is still filled with interesting insights on political-bureaucratic relations and well worth the read for its re-telling of key diplomatic moments, historic electoral campaigns, and, of course, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional adventures.

While cabinet affairs receive remarkably little attention in Mulroney's book, they are more of a going concern for Chretien. It has been almost a decade since Donald Savoie's Governing from the Centre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) dissected the nature of power in Ottawa and concluded that the decision- and policy-making apparatus in the federal government had entered a phase of unprecedented hyper-centralization. (6) It is interesting that both Chretien and Goldenberg single out this argument and respond that Canada's government was not particularly centralized in the 1990s and early 2000s. "Contrary to the myth of the prime minister as dictator--friendly or otherwise--I saw myself as the head of a team of ministers charged with the management of their own departments," Chretien writes.

I had no intention of breathing down their necks, looking over their shoulders, or interfering with their officials as long as everything was functioning smoothly, nor did I expect them to come running to me with every little problem. I gave strict instruction to my PMO staff that it was their role to coordinate the work of the departments, not to tell the ministers what to do. My job was to act like the orchestra conductor, not the pianist or the drummer, and because I insisted on being given time between meetings for reflection and strategy, I found most days surprisingly less strenuous than when I had been responsible to someone else for the day-to-day operations of a large ministry--until, of course, a crisis hit or the really tough decisions landed on my desk" (p. 33).

On Chretien's management of cabinet, Goldenberg sheds more light: Chretien was "comfortable knowing that Cabinet decisions are the sole prerogative of the prime minister; there are no votes taken in Cabinet, and decisions aren't dependent on the number of ministers who have spoken on one side of an issue or another. As soon as discussion ended on an issue, he usually called his decision and moved onto the next item" (p. 99).

Nevertheless, Chretien concedes to the centralization argument in one particular, but telling, way: "Certainly, no other PMO had ever been as consistently involved in the budget-making process as mine" (p. 58). This is a reality Eddie Goldenberg describes at length in The Way it Works. Indeed, Chretien reveals himself as impatient (far more than Mulroney) in putting financial affairs in order by cutting expenses. In describing his government's second budget (1995), which slashed transfers to provinces and pooled the federal transfers for health, education, and welfare into one block grant, the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), he notes that he "wasn't completely happy with the one-year delay, but Paul Martin had promised it to the provincial governments in order to give them time to adjust to the new levels and maybe past their next elections.... [W]e cut our own program spending deeper than we had cut our transfers to the provinces" (p. 274).

Chretien, like Mulroney, paints a picture of his administration as one coping with particularly bad inheritances. "Canada was in terrible shape," he writes, "exhausted, demoralized, and fractured" (p. 3). He points to the bloated deficits of the federal and provincial governments and unemployment at over eleven per cent as being, in his rather original interpretation, the product of a "made in Canada" recession created by "ideological monetary policy" and "a failure to help Canadian industry adapt to the new realities of free trade, financial globalization and rapidly changing technology" (p. 4). He describes the Mulroney legacy as "a mess" (p. 43): even 24 Sussex is characterized as a wreck (p. 29). Notwithstanding these pressing issues (they are never again mentioned), the Chretien program was quickly established on addressing three priorities: reducing the "horrendous deficit," re-asserting Canada's independence vis-a-vis the United States ("protect Canada from being seen as the fifty-first state of the United States"), and, in the face of the separatist threat in Quebec and the sense of alienation in other parts of the country, to keep Canada united (p. 42). Chretien did this, he argues, by restoring optimism: "Instead of visions, I preferred to talk about values--Canadian values, Liberal values, personal values" (p. 44).

In a rare moment of self-doubt, he writes that Mulroney "might have survived to fight and win a third term [against Chretien]" (p. 4). Chretien shows all too well that while his style of governing was dramatically different from Mulroney's, he retained almost intact the policies and machinery that the Progressive Conservative government had bequeathed. The GST was retained, the Free Trade Agreement was honoured, as was NAFTA. The massive departmental reorganization that was conceived in the last Mulroney years and finally installed in the short Campbell interregnum was left untouched. What Chretien did notably alter was the approach to Environment Canada, returning it to the ranks of ordinary line department. It, like all aspects of government, was subjected to the same draconian cutbacks triggered by the Program Review of 1994-95. Chretien devotes a chapter to the year when both serious budget-cutting and the Program Review Committee, led by Marcel Masse, were working through the system, but Goldenberg's description of the mechanics is far superior.

Chretien was the happy heir of another Mulroney legacy: a fractured House of Commons. The 1993 election changed it dramatically by installing the Bloc quebecois under Lucien Bouchard as the Official Opposition, joined by a vigorous Reform Party, under Preston Manning, a listless NDP, and a PC caucus decimated to two seats. Chretien could poke fun at his predecessor for the election outcome but the opposition played in his hands: the Bloc pressing for little of significance except constitutional change, while Reform shouted its demands that the government cut its budgets even more. The presence of the Reform Party in opposition allowed the Liberals the space necessary to cut budgets in a manner that Mulroney could only have dreamed of but for which he gets no credit. Chretien, in fact, has little time for the opposition. Bouchard is never mentioned, and Manning is dismissed: "Preston was too much of a preacher's son for my taste. Like many of the holier-than-thou people who like to lecture others about their high moral standards he was also a bit of a hypocrite" (p. 205). Chretien crushed his opposition easily in three general elections.

Chretien's memoirs reveal a man proud of his work. When he retired in December 2003, Canada was prospering, with a record of six consecutive surplus budgets (a seventh was on the way) and unemployment around the seven-per-cent mark. The Bloc quebecois still sat in the house, the NDP was still without direction, but, after a fifteen-year struggle, the Conservative Party of Canada had unified the right. "How did this remarkable turnaround happen? What critical decisions or mistakes did we make along the way? Why not choose one solution rather than another?" Chretien asks (p. 5). Unfortunately, he does not provide many answers. Readers are referred at the beginning to James Bartleman's Rollercoaster: My Hectic Years as Jean Chretien's Diplomatic Advisor, 1994-1998 (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 2005) and Goldenberg's The Way it Works for an account of critical decisions, and this is revealing of his approach to governing. Chretien writes that prime ministers "must not get bogged down in the details of government or try to micromanage the business of the nation. Rather, it is their job to establish priorities, develop strategies, supervise crises, handle the toughest problems, communicate the complicated issues in simple ways, and delegate as much as possible to their ministers" (p. 7).

In The Way it Works, Goldenberg wrote a singularly important book because he occupied an unprecedented position in the history of Canadian government. For thirty years, he was to Chretien what Mark Hanna was to President McKinley and Col. Edward House was to President Wilson. There are no equivalents elsewhere in the Canadian pageant. Part consigliere, part enforcer, part policy entrepreneur, part court jester who speaks hard truths with a smile, Goldenberg does not explain the Chretien success story but describes it remarkably well. His chapters on the transition to power, the budgetary process, Program Review, cabinet-making, and the structures of the PMO and the government of Canada's pursuit of post-secondary policies are important for their details. Seven chapters are dedicated to the Quebec question, and five examine aspects of foreign policy, mostly in dealing with the U.S. in the context of 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the book is disappointingly inept is in describing Chretien the man. Often caricatured in English Canada as a "bully" and in Quebec as a half-wit, Chretien displayed remarkable human qualities and weaknesses, but his personality is nowhere described.

In his own memoirs, Chretien comes across as remarkably loyal, modest and patient. He is undeniably very intelligent, straightforward and blunt. Like Mulroney (and perhaps like all our prime ministers), he was a worrier and sometimes reveals himself to be cynical and self-righteous. He could also be petty. On Eddie Goldenberg he writes: "Eddie was accurate about 90 percent of the time, because of all the years he had spent working at my side. I liked to tease him that the other 10 percent occurred only when he was pursuing an agenda of his own" (p. 34).

Chretien was, unlike Mulroney, wise to the ways of Ottawa and knew what to expect. "A prime minister has little room for friendship," he writes (p. 20). The importance of experience is particularly revealed when discussing the creation of his cabinet, something Mulroney hardly mentions at all. "Building a Cabinet is perhaps the most private and personal duty a prime minister has to perform," he remembers. Chretien applied a number of tests to potential candidates, one of which being "how they're perceived by the bureaucrats and the press" (p. 23). It is telling that he lumps them together. He devotes five pages to the very political considerations necessary in building a cabinet, concedes to engaging "in a lot of bargaining" (p. 27), and maintains that ideological balance was not a particular concern. Goldenberg, in contrast, points out that Chretien was very serious in striking an ideological balance in his cabinet (p. 64).

Administrative connoisseurship was clearly not a priority according to these memoirs, but it would be a mistake not to read its importance between the lines. Chretien, in fact, looked for very effective administrators for his cabinet. Taking pride in his own administrative prowess in his many ministries, Chretien valued competence far more than political clout and kept ministers in place as long as he could, and sometimes longer than he should. He writes, "If you make a mistake in administration, it will hurt you politically; and if you make a mistake politically, it will hurt your ability to govern with the support of the people. The two have to mesh if you want to do what is right as well as what is possible" (p. 37). Chretien took the same disciplined approach to cabinet meetings: "There weren't to be any more of Trudeau's six-hour marathons, which used to waste everyone's valuable time and leave us totally exhausted. My cabinet meetings weren't graduate seminars or discussion groups; they were a place to make decisions" (p. 32). Cabinet meetings started at 10:00 on Tuesday mornings and wrapped up two hours later. Not counting Treasury Board, Chretien reduced to two--economic policy and social policy - the number of permanent cabinet committees, from more than a dozen. Ad hoc committees were established only on indisputably pressing issues. For example, one was created in the wake of 9/11 on border security and Canada-U.S. border issues.

Chretien appreciated the public service. He notes that Glenn Shortliffe, the last clerk of the Privy Council to serve under Mulroney, immediately submitted his resignation, but Chretien did not accept it. He even addresses the Gomery recommendation that the clerk of the Privy Council no longer be both the PM's chief bureaucratic adviser and the head of the public service: "IT]he result," he curtly summarizes, "would be that the elected government would not be in charge of running anything" (p. 39). He wanted his ministers to become "allies" of the deputy ministers, which is again an interesting turn of phrase (p. 37). It was partly to restore that confidence that he cut down the allowance ministers had been given during the Mulroney years to build up their staffs. He does not mention the massive lay-offs and early retirements triggered by the cutbacks of the mid-1990s--initiatives that changed the face of the public service, caused severe demoralization, and, as some would argue, resulted in a dramatic loss of policy capacity and program execution.

In matters of substantive policy, what is striking in both volumes is the attention devoted to international affairs. Reading these two prime ministers would leave one believing that Canada played a mighty and significant role in global affairs. Not surprisingly, it is a file into which the prime minister can freely inject much of his personality and interests and where liaisons with foreign heads of state make this an imperative. No less than a third of Mulroney's pages are dedicated to his international work. (7) Although much of his attention was devoted to Canada's relations with the U.S., his book is filled with international figures, ranging from Benazir Bhutto, twice Pakistan's prime minister (and for whom Mulroney seemed to have a high regard) to Zhao Ziyang, China's premier and general secretary of the Communist Party. He takes great pains to explain his approach to Canada-U.S.S.R. relations as well as Canada's rapport with the U.K. and with France. Chretien also devotes at least a quarter of his book to the topic, but mostly around Iraq and Afghanistan issues. Mulroney held it as a point of principle that Canada-U.S. relations should not appear to be more than business-like and has precious little to say about other burning issues. Chretien's perception of the United States reveals the trademark smugness of a number of people in his entourage: "Like it or not, everybody recognizes the strength of the United Sates and the appeal of the American Dream. At the same time, everybody recognizes the brashness and insulation that are weaknesses in that superiority, and the poverty, racism, and inequality that are hidden behind its enormous wealth" (p. 332). Paul Martin would try to reverse this mindset. He created a cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations, for instance, and made plans to bolster the Canadian presence in Washington.

Jean Chretien takes delight in personalizing the government of Canada's approach on Afghanistan in his memoirs and uses the opportunity to embarrass his successor Paul Martin. "In January 2003, while responsibility for ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force, based in Kabul] was passing from the UN to NATO, I instructed John McCallum, the defence minister, to inform his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, that we were willing to take over from the Germans and the Dutch at the conclusion of their term in August" (p. 305). A few lines below, he continues: "Later, unfortunately, when my successor took too long to make up his mind about whether Canada should extend our term with ISAF, our soldiers were moved out of Kabul and sent south again to battle the Taliban in the killing fields around Kandahar" (p. 305).

The Unexpected War, by Janice Stein and Eugene Lang, takes readers around and below the wishes of prime ministers and reveals the convoluted policy-making process of Canada's foreign relations under Chretien and Paul Martin. Based on unprecedented access won by Lang's own work as a chief of staff to two Liberal ministers of defence from 2002 and 2006 and Stein's impressive academic credentials, this book is a marriage of two insightful perspectives--those of the seasoned observer and the perspicacious insider. The authors interviewed dozens of key players in the fall of 2006 and the winter of 2007 and deliver a lively and informative account of some of the most important decisions taken in Canadian foreign policy. Theirs is mostly a story seen from the perspective of key departmental ministers under Prime Minister Paul Martin--only a few interviews with anonymous public servants are noted. Absent its day in court, the bureaucracy suffers harsh judgment in this book. The shortage of interviews with senior officials is its only notable flaw.

Their account--winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing in March 2008--begins in the aftermath of 9/11, when Canada contributes its elite military force (the Joint Task Force 2, or JTF2) to defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban government in December 2001, Canada readily committed to a UN mission to stabilize Kabul. A few hundred troops were sent to an area of the world about which decision-makers (political and administrative) simply had no knowledge. Woven through the tale of Afghanistan's place in Canada's foreign policy from Chretien through to Martin and Harper are the Iraq question and the search for a new definition of Canadian foreign policy. The decision not to support the United States in invading Iraq in 2003 is not complicated to explain: Stein and Lang, as well as Goldenberg, show that Chretien could make the decision with little internal consultation. Caucus and cabinet both opposed invasion of Iraq without the sanction of the UN. Goldenberg, for his part, describes a prime minister on the phone with international leaders measuring the velocity of the political winds. With precious little support on the Security Council for UN involvement in Iraq, Chretien's decision was cast.

Instead, Stein and Lang dwell on the issue of Canada's continued participation in Persian Gulf operations that had been sanctioned by the United Nations previously, a position they call "half pregnant." Canada (with its three ships) would remain in command of the Persian Gulf task force (TF 151) but not work in support of the American-led invasion of Iraq. The Dutch, New Zealanders and French ordered their naval commanders not to allow their ships to operate at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, as part of TF 151. Things were more complicated in the case of the Canadian command, but the hair-splitting orders were carried out, and, while Canada's job was to protect the Gulf, Canadian forces were also instructed not to engage with Iraqi vessels. The same kind of confusion was raised by the fact that over a hundred Canadian officers served in the American military during the invasion of Iraq as part of an exchange program. Canadians in effect might be participating in the war, but Canada would have no part of it.

Of greater import to students of public administration is the judgment the authors make about the quality of the foreign policy apparatus. Stein and Lang do not offer much of a thesis: they do not contend that the Liberal government erred in making commitments in Afghanistan but that Canada stumbled from one decision to another without a clear perspective or policy in mind, and they are clearly frustrated by this. The blame is widely shared, in their view. The media's attention-span does not go beyond superficial personal conflicts. "Canada," they write, "has a very shallow and closed process of debate and discussion on issues of national security" (p. 78). Parliamentarians are shown to routinely pass up opportunities to spearhead thoughtful policy reviews.

What makes The Unexpected War so interesting is the detailed recounting of the political in-fighting between the civilian and the military halves of the Department of National Defence (DND) as well as between the DND and Foreign Affairs (identified respectively as "Mars" and "Venus"). Stein and Lang also pay particular attention to the commanding role of the prime minister and of his key advisers, who, more often than not, seem to focus on the wrong priorities. As Canada ramps up its efforts in Afghanistan, for instance, Paul Martin wants to focus on Haiti and Darfur. You can almost see the authors roll their eyes.

In their account, Foreign Affairs seems lost and unable to focus on priorities. In fairness, it must be acknowledged that the department was not particularly well served by the Liberals. In his memoirs, Chretien is especially proud of the Atlantic caper, when Canada boarded the Spanish ships that persisted in fishing off the Grand Banks. But that foreign policy was raised and driven by Brian Tobin as minister of fisheries. For his part, the actual minister of foreign affairs, Lloyd Axworthy, shared the Mulroney/ Trudeau attitude and essentially left the department to deal with mundane issues while he and his staff worked on priorities such as efforts in removing landmines. Axworthy was succeeded by Bill Graham, a Toronto law professor, who is depicted by Stein and Lang as "more conservative, more reluctant to challenge the bureaucracy in Foreign Affairs" (p. 39). Graham fares well in their book, but the authors note that he had finally reached the summit of his ambitions and was "disinclined to put at risk all his hard work and patience by alienating the professional foreign policy establishment in Ottawa unless it was absolutely essential. He knew well how angry civil servants could sabotage a minister" (p. 39). Pierre Pettigrew, Graham's successor in the Paul Martin government, is simply missing in action during the critical phases of decision-making. It was probably intended that way: Bill Graham (who was named minister of defence) was told by Martin's key adviser that "Paul will be his own foreign minister" (p. 130).

Stein and Lang depict a military establishment in Ottawa that seems disconnected from reality and is "so obsessed with its relationship with the Pentagon that it was willing to risk its own credibility with its political masters." They note with some surprise that "[m]ilitary leaders tried to drive foreign policy in the direction they wanted it to go, not normally an operative role for the military in a democracy" (p. 90). This should not be a revelation: most democracies have ensured that the military be accountable to a civilian minister precisely to correct such tendencies. They are not always successful, something Dwight Eisenhower famously noted in his parting address as he warned against the "military industrial complex" that pressured for an aggressive foreign policy. They even cite one anonymous senior official as saying that "the DND gets the military of other countries to pressure and lobby Ottawa on its behalf" (p. 90).

The foreign policy position described in the policy work around the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) scheme could well have been described by the authors as also "half pregnant." In this case, confusion reigned. The DND wanted badly to be a part of it, while Foreign Affairs did not. Meanwhile, the Americans waited for an answer. When President Bush finally visited Canada at the end of November 2004, fresh from re-election, and publicly asked that Canada support the BMD initiative, he caught Prime Minister Martin off-guard. Stein and Lang cite observers shocked at the "staggering inability to articulate what BMD was, and what we were being asked." One of Martin's political advisers stated, "We were given answers that resembled newspaper articles.... [T]here was no policy-based argument that I could discern other than 'if we don't do this we may piss the Americans off'.... We've said no to Iraq already and we have to be concerned about how far we can push the envelope" (p. 165). With no clarity emerging from either Foreign Affairs or DND, the PCO was hardly any better in coming up with a clear position. The embarrassment came to a head when Frank McKenna, the ambassador-designate, freely volunteered before a House of Commons committee that Canada was in essence a partner in BMD. He had not been briefed by the government on the subtleties of the position and, without knowing it, had contradicted the Martin government.

In the result, Martin had to finally declare that Canada would not participate in this aspect of continental defence but would of course remain a vital part of NORAD. Naturally, the DND was "floored" (p. 170) by the announcement. In the U.S., the news was greeted with indifference. According to the American ambassador to Canada, "it did no damage to Canada-U.S. relations. We just threw our hands up and said these people don't know what they are doing" (p. 177). Canada essentially yielded the defence of the continent to the Americans for fear of appearing too "pro-American" by participating in an obviously American-led ballistic missile defence scheme.

According to Stein and Lang, the BMD debacle convinced some people at DND that something had to be done in support of the U.S. In part to compensate for the BMD debacle, the decision was made to "go big" with two six-month rotations in Kandahar, starting late in 2005. The cost to the Canadian purse was estimated at $1.2 billion, in addition to a commitment to development assistance to Afghanistan, averaging $85 million per year until 2012. It also would cost, so far, the lives of over eighty Canadian soldiers.

Stein and Lang's explanation for the makings of the decision focuses on the role of General Rick Hillier in steering the Canadian policy. After 9/11, DND was in a terrible state. Beyond its mission contortions and loss of influence on BMD, it was broke: its budget had been chopped by a third to help eliminate the deficit in the mid-1990s, and it continued to face the hostility of many in Ottawa, including the deputy minister of finance, Kevin Lynch (who is listed as "an opponent" of the department, p. 7) through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Department of National Defence was also confused: It apparently took the department a month to brief its new minister in 2002 on the Afghanistan situation, and its policy-making apparatus is frequently described by Stein and Lang as "sclerotic." General Rick Hillier, recommended by Graham to the prime minister to succeed the retiring Ray Henault, would bring new energy to the job and use his considerable advocacy skills to move Canadian military policy.

Hillier in fact made one of his first marks in defining foreign policy. Upon becoming PM, Martin launched a policy review that soon turned into a fiasco. The job of "holding the pen" was given to Foreign Affairs, but the job was soon botched. Staff from the PMO were brought in; even the clerk of the Privy Council was involved in trying to "rescue" the review, but to no avail. Martin wanted a "bold, transformative" document. By the time of the election, in June 2004, nothing of value had been written, and four departments--Foreign Affairs, International Trade, National Defence, and CIDA--were now writing their own documents.

At what is surely the lowest point in their story, Stein and Lang describe a government so hopelessly lost in defining its foreign policy that it had to turn to an outsider: Jennifer Welsh, a Canadian teaching at Oxford, who had just published At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004). Canada's foreign policy would be written by a scholar with no institutional memory of Foreign Affairs (or the government), working alone across the ocean. Stein and Lang portray this as evidence of yet another failing of bureaucracy, but it seems equally clear that the politicians (and their staffs) were hardly up to the task. The notion of creating a cabinet committee, or caucus committee, on the issue was evidently a non-starter. The many capable and experienced scholars in Canada were deemed incapable.

Meanwhile, the DND, now under the command of Rick Hillier, set to work defining Canada's foreign policy from its own unique perspective. By the summer of 2003, Canada had committed to lead NATO in Kabul for a year. The plan was to reduce Canada's troop strength by ninety per cent by 2004 and then to deploy a Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) somewhere in Afghanistan. By the calendar, Canada had a year to pick a spot. Many Ottawa Foreign Affairs officials favoured Herat. Their colleagues at the embassy in Kabul, however, apparently preferred Kandahar, where Americans had been active since 2001--one of the most unstable and dangerous parts of the country. Rick Hillier also wanted Kandahar. "The PRT was a classic case of competing interests and clashing world views between the two departments, between Venus and Mars," write Stein and Lang. "And it was a classic case of bureaucratic dithering and bickering over comparatively small issues, so that officials missed the bigger picture until it was too late" (p. 134). Other countries soon chose quieter quarters: Italians in Herat, the Dutch in Oruzgan, the Lithuanians in Chaghcharan. Ottawa was waiting for Washington to make decisions. Rick Hillier, for his part, adamantly campaigned for the visibility that Kandahar could offer. Martin had no choice but to accept. The authors are impressed: "In just a few weeks time, a soldier from Newfoundland had outclassed and outrun the best minds in Canada's august Department of Foreign Affairs. It was his work that gave shape and thrust to the International Policy Statement.... Ottawa hadn't seen anything like this in many years" (p. 157).

Stein and Lang offer a picture where policy-making is dysfunctional, affecting the very top. They quote Paul Martin himself, as he shakes his head over the quality of policy advice: "[O]ver 25 years, due to the combination of Michael Pitfield's centralization initiative and my budgets, we have totally destroyed the policy-making capacity of the public service, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the Department of Foreign Affairs" (p. 153). The authors cite a "senior public servant's" view that is even more scathing: "The Department of Foreign Affairs can't do policy, they have no policy capacity. The Department of Foreign Affairs is a roving travel agency and property management department" (p. 153). Stein and Lang conclude their book with the same observation.

The argument that different policy options will emerge from the Defence establishment and the Department of Foreign Affairs is hardly new, or indeed unique, to Canada. What makes The Unexpected War gripping is the account of apparently poorly informed prime ministers left vulnerable to the advice of departments who either have their own professional agenda in mind or who are caught in a death spiral of analysis paralysis. The end result is a personalized approach to foreign policy that seemingly lives and dies on the penchants and interests of prime ministers. This is precisely why their personal inclinations--as well as those of their closest political advisers--are so important for voters (let alone students of public service) to understand.

These books collectively reveal a great deal of how things work in Ottawa and put to the test various theories about who "really governs." There is no doubt that the prime minister--even one enjoying only the support of a minority in the House of Commons--reigns supreme. The books all hint about the importance of the bureaucracy in ensuring execution, but its role in policy-making is a mystery. Even the leadership of the public service--with the exception of Rick Hillier--is relegated to little more than a transactional role in these volumes. While Mulroney praises his clerks and seems genuinely surprised by every good thing he encountered in the Canadian public service, Chretien is more likely to emphasize the contribution of the staff in the Prime Minister's Office. Perhaps Chretien had come to take the involvement of the bureaucracy for granted, but this is not clear. Certainly, his defence of the role of the clerk in light of Justice Gomery's recommendations demonstrates that he was aware of his government's reliance on a bureaucracy that had a strong and important presence in the decision-making circles. All the same, it is striking that in both accounts, the PCO is hardly mentioned, and the Department of Finance gets no more ink than any other ministry. The Department of Foreign Affairs is simply brutalized in all the books.

It took a long time for prime ministers to think that the recollections of their time in power were worthy of publication. Macdonald, Mackenzie and Laurier wrote nothing. Robert Borden was the first to write memoirs, and they were published posthumously. Mackenzie King never had the intention to write. Diefenbaker's One Canada (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975-77) and Pearson's Mike (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972-1975) proved to be good journeyman work. Pierre Trudeau's long-awaited memoirs only served to show that he was in no mood for reflection. The books by Chretien and particularly Mulroney (who sets a new standard) signal a change in the Canadian literary and political landscape that has become friendly to thick volumes of political memoirs. They also demonstrate that there really has not been much progress in explaining how influence is exercised in the courts of power. The enigma of what makes for successful governance--the special chemistry between political operators, public-service leaders, and prime ministers--remains elusive. In the result, scholars are left to produce armchair hypotheses, often with no greater comfort than that bestowed when a Jean Chretien or Eddie Goldenberg notices these enough to question their validity. There remains a crying need for the organizational and intellectual leaders of the public service to contribute their own explanations of how decisions are made and implemented. In addition to Allan Gotlieb, their model might well be the iconic Gordon Robertson, the only clerk who has produced memoirs,s For the interim, their active participation at organized colloquia such as IPAC conferences on leadership, will have to do. (9) This situation must change, and until it does, it will be difficult to assess how prime ministers really interact with their administration.

The author is associate professor of politics and public administration, Ryerson University. He was research director of IPAC from 1999 to 2006.

Notes

(1) See John Sawatsky, Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991); L. Ian MacDonald, Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984); and Rae Murphy, Brian Mulroney: The Boy from Baie Comeau (Toronto: Lorimer, 1984).

(2) See also Burney's own memoirs, Getting it Done: A Memoir (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

(3) Allan Gotlieb, I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Ambassador: The Education of a Canadian Diplomat in Washington (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). See Charles Ritchie's The Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries, 1937-1945 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974); Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982); and Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1983).

(4) See Daniel Schwanen, "Ranking prime ministers of the last 50 years: The numbers speak," Policy Options 24, no. 6 (June/July 2003), pp. 18-20. This report was based on a survey of scholars and experts. Pearson was ranked first, Mulroney second, followed, in order, by Trudeau, St-Laurent, Chretien and Diefenbaker (Clark, Turner and Campbell were not included).

(5) Donald Savoie, Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy (University of Toronto Press, 1994).

(6) See also Jeffrey Simpson, The Friendly Dictatorship (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001).

(7) Readers may want to consult Nelson Michaud, ed., Diplomatic Departures: The Conservative Era in Canadian Foreign Policy, 1984-93 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001).

(8) Gordon Robertson, Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant: Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

(9) See Patrice Dutil, ed., Searching for Leadership: Secretaries to Cabinet in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

* The Department of External Affairs and International Trade was renamed Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 1993. For consistency, I have used the Foreign Affairs designation.