Lonely, but purposeful: reading the new Liberal leader is a challenge.

Westell, Anthony

Stephane Dion: Against the Current Linda Diebel Viking Canada 280 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780670067442

Stephane Dion came from far behind to win the Liberal leadership on December 2 last year and, shortly after, Linda Diebel, journalist and author, met a friend from her agent's office to hash over book ideas. They came up with the notion of a book on Dion to be written and published in three months. "Never before has a book owed so much to a margarita," writes Diebel. Or was it perhaps two margaritas, and a large glass of the Christmas spirit of optimism? She admits she soon had doubts about the deadline. But by then the publishing wheels were turning so she plunged ahead.

Having written in three months one of the first books on Pierre Trudeau (Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister), I have an idea how she felt. But I had all my material to hand in reports and columns already published, while Diebel was starting more or less from scratch. With the help of a research assistant, she seems to have scanned all the published material and interviewed many sources, including Dion, to produce an extended version of a profile you might expect to find in a weekend paper. It is quite an achievement in speed writing, but I expect she would agree it is no more than a first draft of Dion's life and times.

Without perhaps realizing it, she raises and passes over an intriguing aspect of Dion's life that demands more attention: He is surely the most "European" of party leaders since Confederation, with ties to France much stronger than any he may have to the U.S. or the UK. His mother, Denyse--a "force of nature," says Diebel--was French and had been raised in Paris during the German occupation, making her son a French as well as a Canadian citizen. While still a student at Laval, he met his partner-to-be, Janine Krieber, also a student and half European; her father was an Austrian and had been conscripted into the German army before coming to Canada. Both went to Paris for four further years of graduate studies. Dion obtained the French these d'etat--a PhD plus a year--and a medal for his study of socialist and communist communes ringing Paris. Krieber studied European terrorist groups to discover how middle-class children could become bombers and political bandits. She has become, says Diebel, an internationally recognized authority on terrorism, which might come in handy if Dion ever becomes prime minister.

He was resentful when told, after he became leader, that he must surrender his French citizenship. The argument, I suppose, was that there must be no doubt where his loyalty lies, but the number of Canadians with dual nationality is increasing in an increasingly supranational world, so the question of whether a prime minister, or indeed any minister, must resign any other nationality on taking office deserves more consideration. (For the record, I carry both Canadian and UK passports, mainly for convenience when travelling, but have not a shadow of a doubt I am Canadian.)

Dion was not a well-known quantity when he won the Liberal leadership. Diebel documents his one unmistakable triumph, his successful battle, when a minister in the Chretien government, to pass the Clarity Act preventing any Quebec government from claiming a mandate for separatism on the basis of a less than clear question put to the people in a referendum. He faced down fierce opposition in Quebec and seems to have won over popular opinion.

But with Chretien's departure, his protege Dion was out of favour and out of Prime Minister Paul Martin's first Cabinet. Dion hung on until Martin lost his majority and, needing to unite the party, restored Dion to his second Cabinet. Diebel's account of how that was brought about would not pass the Clarity test:

 Senator David Smith, the legendary eight-hundred-pound
 gorilla of Liberal party politics,
 wouldn't claim responsibility for Dion's return to
 grace but acknowledged that he may have had
 something to do with it ... "Look Paul," Smith
 told Martin. "Every time he speaks, people are
 going to be thinking, 'There's a mistake that
 [Martin] hasn't fixed yet." Later, Smith would say:

 "I've never asked Paul about it, and maybe he had
 heard from other people, too. But I saw something
 click--you know how you can see that in a
 person--and Dion got back in."

Whatever. With the environment portfolio, Dion became a green crusader and rode the burgeoning issue all the way to the leadership convention. Naturally, Diebel devotes a chapter to the convention at which two second-stringers, Dion and Gerard Kennedy, cooperated to ensure one of them would win rather than one of the favourites, Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae. It happened that on the first ballot Dion was two votes ahead of Kennedy and by prior agreement won the support of Kennedy's committed delegates.

Diebel provides new items of information and illuminating comments about these events, but the important information, at least for this reader, is in her chapters about the shaping of the man and his ideas during his youth, education and career as an academic before he entered electoral politics. His father, Leon, was a somewhat frail academic in Quebec, an advisor to premiers, much respected at Laval but a federalist and out of step with most of his colleagues, who were separatists. In the 1960s he worked for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and Diebel seems to credit the language reforms that followed with arresting Quebec's march to separatism.

To his father's dismay, Stephane was a militant independantiste in his youth, campaigning for the Parti Quebecois. He claims, apparently, to have changed his mind during a drunken argument with a man he encountered while canvassing. It seems much more likely he was converted in arguments with his father with whom he bonded, and was looking for a reason to change his mind. Abandoning separatism did not make him Canadian: he was in Paris during the 1980 referendum and says that when voters rejected separation, "I was analyzing. I was proud to have no strong emotion. I was not pro-Canadian or pro-separatist."

A cold fish, then, one might think, and that impression is still abroad today, although not to his family, friends and staff, we are told. When he returned to Canada to teach public administration at the Universite de Montreal and research power within bureaucracies, he tried and succeeded for several years to avoid the politics that had derailed his father's academic career. Ironically, it was not until he was on sabbatical leave at the Brookings think tank in Washington and when he was asked to explain what was happening in Quebec that he realized he had become a federalist. Back home, he became a spokesman for federalism in the media and in public debate.

When Chretien needed to reinforce his Cabinet, Dion was a fairly obvious choice. In this way and in others he reminds me of Trudeau, but without a scrap of the charisma that captivated the public. Trudeau was one of the Three Wise Men recruited by Lester Pearson because they were spokesmen for federalism in Quebec. Trudeau arrived at his conclusions by rigorous analysis of the options. So it seems does Dion. Trudeau was an academic and intellectual before he became a politician; so was Dion. Trudeau sometimes appeared to be arrogant, and so does Dion when he is convinced of the rightness of his views, which is often. Both men have a style, but while Trudeau was flamboyant, Dion is reserved, self-effacing; not for him the Mercedes sports car, swirling black cloak and parade of glamorous girlfriends before the trophy wife. He arrived in Ottawa by bus and is proud of it. He wears nondescript clothes, often with a bag slung over his shoulder. Krieber seems to have been his first and only girlfriend, and they married in 1988, adopting a Chilean child with whom Dion immediately bonded.

The quintessential image of Dion, says Diebel, is by Toronto Star photographer Richard Lautens. It is a rear view of Dion trudging across a carpark, carrying his bags: "Dion is slightly stooped, his bony shoulder blades visible through his suit, his head down. There is a sense of loneliness about it--and a sense of purpose." It doesn't sound to me like a winner, but Mackenzie King was not exactly an exciting personality either.

The Liberals seem at present to be surviving in the polls because of dislike or distrust of Stephen Harper rather than any liking for Dion, who, among his other troubles, is being battered by Conservative attack ads, an almost unheard-of tactic between election campaigns, and further evidence of Harper's utterly ruthless style of politics. It would be easy now to write Dion off as a mistake, but he is nothing if not tenacious and hardworking. If he can find a way to display to the public the personality he displays to friends, and if Harper continues to offend the media and to make enemies of the premiers, Dion may yet be able to gain momentum. Then will be the time for someone to write a more thoughtful book than was possible for Diebel.

Finally, one of the hazards of writing and publishing at speed is that errors creep in. In this book I came across three errors of fact concerning matters with which I am familiar in the first 34 pages. Paris was occupied by the Germans for four years (June 1940 to August 1944), not five, and liberated in 1944, not 1945. The FLQ terrorists who kidnapped Pierre Laporte were not armed with machine guns. These errors in themselves are not significant but they cause one to wonder if there are more substantial errors about matters with which I am not familiar. I am reminded of a comment by a somewhat cynical friend: Editors are not there to correct errors by the writer, but to add their own.

Anthony Westell is a contributing editor of the LRC.