INDEPTH: PAUL MARTIN
Inside Paul Martin's mind
By Dan Brown, CBC News Online | October 28, 2003
CBC News Online asked Paul Martin to name his favourite book, movie and TV show, then culture critics analysed his answers to give us this insight into his personality.
If all goes according to plan, Paul Martin will soon be this country's prime minister. He will be the most powerful politician in the land and the decisions he makes will have an impact on all our lives. Given that he will wield so much influence, you might think the average Canadian would have a concrete idea of what the man is like, of what makes him tick.
The truth, however, is that most Canadians know very little about their future leader. They know he's from Quebec. They know his father used to be some sort of bigwig in the Liberal party. And they know that at one point he ran a shipping company. Or something like that.
Paul Martin
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Other than those tenuous details, the former finance minister is a
question mark. Whether by design on his part or lack of interest on our
part, he has remained a blank slate. Oh sure, the delegates who have
been selected to seal his coronation on Nov. 15 probably have some sense
of where he stands on the burning issues of the day, but those are
Martin's political views. What about Paul Martin's personality?
Is he smart? Does he have a favourite ice cream? Can he tell funny jokes? Who's his best friend? Who knows?
What about Paul Martin's character? At least Jean Chrétien wrote a book about himself before he became prime minister. The only equivalent for Martin is the blog on his website, which many believe he doesn't write himself. Some insight.
In an attempt to learn more about the prime-minister-in-waiting, CBC.ca submitted a questionnaire to his office. He was asked to list his favourite things – favourite book, favourite movie, favourite television show, and so on. He didn't have to give an answer for every category. These are the answers we got back:
Favourite author: historian Barbara Tuchman
Favourite fiction books: the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser
Favourite movies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sunshine
Favourite director: Jake Eberts
Favourite actress: Katherine Hepburn, because she reminds me of my wife, Sheila
Favourite TV drama: Law and Order
Favourite TV comedy: Radio-Canada's Infoman
Favourite band: Montreal's Bowser and Blue
Favourite websites: www.l'heurepaulmartin.ca, www.paulmartintimes.ca
Favourite artist: A.Y. Jackson
Favourite painting: Duncan's painting of the Port of Montreal
Favourite museum: the Johnson Geo Centre in St. John's
Favourite sport to watch: football
Favourite sport to play: golf
Favourite hobby: moving earth
Favourite musical instrument: piano
The danger with a list like this, of course, is that politicians are in the habit of giving political answers. When U.S. Vice-President Al Gore appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to declare that his favourite book was Stendhal's The Red and the Black, the choice made headlines precisely because it was so impolitic. Many observers were surprised at Gore's unconventional tastes, the subtext being the selection must have been an honest one because there's no political advantage for a presidential candidate in naming a potboiler from 1830, replete with sex and violence.
To help interpret Martin's answers, CBC News Online talked to those in the know.
"It's almost impossible to get a knee-jerk response from a politician," notes Stephen Cole, a Toronto author who has written books on film, television and hockey.
By the same token, there's also danger in giving a flip answer. When former Ontario premier Mike Harris said his favourite book was the children's tome Mr. Silly, it didn't help dispel his image as an anti-intellectual.
"He's going to be a little careful about the things he says," says Martin biographer John Gray, whose Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition landed on bookstore shelves in September.
Gray adds that Martin's first instinct is to be earnest: "To be frank, it strikes me that he is more candid than a lot of the people who are advising him. The people who are advising him are being careful. They don't want him to get into trouble. They will try to steer him and coax him and shelter him. His inclination is to wade in and argue or whatever."
Cole says Martin's choice of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as one of his favourite films is revealing because it shows he's not a politician who's overly interested in keeping up with pop culture: "It's a Hollywood feel-good story with a touch of hip '60s fatalism, I guess. I would suggest that it was a film that caught his fancy when he was still going to movies. If that's his favourite, I don't think he's in the habit of seeing many films."
As for his favourite television drama, Cole is not surprised: "Law and Order is good middlebrow entertainment. And it doesn't surprise me that a good middlebrow politician would be attracted to the morality and neat storylines. It's just smart enough to be cynical and just Hollywood enough to always be resolved neatly."
"I don't think he's a particularly experimental person, socially or intellectually," echoes Gray.
For his favourite director, Martin actually named a producer, Montreal native Jake Eberts. Eberts has an impressive filmography – he has produced everything from Chariots of Fire to Black Robe to The Legend of Bagger Vance – but Cole thinks there's another reason for his name being on the list. "That's a naked CanCon plug," he says.
"When you ask him the question 'Who's your favourite filmmaker?' his immediate response is 'OK, who is a Canadian that I can readily endorse that will do me good among cultural nationalists?' Which is not to say we have a bankrupt film industry."
Antonia Maioni, the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, is heartened that Martin's favourite author is Barbara Tuchman, the American writer of popular histories like The March of Folly. "She's written several books that look back at leaders and see why they took the decisions they did," she says. "We should be relieved that [Martin is] someone who reads the past as having lessons for the future."
"He loves reading history, very much loves reading history," reinforces Gray, who sees the Flashman books fitting into the same pattern. Gray calls the series "historical fiction of a particularly imaginative nature."
What may be most revealing, though, are Martin's preferences when it comes to sports. If he was trying to court favour with the Canadian public, the smartest political move would have been to say his favourite spectator sport is hockey. Instead, he'd rather watch football.
"He's being honest there," Cole says. "Hockey would be the easy thing to [say], which suggests to me that was an honest response."
Tom Harrington is the host of TV's Sports Journal. He says it's "unusual" that Martin would be willing to stand up in a hockey-obsessed country and announce that he's a football fan. But Harrington argues that football's emphasis on strategy means it might naturally appeal to a politician like Martin: "I think that says a lot in terms of the kind of character he is."
Although some political leaders have been taken to task for spending too much time on the links, Harrington believes there's no danger for Martin in admitting he loves playing golf: "I think it's a political asset because it'll put him in the position to relate to the common person because so many people are playing the game."
In the course of writing his book, Gray says he discovered Martin loves the CFL. In fact, Martin plans to fly to Regina the day after he assumes the Liberal leadership to attend this year's Grey Cup. His favourite NFL team is the Detroit Lions, which Gray believes is just a function of having spent his early years in Windsor, Ont.
But Gray does allow that one of Martin's answers is a calculated one. When asked to name his favourite website, Martin named his own.
"That's a political answer," Gray says. "If you've read it, you'll know what I mean."
"It's fairly boring and it's fairly inefficient. I don't think they had a good enough person doing it and as for his blogs, they're as boring as hell."
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Liberal leadership vote: Nov. 12 to 15
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"In recent times, a kind of complacency, a certain drift, has set in and we've lost some of the great energy and enthusiasm that Canadians are looking for. In my view, new times require new approaches, and I want to lead a new government with a renewed sense of purpose, and a sharper focus and a clearer plan."
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