Ottawa Confidential

The word is “brash.” Ahead of the 1963 federal election, Jim Coutts, then a twenty-four-year-old Liberal campaign chairman in Alberta, was trying to recruit Harry Hays, Calgary’s former mayor, as a candidate. But Coutts had a poll showing that more than 50 percent disapproved of Hays, then a Conservative. When Hays asked about his chances, Coutts replied, “It looks good, Harry.” Fed by false hope, Hays plunged into the race and went on to serve in Lester Pearson’s government as agriculture minister. Fast-forward a decade and Coutts had become Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s most senior political aide. He had a poll showing a drop in Trudeau’s ratings. Not wishing to unsettle the prime minister on the eve of a major speech, he withheld the numbers until afterwards.

This fall, Coutts is back, in a manner of speaking. He comes to us from the grave, in the style of Mackenzie King, in the form of an exhaustive, at times exhausting, often illuminating diary of his years as Trudeau’s right hand. The medium in this case is the skillful editing mind of the journalist Ron Graham. Yes, Coutts lived by the polls. He admitted at one point that “one does have to shit one’s friends in this business.” But not by polls alone did he live. Clearly he cared about the country and the Liberal Party (often in that order), the woman he loved and lost, and the weekly all-night poker games at the Rideau Club, if not his staggering five-figure losses.

Beyond all of that, The Coutts Diaries provides an insider account of how government works — and does not. It also reveals a steely practitioner and sober policy wonk who spoke bluntly to power and was tougher than members of the Liberal cabinet, sometimes even including Trudeau. His sidekicks in the inner circle were the master campaigner and senator Keith Davey and Michael Pitfield, the Clerk of the Privy Council, who is revealed as a hard-nosed politico despite his mandarin robes. Not a week went by when the three did not confer on the state of the government, the Liberals, and their personal lives — all dutifully recorded in the diaries.

There are notable gaps, including all of 1977, when Pierre and Margaret Trudeau separated. The diary is also quiet on the day John Turner resigned as finance minister and when the Clark government fell in 1979, presumably because Coutts was busy, though he was in full throat about his determination to get Trudeau to return, Lazarus‑like, to the leadership. While Graham fleshes out some of the record using archival sources and sets up chapters with background, casual readers will find that a knowledge of the times, or an open Wikipedia page, will enhance comprehension of many entries.

Coutts’s imprint is all over decisions that shaped the future of Canada: energy policies, the new Constitution, the $2-billion spending cut in 1978. Readers are in the room when Allan MacEachen forced Trudeau to back down by threatening to resign as finance minister; when Trudeau considered offering cabinet seats to the NDP to stay in power; when Coutts persuaded Trudeau to confront Alberta premier Peter Lougheed over the freeze on oil exports to the East; when Coutts bluntly warned Trudeau that his government was “moving towards defeat.” We also go behind the scenes of Trudeau’s stunning return to power in the 1980 election after that fateful day the previous December —“the Glorious 13th,” in Liberal lore — when the Clark government stumbled into a non-confidence defeat. Those singular events provide the most dramatic elements of The Coutts Diaries.

From 1978 through late 1979, as time was running out for an election call, Trudeau dilly-dallied, threatening to quit, then lashing out at people wanting his head. He was driven by his undulating fortunes in the polls and the toll his marriage was taking on him. He agonized over revelations of Margaret’s infidelity and her notoriety on the celebrity circuit, including a fling with Ted Kennedy. In March 1979, Trudeau told Coutts, “I don’t want to spend the next six months competing with my wife for headlines.” Later his executive assistant, Allan Lutfy, reported that Trudeau “was in the office most of the day reading clippings about Margaret,” while Coutts was urging him to deliver a major energy speech in the Commons. A devoted dad, he went to parent night at school and “discovered the boys weren’t doing well, and he was shocked that he didn’t know this from his own observation.”

The turbulence of those years led Trudeau to pull back twice from calling winnable elections, as well as to agonize about whether to stay on as party leader and call an election in 1979. After he did — only to lose and resign — the Liberals forced another election and supporters launched an intense campaign for Trudeau to come back, fearing Turner’s return to politics. Coutts described his last-minute call to Trudeau, who was preparing to announce his retirement. He told Coutts, “I don’t think I can be convinced, but talk on. The only reason I can see is to stop Turner.” Coutts responded that instead of staying on the phone, he would come out to Stornoway and see Trudeau.

Coutts argued that Trudeau needed to stay for the good of the party. He owed it to his colleagues, “having done what you did” in allowing the non-confidence vote. With fifteen minutes left before a scheduled press conference, Trudeau changed out of casual clothes and told his three sons, “I am running.” Four-year-old Michel asked, “Running for what?” Trudeau said, “Prime minister.” And, as it turned out, for history.

A senior adviser once told me that Trudeau’s private comments rarely differed from his public utterances, especially on questions of national unity. That is mostly borne out in Coutts’s diaries. Trudeau was often in a bad mood, usually in the morning. On a campaign trip by train in 1974, he complained of having had only two or three hours of sleep. The bed broke, and he cut his finger attempting repairs. “ ‘Margaret’s romantic ideas’ had kept him up all night,” Coutts wrote. Trudeau could be especially diffident when official plans stood in the way of an exotic vacation or when he didn’t want to do something, like greet party regulars. He was often oblivious to political mores. Ahead of the fourth G7 summit, in 1978, he asked Coutts and Pitfield if it would be okay “to take a woman with him on the sail with Helmut Schmidt after Bonn. He said Schmidt usually does.” Later, Pitfield told the prime minister that he couldn’t have a woman with him and the West German chancellor, adding, according to Coutts, “You’ll look like a couple of dirty old men.”

Tellingly, Trudeau fretted in a conversation with Coutts and Pitfield that his strong positions on national unity and energy policy might backfire. Ahead of the 1980 referendum, he asked if he should even campaign in his own province, lest he fire up the separatists. He did speak three times, but Coutts’s diary is silent about his tour de force at the Paul Sauvé Arena on May 14, when he made his ringing defence of a reformed federalism and, in response to René Lévesque’s jibe about the Anglo part of his name, celebrated his Trudeau-Elliott ancestral roots: “My name is a Quebec name, but my name is a Canadian name also.” As for the West, he asked Coutts, “Is the feeling so strong that we face something in Alberta like Riel was for Quebec and that the feelings will never be the same again if we force too much at this time?” Those musings proved prophetic. While Trudeau and the federalist forces won the referendum, separatism flourished on Trudeau’s watch; the Liberals still pay the price in western provinces for the National Energy Program’s controls on oil prices.

One of the themes of The Coutts Diaries is the chaotic nature of governing, often in contrast to outward appearances. In October 1980, Coutts wrote, “There are very few ministers who are not fighting with one another over something.” After one desultory cabinet session about forcing closure in the Commons on the constitutional reform package, he observed, “What is always clear is that when the crunch is on, no one really wants to take the decision.” He described MacEachen, the power broker who was Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, “at his slipperiest, coming down all sides of the issue.” Not so for Jean Chrétien, who filled his presentation on constitutional policy with references to “my strategy” and detailed “what I’m prepared to do.” Coutts wrote, “Jean seems to sink further and further into the difficulty of the ego and ignores Cabinet feelings and the necessity for Cabinet solidarity.” (As the former justice minister Ron Basford once told me, “Cabinet is not a company of friends.”)

James Allan Coutts came from humble roots in rural Alberta. Born on May 16, 1938, in High River (also Joe Clark’s hometown), he grew up in nearby Nanton, 100 kilometres south of Calgary. At fifteen, he was the campaign manager for a local Liberal candidate. His mother, Alberta, told me for a Maclean’s profile in 1976 that she “never saw a child so interested in older people.” His father, Ewart, who sold insurance and real estate, noted, “He has a facility of getting along with people and making them work for him without them knowing they are doing it.”

Armed with a law degree from the University of Alberta and an MBA from Harvard, Coutts set out to find his fortune in consulting work in New York and later Toronto, making $200,000 a year. He had already done a stint as Pearson’s appointments secretary in the 1960s and featured so prominently in a commissioned documentary that, given their vague resemblance, the prime minister worried that viewers would think the country was being run by his grandson. Following their 1968 victory, the brash Trudeau team pushed the Pearson crowd aside, including Coutts. By early 1970, however, Coutts was part of a small group of progressives in Toronto, including Keith Davey, feeding strategy and ideas to the Grits, especially after their near defeat at the hands of Robert Stanfield’s Conservatives in 1972. Upon becoming principal secretary three years later, he moved quickly to concentrate power in the Prime Minister’s Office — raising the hackles of envious ministers, aides on the Hill, and party regulars.

His connections were legendary. On an annual hunting trip to Texas with the industrialist Paul Desmarais, in December 1978, Coutts reported, “There were not that many quail this year.” He also wrote that Paul Martin Jr. was the big winner at poker — $3,000 over the weekend — and that Chrétien complained about his lot and “has almost crossed the line where he believes his reputation is more important than the government’s.” Coutts was the key link to senior business leaders on Trudeau’s behalf. He and Pitfield organized a series of CEO dinners with the likes of Desmarais (Power Corporation), Ian Sinclair (Canadian Pacific), and Charles Bronfman (Seagram) to confer on referendum strategies and economic policies. He placed calls to Bob Blair (Alberta Gas Trunk Line) and Peter Gordon (Stelco), trying to coax them into running for the Liberals, to no avail. The Liberals did not expect electoral support for these efforts, but they wanted to “have the private sector knowledgeable and feeling like partners in the process.” Coutts admitted later it was a big mistake to believe “that an enormous amount of work to persuade the business community would save the government.” Another relationship he nurtured was with key advisers to Bill Davis; their discussions on strategy resulted in the Ontario premier’s strong support of Trudeau’s constitutional reform plan. Coutts also wrote poetically about attending a private mass at the home of Marshall McLuhan shortly after his death, one of many allusions to his rich personal life.

Away from the office, Coutts was a contemplative soul, interested in fine art, the theatre, music, and his beloved family homestead, which he lovingly restored and donated before his death in 2013 as a cultural and heritage centre. He reflected as well on his astounding poker misfortunes. Down $13,000 one Friday night in late 1980, he managed to pare the loss to $5,000 but pushed the game until nine the next morning: “It was an incredible lesson in poker on how easily and quickly one can go down heavily in the game.”

Throughout, Coutts pined for Jennifer Rae, the sister of Bob Rae, and the marriage that never was. (He poignantly described attending her wedding in April 1981.) And then there was his cynical plan, abetted by Trudeau, to run in a Toronto by‑election in 1981 so that, he was assured, he could slide into a senior cabinet post — his nomination path having been cleared by the appointment of Peter Stollery to the Senate. He lost that and a second attempt in 1984 and retired to private life.

Shortly before Jim Coutts’s death at seventy-five, my friend Richard O’Hagan and I took him, then fragile from cancer, on a tour of famous graves in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. We had not talked for years, but the conversation was replete with gentle humour about how Coutts would be taking his secrets to the grave, since he rarely confided any, certainly not to reporters like me. Before we left, he lingered over a particular memorial, that of Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister and most famous political diarist. It turns out that Jim Coutts left us his own backstage account of a remarkable career at the pinnacle of power, a worthy successor to King’s chronicles.