Paul Martin and his friends and acolytes have always insisted that what drives the man is not politics but policy. True, his early years were framed by politics, the child of a famous father whose talent and taste for shaking hands and garnering votes made him almost a caricature. Anybody here from Windsor? On the Sunday mornings when Paul Sr. was not travelling the world, he and Paul Jr. would make the rounds of the local parish churches to shake hands, to see and be seen. Good to see you. How have you been? How are the kids? And how’s the wife?
So that’s the journey. An impressive kid in privileged circumstances, a big money job through his father’s connections, he makes it on his own in a business environment that is not made for comfort, and he dutifully attends while those who once professed to be friends read the last political rites for his father. Paul Sr. was gone, but it...
John Gray wrote for a number of newspapers, including the Globe and Mail, for which he was Ottawa bureau chief, national editor, foreign editor, foreign correspondent, and national correspondent. He published Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition in 2003.
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