An Exercise in Opposites

Provincial politics in Canada can be a messy business and our ten premiers don’t get a lot of respect. Submerged in the politics of the street, kept in their rooms when Canada is on display at the G8 or he United Nations, they have no “national” mission to offer their citizens (except in Quebec). They materialize en groupe from time to time—to demand more money from Ottawa—and then disappear back into their local newspapers where they are called to account for overcrowded emergency rooms, unpaved roads and unemployment. Despite the constitutional notion that our federal system consists of two equal “orders” of government, most people don’t see it that way, and the head of a provincial legislature rarely achieves, even in his or her own province, the stature we automatically assign to the prime minister of Canada.

A provincial premier’s job description is clearly laid out in the Constitution. But the enumerated provincial powers must be applied uniformly to ten quite different and accidental regions of the country. Premiers are required to work out for themselves the application of these rules to the circumstances of their own province—not an easy task. The academy ignores the subject; there are no professors of provincial politics. We have had 229 premiers since Confederation (227 men, 2 women), of varying degrees of distinction and staying power, but not one of them has ever gone on to become prime minister.

Nonetheless, the events of political life in our provinces are a critical part of the story of Canada, every bit as important, and often just as interesting, as the great goings-on in Ottawa. The new biographies of two provincial premiers provide us with a useful glimpse of the role that holders of this difficult post have played in the evolution of politics and public policy in our country.

The subjects of the two books are contemporaries—Frank D. Moores, Conservative premier of Newfoundland from 1972 to 1979, and Allan Blakeney, NDP premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982. Both books are well worth reading. Like their subjects, they are very different, and their titles reveal quite clearly the contrasting ways in which the two men approached the challenges of their high office. Blakeney names his book An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs. The Moores book is subtitled “The Time of His Life.”

Frank Moores: The Time of His Life is both informative and fun to read, the work of a Newfoundland journalist, Janice Wells, who writes a weekly lifestyle column for several Atlantic Canadian newspapers. She knew Moores and the people who surrounded him, and her biography is anecdotal, colourful, highly personalized and, at the same time, quite detailed. She is interested in Moores’s private life as well as in his professional career, and she takes her subject no more or less seriously than he took himself.

Recently, Frank Moores has been known to the Canadian public for his association with Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber in the celebrated Airbus affair. His implication in that fiasco, whatever it may have been, took place after Moores had left Newfoundland and was employed in the private sector, in Ottawa, as a professional consultant and lobbyist. Wells devotes a chapter of her book to the affair and makes a plausible case that Moores was essentially innocent of any serious wrongdoing.

But for the people of Newfoundland, Moores means something else altogether. He goes down in history as the man who ended the 23-year reign of Newfoundland’s first premier, Joseph R. Smallwood. Elected and re-elected no less than seven times, Joey brought Newfoundland into Canada in 1949 and then ruled it for nearly a quarter century with a breathtaking cocktail of coercion, vote rigging, patronage, fiscal irresponsibility, natural resource giveaways, folksy humour and generalized chaos. “Not so much crooked as a maniac” is the way Moores describes Joey and, in 1972, Moores brought the Smallwood era to an end and, in the eyes of many, provided the people of his province with their first taste of modern government, democracy and freedom of speech.

Frank Moores was raised in the town of Carbonear, not far from St. John’s. Born into a well-to-do family, he was sent away to be educated in Toronto and Boston, and returned to work with his dad in the family fish-processing business. When his father died in 1962, Frank took over the company and was very successful. Competent, sophisticated, blessed with an effortless charisma and a fundamental generosity of spirit, he had an easy way with people from every walk of life. Women in particular seemed to enjoy his company—to put it mildly—and Moores had three wives, at least that many mistresses and, according to Wells, for at least 30 years made a pass at every pretty girl he saw, including her. Wells sums up that aspect of his character with the observation of an old timer from Bonavista Bay—“He can’t help it, b’y. He haf to haf it.”

Wells takes us through the chronology of Moores’s political career, providing an exhaustive (and at times exhausting) list of names, places and events. It was Roy McMurtry who persuaded him to get into politics and run as Conservative candidate in the federal election of 1968. And it took a lot of persuading because Moores was never attracted to political life, either before or after he got into it. But he was a natural. So, despite the furious opposition of Smallwood and his associates, Moores won the federal seat of Bonavista-Trinity-Conception. He made a powerful impression in Ottawa and within a few months was elected president of the Conservative Party of Canada.

But two years after his election, Moores was “drafted” to return to Newfoundland and lead the Conservatives there in the real battle with Joey—at the provincial level. After a dead-heat election in 1971, followed by months of mind-boggling political machinations on all sides, Moores won a convincing general election victory and, on the evening of March 21, 1972, fortified by a bottle of Scotch, he announced on TV to his fellow Newfoundlanders the “ignominious defeat” of Canada’s last Father of Confederation and the beginning of modern government in the province.

And you get the impression that he gave the people of Newfoundland what he promised. A bit of digging by the reader is required, because Wells spends less than a third of her book on an account of Moores’s seven years in power, and much of that is devoted to his spectacular private life. During the salmon season, he was often on the river with his friends—“gone upstream to spawn” was the way his colleagues put it, and there were many trips abroad for “study and consultation” on conditions in Europe and the United States. Back in St. John’s, Moores saw his premier’s role as one of CEO. He delegated most of the work to the competent Cabinet he formed and had little interest in getting involved in the details. So there were countless feuds, personality conflicts and territorial battles among his associates.

However, plenty of things got done. Moores resolved the industrial disasters of Stephenville and Come By Chance created by Smallwood’s relationships with John Doyle and John Shaheen. He ended the contentious rural resettlement program, tried to resolve the Churchill Falls fiasco with the purchase of Brinco and got approval for recognition of a 320-kilometre fishing limit. He established a coherent natural resources policy, which provided a frame-work for the spectacular development of offshore oil in Newfoundland. But, most importantly, a new sense of ethics in government behaviour was set in place. The weak and demoralized public service was professionalized, public tendering was made more transparent, and Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants were given real responsibilities. In the words of one of his colleagues, “he took us from a third-world state into a modern Canadian democracy.”

Allan Blakeney is quite another matter. If Moores never wanted to be a politician, Blakeney never wanted anything else. An Honourable Calling is an autobiography, but he recounts only the essential facts of his private life. What we get is a detailed, well-balanced and very interesting account of the most important issues Blakeney faced as premier, together with long passages in which he exposes the fundamental principles that guided him in his political decisions. The book is a manual of responsible behaviour in public life.

A Maritimer, son of a prosperous fruit wholesaler, Blakeney was dependable from the start. His youth was spent in bible classes, the Boy Scouts and student council meetings, with a little tennis thrown in for exercise. Early in life he developed strong socialist convictions and, while studying law at Dalhousie University, he started a chapter of the CCF. A brilliant student, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and he travelled extensively in Europe. It’s unlikely he ever ran into Moores on these trips. Blakeney really was studying other systems of government.

Having decided to devote himself to a career in the public sector and attracted by the cooperative movement evolving in Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas, Blakeney moved there in 1950 with his wife and daughter, taking up a post as secretary to the boards of directors of a number of small Crown corporations. After his wife died tragically of a heart ailment in 1957, he married a family friend, a relationship that has endured, happily, for almost 50 years.

Blakeney progressed quickly in the public service and soon decided to become directly involved in politics. In 1960, he won a seat in the legislature and was almost immediately appointed to the Cabinet as minister of education. A year later Blakeney became treasurer, from which vantage point he took a leading role in the historic and highly contentious introduction of Canada’s first universal healthcare program. In 1970, he was elected leader of the NDP in Saskatchewan and on June 30, 1971, he defeated the Liberal government of Ross Thatcher and became premier of the province. Nine months later, Frank Moores was elected premier of Newfoundland.

Blakeney inherited a government and civil service that could not have been more different from the one in Newfoundland. It had been conceived and put in place over 15 years by Douglas, founder of the CCF and recently chosen in a CBC poll as the Greatest Canadian of All Time. Widely considered to be Canada’s social laboratory, politics in Saskatchewan were conducted in an orderly, rational manner. Every government policy was backed up by a theory and refined into practice after going past planning committees, commissions, study groups, public consultations and eminent professionals. In Saskatchewan, things were organized; ethical behaviour was the norm.

Blakeney was, of course, faithful to that tradition. More than half of the book is an account of his years as premier and we are privileged to watch as he faces challenge after challenge from a principled and well-informed starting point with a pragmatic, respectful and good-natured approach to getting things done. Natural resource development is critical for him—grain, oil, potash, uranium—and he battles, confidently, competently, with private sector corporations, Ottawa and local opposition in his efforts to ensure that Saskatchewan gets a fair share of the profits from its impressive resource base. There is a chapter of the book on every issue— 20 pages on potash alone.

But economics is not Blakeney’s only interest. From aboriginal policy, through the health system, rural development and the universities, and all the way to the design of urban parks, Blakeney has a plan for everything. An active participant in federal-provincial activities, he was deeply involved in the constitutional negotiations of 1981 and provides us with four chapters devoted to his views on the subject and on the negotiations themselves.

It is tempting to compare the careers of these two men. But to do so is a bit far-fetched. These were just two premiers from the same period, the 1970s, each of whom had the task of running a small, resource-based province with an important rural population and a difficult climate. Yet their provinces were otherwise quite different and at very different points in their evolution. Blakeney’s Saskatchewan was made up of people from many countries (the largest single ethnic group is German; almost 15percent is aboriginal); the spirit of cooperation was deeply ingrained, and he was able to build on the traditions and practices of 15 uninterrupted years of competent CCF administration. Newfoundland, individualistic and ethnically homogenous (90 percent of its population is of British or Irish origin) had endured bankruptcy and British tutelage, followed by the chaos of the Smallwood administration. Moores and Blakeney had quite different tasks. Moores did one big thing, Blakeney many small ones, because, in each case, that was what the situation required. If one wants to reflect on the diversity of Canada, it is only necessary to imagine Frank Moores as premier of Saskatchewan or Allan Blakeney as leader of Newfoundland.

Where are they now? Frank Moores died in July 2005, of cancer, at the age of 72. He was buried in St. John’s. His three wives were present at the funeral along with hundreds of friends and admirers of all political persuasions. Allan Blakeney, after leaving active politics, taught constitutional law in Toronto and has worked as advisor in a number of developing countries. You will quite possibly find him this afternoon in Africa or Eastern Europe, explaining the virtues of the civil society. He is 83 years old.

The two books are each, in their style and substance, a reflection of the people and the times they describe. Wells’s biography, moving, informal, exciting, often confusing, catches the spirit of a talented, generous, undisciplined man who became a politician for a while and an important catalyst for real change. Blakeney’s memoir is the wise and reasoned account of political stewardship at its very best. We need them both.