Big Questions

The first time I met Rick Salutin, we were both in need of a certain kind of salvation. We are talking about 1990 here, the start of the last decade of the previous century. Bob Rae had recently been elected the first (and still only) New Democratic Party premier of Ontario. The great and the good of the left were in a state of more-than-the-­usual righteousness, while the night riders of the right were gnashing their teeth and sharpening their swords. Both sides were looking for human sacrifices. Journalistically, it was not a safe time for either a left-­leaning disturber of the status quo or a vacillating, indistinctly right-of-­centre magpie. This would be Mr. Salutin and Mr. Fraser, who discovered each other in the eye of an ideological storm.

Rick, who thirty years later is in serious danger of becoming a “national treasure,” had been busy burning his bridges. His scathing account of the 1988 free trade federal election was particularly damning about how the...