Down last night to the gothic halls of Trinity
College, U of T, for the launch of The Coutts Diaries: Power, Politics and
Pierre Trudeau. It’s a selection by
Ron Graham from the massive private journals of the late Jim Coutts
(1938-2013), longtime Liberal political fixer and chief of staff to
Pierre-Elliott Trudeau.
Sutherland House had kindly sent me an
advance copy. My first reactions to it were none too positive (except to admire what a handsomely produced volume it is). I
was probably jaundiced against Coutts from the start, for I thought of him as not exactly
the cause, but certainly a symbol of the degradation of Canadian politics:
its takeover by the unelected strategists, marketing guys, and poll analysts
who give marching orders to cabinet ministers, caucuses, and the whole “representative”
side of political life.
So at first I was both annoyed and bored with
Coutts’ endless recounting of strategy sessions and speech-drafting at Pierre's elbow, as if the
diaries were a rewriting of his appointment book.
But the book grew on me gradually. I conceded
that John Ibbitson had a point in his rave review in the Globe and Mail,
summed up in his quotation from Ron Graham’s introduction:
at their best [the diaries] are
“extraordinary: vivid, insightful accounts of one of the most turbulent times
in Canadian history”
The diaries will have great value for
researchers and journalists looking for new clues to the mind and measures of
Trudeau the First. Trudeau gave him great latitude to drive all the (many) matters that did not engage Trudeau himself. For most of a decade, Coutts was in (often shaping) every significant conversation
in the Prime Minister’s office, in the cabinet room, and in endless Ottawa lunches,
dinners, and telephone sessions with the powerful and connected. Historians, political scientists, journalists, and aspiring apparatchiks will be mining Coutts's testimony for decades as to how politics was done in the first Trudeau era.
And as I kept browsing through – what’s a
published diary for if not for browsing through? – I sorta came around to the
man writing them.
They remain intensely
focused on political detail. Beyond a few
descriptions of visits to his parents in Alberta and an occasional touch of
angst over his long-floundering relationship with a woman from a prominent
political family, it's mostly just the job, the job, and the job. But gradually I had to acknowledge Coutts was
more than a guy selling politics like cornflakes.
He did wield way too much power for someone
never elected to anything, but he surely had a brilliant policy mind and
immense skills at getting real politicians to do what he wanted them to do. And
I don’t doubt he cared deeply about devoting his life to something he actually
hoped would make his country a better place.
In the end, however, he was not a great writer (except
of policy briefs and campaign speeches, I guess). Maybe the Coutts diaries
are an important book but not a great diary. He's not Charles Ritchie.
Paul Wells’s Substack the other day had an interview with Ron Graham about the book. These are two veteran political journalists,
and both are concerned about whether who might read a book like this and the
larger implications for serious researched nonfiction in Canada. Graham says:
There’s been a total collapse of the Canadian
newspaper and magazine publishing businesses. There are many guilty suspects
out there, but we all sort of know what's happened. One thing is that there's
just not the vehicle. I mean, when I was doing those Saturday Night articles, I was allowed to
spend 3 or 4 months following Joe Clark around the country during an election,
with expenses. Now, sometimes I had to sleep on a friend's couch, but they were
pretty good. They gave me the length to write about them.
The pay was always crummy, but it's even worse now. In fact, I think it's the
same dollar per word as it was in 1970. Then you get into all kinds of issues
with attentive readers. Who's buying a book anyway, these days? Then you get
into the much more complicated— and I think more important— public policy issue
of our shameless abandoning of the nonfiction and historical side of our
country. Our publishing industry is foreign-owned, our newspapers are broke,
our magazines are charities effectively.
True, all that. Boy, is it ever.
Coutts wrote frequently in his diary about people telling him it was time he got elected to Parliament, took a Cabinet seat,
prepared to run for the leadership. I must say, nothing in the book made me feel
it was a brilliant idea or even very likely to come true.
Wells reminds us
that Coutts actually did decide to run for election in 1981, and Trudeau sent a backbencher off to the Senate to open a safe seat for him. But he lost. And then the diary, the political diary at least, stopped dead.
The Trinity book launch was not the usual drinks and book-selling thing, but mostly an interview by Ron Graham of Coutts alter-ego Tom Axworthy and Alexandre Trudeau, all three of them lively and insightful.
