Part Four Manley Profile

pwells@nationalpost.com; Part four of a four-part series.

Once an earnest novice, the Finance Minister has become a Liberal party curmudgeon

The National Post concludes its series on John Manley, the Deputy Prime Minister and federal Finance Minister, in the wake of his first budget and the lead-up to his possible bid for the Liberal leadership. Today, Paul Wells traces the three distinct phases of Mr. Manley's public personality.

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In one of Monty Python's finest television sketches, Terry Jones plays an amateur athlete who hopes to long-jump 26 miles across the English Channel. "Provided I get a good lift off and maybe a gust of breeze over the French coast, I shall be jumping into the centre of Calais itself," he tells an interviewer.

Of course, success is not assured. "What is the furthest distance that you've jumped so far?" he is asked.

"Oh, 11-foot-6 inches at Motspur Park on July 22nd. But I have done nearly 12 feet unofficially."

The genius of the sketch is that until Mr. Jones lands barely a yard and a half from his takeoff point, you find yourself hoping he will make it. I remembered that feeling as I read yesterday's article about John Manley's plans to become leader of the Liberal party.

He has already jumped quite far in competition: elected to Parliament four times from Ottawa South. He has gone even further unofficially -- Deputy Prime Minister, one-budget Finance Minister, media darling for several weeks after 9/11.

And provided he electrifies Liberals as they have not been electrified since the heyday of Trudeaumania, he shall be jumping right over the Strait of Paul Martin, a gulf that has already swallowed the bodies of Brian Tobin, Allan Rock and Jean Chretien.

The prudent course would be to abstain from prejudging the outcome of this enterprise. In the past, Mr. Manley has proved himself capable of exceeding expectations. But as he takes a vacation with his wife to ponder his future -- the same scenario, ominously, that put paid to the Tobin and Rock campaigns -- Mr. Manley may wonder whether his friends have miscast him as resoundingly as the Pythons miscast their long jumper.

The model for the Manley campaign is Pierre Trudeau's 1968 assault on the Liberal leadership. A romantic and an intellectual, Trudeau arrived, as most of the country saw it, from nowhere: Three years earlier, he had been a Montreal law professor whose only notable talents were for getting under the skins of Quebec nationalists and under the skirts of their daughters.

But Trudeau rose at a moment of global intellectual ferment. Students were taking to the streets in protests from Paris to Berkeley. Dashing and cavalier, Trudeau became his party's way to rebut a platoon of interchangeable leadership candidates in horn- rimmed glasses and sack suits.

The message of the times was "Tune in, turn on, drop out." The message from the Liberal establishment candidates was, "Eat your vegetables." They never knew what hit them.

Let's recap.

(a) The Trudeau lesson is that you can overcome seemingly insurmountable advantages of organization and name recognition by electrifying the nation with a magnetic personality.

(b) The guy trying to do this is John Manley.

At a moment when ambition and agenda seem so radically mismatched, it becomes difficult to take the measure of a man's public life. Yet Mr. Manley has travelled a great distance since he arrived in Ottawa South in 1988 after a lifetime in, er, southern Ottawa.

His contribution to Jean Chretien's government has outweighed that of all but a few other ministers. As Industry Minister, he sacrificed a disproportionate share of his department to the belt- tightening that eliminated the budget deficit between 1995 and 1997. He masterminded the immense investments into research and technology that have characterized almost every Liberal budget. As foreign affairs minister, he made sure Canada kept enough credibility as a security-conscious northern neighbour after 9/11 that the Americans refrained from shutting down the border.

Through it all, he evolved rapidly as a political performer. It is most accurate to describe three distinct phases in his public personality.

The first face of John Manley was that of Beaker, the helpless lab assistant from The Muppet Show. Earnest and clumsy, Beaker served as industry minister without complaint until stepping aside, without complaint, when Brian Tobin demanded his job just before the 2000 election. Unlike the Muppet Show character, Beaker Manley did important work well. If he was not a star of the early Chretien cabinet, it was partly because interviewing him was like dipping your arms into liquid nitrogen.

As a reporter for The Gazette in Montreal, I chatted with Mr. Manley several years ago at his Queen Street ministerial office suite about connectivity and broadband and licensing structures and wired classrooms. When it was over, my notebook looked like a VCR instruction manual. When he left the department, though, Canada was one of the most Internet-connected countries in the world. Whatever the hell he was talking about, it seems to have worked.

For years, Beaker offered only occasional hints of a livelier intelligence and a more active imagination. The first was when he was handed the file that nearly sunk him, the mandate to consider whether Ottawa should bail out ailing professional hockey teams. What few people remember is that Jean Chretien handed him that particular tar baby, an order Mr. Manley could not countermand, and that as he spoke to reporters about it during the closing days of 1999, he was invariably in a vile mood.

In retrospect, this showed great insight. What people also forget is that three provincial governments and a bunch of hockey-industry spokespeople were urging Mr. Manley to fork over our tax dollars to millionaire players and billionaire owners. Yet Mr. Manley knew the only thing worse than inaction would be action.

So there was something perfectly charming about the minister who withdrew his $20-million bailout plan only days after he offered it. You were never too crazy about helping hockey, were you?

He cut in: "I was never too crazy? That may be debatable."

Ottawa can be a lovely town. There are days when even the most cynical reporter feels privileged to be patrolling the halls of Parliament. But straight talk and self-deprecating humour are so rare around here they are greeted with almost absurd gratitude when they show up. With increasing frequency through 2000 and 2001, John Manley morphed into Straight-Talking Guy. You never knew what would pop out of his mouth. It was as though he had a low-grade and relatively benign form of Tourette's syndrome.

In one of his first interviews as foreign minister, he cheerfully wrote off his predecessor, a secular Liberal saint: "You may want to poll [United States] congressmen and see how many of them can tell you who Lloyd Axworthy is." In a later interview, he told me Canada would lose whatever clout it still had in the world if it stayed in the habit of preaching at the G8 and other global councils, then heading for the lavatory when the bill came due.

Mr. Manley's most memorable appearance in his Straight-Talking Guy persona came days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some observers, including Liberal MPs, were calling on the government to keep out of an Afghanistan invasion because it might get dangerous.

Mr. Manley had no time for the sentiment. "Canada has soldiers that are buried all over Europe because we fought in defence of liberty. And we're not about to back away from a challenge now because we think that somebody might get hurt."

He did serious policy work during that dark autumn too, but it may be fair to say that one sound bite made him Time magazine's Canadian Newsmaker of the Year for 2001.

And it may also be fair to point out, as Mr. Manley builds his leadership strategy on the hope that Paul Martin has peaked early, that Mr. Manley became Time's Newsmaker a year before Mr. Martin did.

It hasn't been all downhill since then. Mr. Manley remains an almost uniquely clear-eyed and frank presence amid the grey legions of Liberal ministers with their talking points and their fading Xeroxed personalities. He has taken on more responsibility than any half-dozen of his colleagues and managed to avoid serious error.

The rollout of his budget earlier this month was a little raggedy- assed, with most observers unable to remember even a few days later what Mr. Manley had spent his considerable revenue windfall on. But the late Martin budgets weren't classics either. Measured against the ministerial field, Mr. Manley remains a strong performer.

But the romance with Straight-Talking Guy is over, thanks largely to a further evolution of Mr. Manley's public persona.

Too often he has sabotaged whatever advantage his gift for audacity would confer.

Either he refuses to follow through or he displays an unbecoming chippiness.

More and more frequently, journalists have had to learn that the day after the latest bold declaration from Straight-Talking Guy, the Minister will appear in his guise as a grumpy old cuss to chew the scribes or his fellow Liberals out.

Uh-oh. Here comes Old Man Manley.

First, Straight-Talking Guy's on the front page of the paper saying something courageous about Canada-U.S. relations or the Prime Minister's ethics-related scandals. Then the next day, instead of basking in it, Old Man Manley comes chasing after the scribes with his garden rake.

"Hey, you pesky kids!" he shouts. "Get away from that quotation about underpaying at the G-8! What are ya trying to do, get me in trouble? Tarnation!"

Straight-Talking Guy celebrates the arrival of the Queen on Canadian soil by saying that, nice lady though she is, he hopes she's the last British royal to impose her royalty on Canadians. Then Old Man Manley trots out a few days later to take it all back.

Old Man Manley turns up at the Liberal party's internal organizational meetings, saying Liberals can't be trusted to pick a Liberal leader. "Bring in Elections Canada," Old Man Manley says. "Pesky kids! Can't leave you alone for two minutes!"

Old Man Manley doles out billions of dollars in new spending on the only budget he may ever deliver, then gives a speech two days later to complain taxes are too high. "Land o' Goshen! Who's responsible for these taxes? What do you mean, I am? Pesky kids."

These are human flaws and frailties. As I have written at Proustian length over the past nine months, Paul Martin ain't perfect either. Especially in the heat of a leadership campaign, the vagaries of press coverage and Liberal party idiosyncrasies can be hard to bear. Mr. Manley's emerging weaknesses do not cancel out his established strengths; they simply make it harder to get carried away with the guy than it used to be.

But his strategy is precisely to hope Liberals get carried away with him. If he and Paul Martin were starting from the same place, with the same CV and the same organizations, appealing to Canadians who did not know either man better than the other, I would like Mr. Manley's chances very much.

But Paul Martin has already dug a trench 26 miles wide. Mr. Manley is limbering up on the shores. Running will take a leap of faith. He must pray for that gust of breeze.