Double Vision: The Inside Story of the Liberals in Power

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Greenspon (The Globe and Mail) and Wilson-Smith (Maclean’s) are two of
the better-known journalists covering the Ottawa political scene, and
this book, the first for both, is their very good attempt to examine the
Chrétien Liberal government in power. Their focus is policy more than
personality, and they trace the battles between ministers and
departments for primacy. The winner is no surprise: Paul Martin and the
Department of Finance triumph easily over the big spenders in Human
Resources, who wanted to reform social welfare spending but preserve a
viable safety net. Hack, slash, and rollback prevailed, but the deficit
was tamed and Canadian business cheered. Paul Martin emerges from their
account as a difficult, troubled man, one who can rage and curse one
minute and can be charming and loyal the next. The prime minister does
enter the picture, even if the government’s policies and priorities
were set and controlled by Martin, but Chrétien emerges as a rather
grey figure, a francophone Mackenzie King who has few convictions, who
believes that what is prevented is more important than what is
accomplished, and who gives ministers a long leash and lets them get on
with their business. Troublingly, Greenspon and Wilson-Smith also
suggest that the prime minister is convinced of his infallibility—an
attitude that, perhaps, ought to have been knocked out of him by the
results of the 1995 Quebec referendum.

Based overwhelmingly on interviews, this is a first draft of history.
But it is an uncommonly good book, one that reflects the attitudes of
the mid-1990s with clarity. If the emphasis here is on Canada’s fiscal
problems rather than on the unity question, then as a result historians
a generation from now may be able to understand how Canadians
sleepwalked to dissolution.