Straight from the Heart

Penny E. Bryden teaches history at Mount Allison University in New
Brunswick.

When Jean Chrétien’s political memoirs first appeared in 1985, the
year after he lost the leadership of the Liberal Party to John Turner,
they created quite a stir. Straight from the Heart was taken as an
implicit announcement that Chrétien had not disappeared from politics
entirely and intended to be poised for the mantle of leadership when
Turner decided to resign. This new edition of Chrétien’s widely
popular memoirs was issued to “take into account some of the events
that have occurred since the paperback appeared.” This it does in a
cursory fashion, adding little to the original work and in some ways
detracting from its friendly and informative tone.

Although there are two new chapters, little, if anything, has been
revised in the first nine chapters, and outdated material has been left
in. For example, there is no acknowledgment of the wrangles over the
Meech Lake Accord or the Charlottetown Agreement in assessing Ottawa-
Quebec relations and constitutional arrangements in the 1970s and early
1980s. The first part of the book is clearly written from the
perspective of 1985—René Lévesque is still alive, there is no Bloc
Québécois, the 1982 Constitution is a huge success. Readers will find
these perspectives odd in a book purporting to be “revised and
updated.”

There is also an awkward shift in tone between the early chapters and
the last two add-ons. The first edition was obviously written by a man
who was prepared to leave active politics. Chrétien believed John
Turner “had a good chance of remaining prime minister for a long time
... and since that meant [he] had probably missed [his] only chance to
become leader, [he] had better think about doing something else.” The
early part of the book reflects that sentiment. It appears to have been
written less to justify a political life than to explain—in the
down-to-earth speech that Chrétien has elevated to an art form—the
curious nature of politics in Canada. The style is engaging, the
anecdotes amusing, and readers will come away with a more intimate sense
of what goes on in Ottawa and why. However, the last two chapters were
written by a different man. By 1994, Chrétien was Prime Minister; he
could no longer merely explain the political process, but had to justify
his decisions. In the end, the original book is the more satisfying of
the two editions.