From 1975 to 1981, Jimmy Coutts served as Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s all-powerful principal secretary.Supplied
- Title: The Coutts Diaries: Power, Politics, and Pierre Trudeau 1973-1981
- Editor: Ron Graham
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Sutherland House Books
- Pages: 470
In politics and in poker, Jimmy Coutts played for high stakes.
From 1975 to 1981 – through years of constitutional negotiation and financial woes, the arrival of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois, the victory and then defeat of Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative government, and the reviled National Energy Program − Coutts served as Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s all-powerful principal secretary.
He controlled the Prime Minister’s Office, access to Mr. Trudeau and the Liberal government’s agenda.
And he kept a diary.
After Coutts’s death in 2013 at the age of 75, the archive of Trinity College, University of Toronto, received a collection of leather-bound volumes, along with other papers, with the stipulation that the materials must remain publicly unavailable until Jan. 1 of this year. Author and journalist Ron Graham was given advanced access to the diaries, and from them has assembled this account.
The Coutts Diaries
Power, Politics, and Pierre Trudeau 1973-1981Sutherland Press
In his introduction, Graham writes that the diaries at their best are “extraordinary: vivid, insightful accounts of one of the most turbulent times in Canadian history, marked by a talent for narrative, an instinct for the human moment, and an honest voice.”
I completely agree. If you are a student of Canada’s political history, you must have this book.
That said, the entries are at times repetitive, self-serving and dull. This is a book for political addicts; anyone seeking a more general account of Pierre Trudeau and his times will want to look elsewhere.
James Allan Coutts was born in 1938 in High River, Alta., in the same town and at about the same time as his Conservative rival, Joe Clark. He briefly practised law in Calgary, but his heart was devoted to the Liberal Party, and in 1963, he became an aide to the newly elected prime minister, Lester Pearson.
In 1966, Coutts left the PMO to obtain an MBA from Harvard, then worked as a management consultant. But after Trudeau’s Liberals almost lost the 1972 election, campaign wizard Keith “the Rainmaker” Davey and Coutts helped engineer the campaign that gave the Liberals a majority-government victory in 1974, after which Trudeau made Coutts his principal secretary.
No one and nothing got to Trudeau except through Coutts. Cherubic, impish, a splendid mimic and culturally literate, he became second only to the prime minister in power and influence in Ottawa.
He was forever trying and failing to quit smoking. He arrived at work more than once dragging a hangover, and was obsessed with poker, regularly playing games that went late into the night and sometimes into the morning, winning or losing thousands of dollars a game.
During cabinet meetings, Coutts liked to sit at the end of the room by the coffee pot, which gave him the opportunity to chat informally with ministers as they filled their cups. “In this way, I’m able to have 10 to 15 conversations with ministers in the course of the two-or-three-hour meeting,” he wrote in his diary.
He was at the heart of the debate when the Liberals, having ridiculed the Conservatives’ proposal for wage and price controls, imposed them; when John Turner shockingly resigned as finance minister in protest over government spending; when then-PQ leader René Lévesque became premier, promising a referendum on sovereignty.
James Coutts hands out leaflets while campaigning in Toronto in 1981.The Globe and Mail
The diary entries become truly compelling in the months leading up to Trudeau’s 1979 election defeat, his decision to resign and then to unresign, after the minority Clark government was defeated over its December, 1979 budget, followed by the triumphant Liberal majority-government win in February, 1980.
In the wake of that election, the new government confronted a plethora of challenges, which Coutts enumerated as “the Quebec situation, the oil and gas situation, the federal-provincial relations generally, and the international situation both economic and political.”
The government’s approach, he resolved, must be two-pronged: “seeking reasonable change on the constitutional issues that affect Quebec” and “to show great strength on the economic side and the other questions as they affect English Canada.”
That “great strength” turned out to be the National Energy Program, reviled to this day in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The NEP forced the energy-producing provinces to sell oil domestically at below-market price, in order to protect the economic interests of people and business in Central Canada. It also sought to increase the federal share of energy revenue, and of Canadian ownership in the energy sector.
Meanwhile, Trudeau struggled throughout 1981 to craft a constitutional package, including a bill of rights, that would earn the support of at least some premiers and opposition parliamentarians. Most Canadians, however, were far more interested in, and alarmed by, a crippling recession that produced double-digit rates of inflation, interest and unemployment.
Coutts, a strong proponent of the NEP, also favoured a government bailout for troubled manufacturers Chrysler and Massey. As an economic nationalist and a progressive, he was more committed to Canadian sovereignty than to the demands of business executives.
“I am not convinced by any means that we should spend very much effort bringing the senior members of the business community around,” he wrote in March, 1981.
But with Margaret Thatcher now prime minister in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the White House, the world was trending toward globalization and deregulation. Coutts, Trudeau and the Liberals were outside the times.
Jimmy Coutts and Pierre Trudeau go over notes in a 1981 file photo.The Canadian Press
The prime minister’s most senior aide despaired over the endless machinations of those seeking to succeed Trudeau as leader. As early as 1980, Paul Martin Jr. − whose father had served in the cabinets of four Liberal prime ministers, stretching back to Mackenzie King − told Coutts that he wanted to become Liberal leader.
Mr. Coutts warned Martin that “those who become obsessed with the idea of leadership end up as very unhappy people.” There were many in cabinet chasing such unhappiness, including Jean Chrétien, who Mr. Coutts thought was at times in over his head, and Eugene Whelan, who complained about being marginalized in cabinet even as he sought to increase his influence in it.
“There are very few ministers who are not fighting one another over something,” Coutts observed.
Coutts had leadership ambitious of his own, and Trudeau accordingly arranged a by-election in the Toronto riding of Spadina in 1981, as the first step toward making him an MP and cabinet minister.
But the riding’s voters resented the manipulation, and he lost narrowly to NDP candidate Dan Heap. He tried again and failed again in the 1984 election, ending his life in politics.
The diaries suggest that Coutts in these years did little other than work. He seemed to have rarely eaten a meal other than at a restaurant with a political ally, to strategize and scheme. But he also enjoyed the arts, and the diaries reveal that he suffered for years from an unrequited love for Jennifer Rae, sister to Bob Rae, former Ontario premier and currently Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.
There are other important Canadian political diaries. Among them, Mackenzie King’s are, of course, by far the most important. Former diplomat Charles Ritchie’s are the most elegantly written. And Allan Gotlieb’s book The Washington Diaries: 1981-1989, recounting his years as Canada’s ambassador in D.C, including the free-trade negotiations, is witty, gossipy and insightful.
Now, Jim Coutts joins their ranks, thanks to Ron Graham’s skillful editing. The country is richer for it.
John Ibbitson is a writer and journalist.
