Former federal Liberal cabinet minister Allan MacEachen dies at 96
By Jim CoyleNews, Insight
Wed., Sept. 13, 2017timer7 min. read
He was a giant of his time, a classic of his political type as regional godfather and an architect of some of the social programs on which Canadians still define and pride themselves.
Allan Joseph MacEachen — known as "Allan J." across his native Cape Breton Island; if you called him anything else you outed yourself as a come-from-away — died this week at 96.
And for once the frequently uttered epitaph is true. His like is not apt to pass this way again any time soon.
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"Allan J. was the pre-eminent parliamentarian of his time," Bob Rae, former MP and Ontario premier, told the Star.
"He will deservedly be remembered for his deep commitment to social justice, to the economic development of his region and the whole country and to Parliament itself."
Sean Fraser, Liberal MP for the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova, told the Star that MacEachen "was just a larger-than-life character. He's peerless in Canadian politics."
MacEachen held just about "every position there is to hold," Fraser said. "And he did more with those positions than can reasonably be expected of a human being."
Allan J. was an MP and senator for more than 43 years, starting out at the progressive heart of the Pearson government in the 1960s and using his vast parliamentary skills, University of Toronto professor Nelson Wiseman told the Star, to engineer the downfall of the Joe Clark government in 1979 and his considerable powers of persuasion on the Liberal caucus to enable Pierre Trudeau's return as leader — after his dalliance with resignation.
"Allan MacEachen was a very, very shrewd tactician, and it's actually because of him that Pierre Trudeau came back into power in 1980," Wiseman said.
MacEachen was born in 1921 in Inverness, N.S., and grew up during the Great Depression. His father worked in the Cape Breton coal mines for 46 years, and when he left, his son once recalled, "he left with nothing; he had no pension."
But MacEachen found education to be the great equalizer. He attended St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., and graduated in 1944 before studying economics at M.I.T.
He was first elected in 1953 at just 33, was defeated in 1958 and re-elected in 1962.
His first cabinet portfolio was as Lester Pearson's labour minister. Then, in 1966, as minister of national health and welfare, he helped implement medicare in Canada, widely regarded as his greatest achievement.
He told the Commons "this effort springs not only from a deepening of our humanitarian concern for our fellow citizens, but from a realization that we cannot afford the social and economic consequences of our failure to do so. In an industrial country such as ours, we cannot afford the loss to the economy stemming from ill health."
MacEachen, said Rae, "was at the heart and centre of the Pearson government — whose social and economic policies remain an integral part of the policy architecture of our country.
"The Canada Pension Plan, medicare, manpower changes, regional development, immigration changes — Allan J. was instrumental in making these happen."
In 1968, MacEachen ran for the Liberal leadership, but lost badly and ended up in debt. He was shuffled sideways, then downward for a time by Pierre Trudeau. He considered quitting politics, but friends convinced him he would be letting down Cape Breton.
For all MacEachen's accomplishments during the Pearson years, he was what former Star columnist Richard Gwyn once called "a late-blooming media star."
By 1972, MacEachen had been on Parliament Hill for almost 20 years in various capacities, but cultivated a sort of shaggy, bearish demeanour that was clever camouflage for his shrewdness.
He was an intensely private bachelor, with a reputation among some colleagues for brooding and melancholy. And it was the Clark-Trudeau dramas of 1979-80 in which he jumped to national prominence, Gwyn wrote.
In his memoirs, Pierre Trudeau wrote that MacEachen had great strategic sense, lived and breathed politics and was "the kind of man I respected because he had no ulterior motives.
"He said what he thought, and the reasons he would give were always his real reasons."
Trudeau's confidence in MacEachen was reflected by the late Liberal cabinet minister, Eugene Whelan, when he wrote in his memoir of having his knuckles rapped by the PM after speaking out critically on financial affairs while MacEachen was minister.
"You can say anything you like about the banks, but leave MacEachen out of it," Whelan reported Trudeau telling him.
MacEachen, who retired from the Senate in 1996 after 12 years in the upper chamber, led the infamous Liberal protests there in the late 1980s over the Progressive Conservative government's free-trade treaty with the United States.
At MacEachen's Senate retirement, colleague Sen. Anne Cools described the country's first deputy prime minister as a true son of Cape Breton, whose parents spoke Scottish Gaelic at home.
"His Scottish racial ancestry is revealed in his physical build and his stalwart features. He is a handsome man with great serenity and poise. He has the countenance of one who understands human beings and the human condition.
MacEachen enjoyed solitude, she said. His face was inscrutable when necessary. "He is a complex man."
Richard Gwyn concurred.
"The only way to understand him is to understand Cape Breton," Gwyn wrote in The Northern Magus, a biography of Pierre Trudeau.
"That tribal, private, tightly knit kingdom peopled by cynical romantics and canny innocents, peopled that is to say by Catholic highland Scots, given to beholding the Hebrides in dreams.
"MacEachen is happiest in the past, which to him is part of the present. He speaks Gaelic fluently and visits Scotland regularly to revivify his roots. To his Cape Breton tribe, he is shepherd and icon combined."
And for all the titles he held — for all the landmark accomplishments — his "reputation at home was for service to his constituents," said Fraser.
He recalled an oft-told tale of how, as external affairs minister, MacEachen was attending a Middle East peace conference. He wanted the schedule changed so he could leave Thursday in order to get home to Cape Breton to deal with constituents.
He was told by other participants that changing the agenda was no small inconvenience.
"He said to the U.S. secretary of state, 'The difference between your political system and mine is if I don't get back for this weekend for my meetings at home, we don't get to have this meeting next year."
Fraser said MacEachen's impact on Canadian politics will continue for years because of the leaders he groomed as they passed through his office and under his influence.
"When I was student union president at St. F.X. (Francis Xavier), the president of the university had worked in his (MacEachen's) office.
"When I was deciding to go to law school, the two people who convinced me that it was a good idea . . . they both got their start in law and politics working for Allan MacEachen.
"The people that are around Ottawa now who have worked alongside him include Ralph Goodale and Gerry Butts.
"This man had his fingers on the careers of so many talented people that he's going to continue to influence Canadian politics for a generation after he's gone."
In fact, MacEachen — whose stamp of approval mattered until the end of his days — helped in the election of 2015, Fraser said.
"He had a home in Antigonish until he passed and he had a big red sign in the middle of town for me during the last election."
Still, it might be Bob Rae who hit on the most important of Allan J.'s legacies.
Rae met MacEachen when he was a young guide in the House of Commons in the summer of 1966 and the MP was already a parliamentary veteran.
"I saw him perform brilliantly in an emergency debate on back-to-work legislation. When I was first elected to the House in 1978, he was friendly, but didn't give me any leeway in debate. I was his critic when he was finance minister.
"When I was thinking about running for the Liberal leadership in 2006, he called me out of the blue and said he wanted to help. Given my often barbed comments about him I was taken aback. I went to see him, and we talked it through. I asked him to co-chair my campaign, which he generously did."
MacEachen was a scholar who remained, Rae said, "a student of economics, politics and philosophy his whole life."
He had been "made frail by a series of strokes, but kept reading, engaging and talking things through as best he could.
"His was a life of service," Rae said. "And he was loved by many, including me."