Liberal Party MPs who gathered in front of a Parliament Hill television screen Oct. 4 to watch Ralph Goodale unveil the government’s Canadian Wheat Board policy left the room shaking their heads.
It had been an unsteady performance, difficult to understand. The normally unflappable minister had seemed unsure of himself. He had not been as forceful, as clear or as definitive as he had been days earlier when talking to some MPs about some of his plans.
Even more mysterious, stacks of background documents that were carted into the room to give MPs the background they would need to field weekend queries from their constituents were carted out before they could be distributed.
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They were told the minister’s office had “put them on hold.”
What was going on?
A popular theory was that Goodale was going to be shuffled from his portfolio as part of the fall-out from the same-day resignation of defence minister David Collenette. He did not want to tie the hands of his successor.
A close runner-up theory was that Goodale had been distracted by some event.
The “distraction” theory was correct, but the source was a bit off target.
In fact, less than half an hour before Goodale was to go before the cameras in Regina, he was summoned to the telephone. From Ottawa, an official from either the prime minister’s office or the privy council office was telling him they were no longer totally comfortable with his announcement.
They needed clarification.
Make it tentative enough that the government had some wiggle room if changes had to be made, he was told.
This caught Goodale off guard.
There had been weeks of planning and negotiation in Ottawa, approval by cabinet and the prime minister.
Goodale thought he had done his homework thoroughly.
These last-minute questions unnerved him, making his performance tentative and requiring him to add indecision to a statement meant to end the criticisms of indecisiveness.
He spent the weekend preparing his arguments and when he returned to Ottawa, satisfied the question.
“He tuned people in,” one colleague said later. “Some ears were burning.”
Last week, Goodale would not say precisely what had been asked or who had asked it, only that it was uncertainty about “international trade technicalities.”
It likely was a query about implications for Canada-U.S. trade rules of the vote on barley marketing, an issue that had been thoroughly debated within government and approved beforehand.
Goodale last week dismissed it as “an old issue … The concern was to make sure that in the whole collection of proposals, our position with respect to international trade was in fact being enhanced and not in any way diminished.”
Privately, colleagues said, Goodale was outraged that some last-minute high-level jitters disrupted his day in the spotlight.
“I felt sorry for Ralph,” one of his caucus colleagues said last week. “He got screwed. Somebody here should pay.”
