During his years as finance minister, then as Canada's 21st prime minister, Paul Martin always believed that a federal surplus was key to economic stability in uncertain times.
The Conservative government's biggest economic misstep has been to "gut" the surplus that he spent so much time building, Martin tells CTV.ca in Toronto.
That has put Canada at great risk amid the current global economic slowdown, Martin said in an interview during a tour to promote his new memoir "Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics."
"We left a $12 billion surplus. I would have protected that surplus because that is really what gives government the ability to maneuver," Martin says.
"The Conservative government essentially gutted it, which really puts Canada in a very difficult position from my point of view. ...And I would have worked much more on building up the international effort to co-operate, to deal with and prevent these kinds of things."
Grudges
Martin has a few other grudges with the Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His work on early learning and child care, providing greater support for cities and tackling Aboriginal issues through the Kelowna Accord -- was all but abandoned by the Tories, he said.
"We got them all in place, we had them up and running or virtually, and then of course what happened is the election came and the Conservatives were able to come in and because they were not so strongly anchored in the public psyche and government operations, they were able to walk away from it."
In the book, Martin describes Harper's abandonment of Kelowna -- a $5-billion, five-year plan to boost Aboriginal living standards to the Canadian average -- as his greatest regret about leaving office.
Martin is also bitter about the timing of the release of a report into the sponsorship scandal by his predecessor and political nemesis Jean Chretien. Chretien prorogued Parliament in November 2003, delaying the release of the report and leaving Martin to deal with the fallout from the auditor general's report after Chretien had left office.
"I was mad at Jean Chretien for having left me this time bomb," he writes in the book. "It drove me crazy that I had to deal with this leftover mess when there were so many more important issues I had come into government to confront."
In the book, Martin maintains his early assertions that he was unaware kickbacks were being funnelled through the sponsorship program to party supporters in Quebec.
The sheer amount of time and energy that Martin had to put into dealing with the fallout of the scandal robbed him of his ability to focus on those issues, he says. And arguably, it was also the iceberg that helped sink Martin's political career and give the Conservatives the foothold they needed to unseat the Liberals.
In writing his memoir, one of Martin's main goals was to keep his political agenda from slipping from the public eye "just because there's a government in office that doesn't believe in it," he says.
Not looking back
But the former prime minister, widely seen as one of the most popular finance ministers the country has ever had, says he spends little time looking back or analyzing the mistakes that were made and what could have been done differently.
"You focus on where you're going, not where you've been," he says.
Despite his retirement from public life, Martin's vision has remained locked on clear objectives. Right now much of his energy is focused on his chairmanship of a project to preserve the Congo River Basin.
"I'm very actively involved with the preservation of the Congo rainforest, which is an essential part of the climate change agenda. I continue to be fully involved in the Aboriginal issue and I've been called in much more than I thought I would be on this whole financial crisis," Martin says.
Martin's book doesn't only focus on politics. It also paints a picture of his early life growing up in the Windsor, Ont. area as the son of an MP and cabinet minister who served in four Liberal governments.
Despite his lineage, Martin writes that he wasn't focused solely on a life in politics or business, as a young man.
Surprisingly, one of his main goals growing up was to play in the Canadian Football League.
Martin tells CTV.ca he's excited about the current state of the Liberal Party. Its recent election loss and Stephane Dion's decision to step down from the role of leader are not insurmountable hurdles, but rather serve as building blocks for rebuilding, Martin suggests.
"I think what you're going to see is a great grassroots movement within the party," he says. "I think that there are outstanding candidates who are preparing to put themselves forth and I think we'll see a great debate and I think we'll find a very strong party coming out of this."
