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I was headed to my mother’s condo, where the family would assemble for the trip to Guelph. On the way, I passed Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, and thought about how unusual it was for a church to be named for a mortal individual, and more broadly about the ways we strive to be remembered by future generations.

Those who have the energy and cleverness to amass wealth sooner or later face the question of what to do with it. If the wealth is liquid, once a decision is made, it is relatively easy to implement. If the wealth is illiquid, implementation becomes much more complicated.

In the seventies, my parents established a store that sold weavings, wall hangings, and other items for interior design. Some things, like clumpy weavings, macrame, and marimekko fabric, were very seventies. But my mother became interested in Inuit art, and over the years, she began to focus on Inuit sculpture, prints, and graphics. I’m not exactly sure why: I think it was out of respect for the Innu artists’ ability to represent the challenges of their way of life. My mother felt a responsibility (and opportunity) to make their art available in this large metropolis. After a while, the Pareto rule began to assert itself: Twenty percent of the items – the Inuit art – were responsible for eighty percent of the business.

My parents retired from the business in 1984, but my mother retained and deepened her interest in Inuit art. She continued to buy from wholesalers and sell from her house to loyal customers. Almost every summer she went north on a buying trip, adding exceptional pieces to her inventory. Ultimately, her personal collection grew to several hundred pieces, one of the major private Inuit art collections in Canada. Along the way, she made some major donations, for example to the Mount Sinai and Baycrest hospitals and to the Rotman School of Management. When she moved from a house to a 1500 square foot condo about a decade ago, the pieces she took with filled several rooms.

My siblings and I have some interest in Inuit art, but do not share her passion. The question we faced as a family is what to do about the majority of the collection that the three of her children were not interested in inheriting. This became a family preoccupation for several years. There was far too much to attempt to sell. Donations were also a possibility.

In the last half-century Inuit art has achieved iconic status as Canadian art. The primitivism of the stone carving – its absence of detail and ornamentation –fits well with “Canadian school” of public architecture, with its blending of stone, wood, glass, and natural light. The problem with donating Inuit art to display in these buildings is that the art is part of the building, in effect a sort of accent. And there are limits on the amount of accenting any building can use. Thus, the Borins donation to the Rotman School shows both the strength and limits of this approach.

My mother began to look for a place that wanted the entire collection for its artistic value. Through the good offices of Inuit art consultant Heather Beecroft, the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (MSAC) at the University of Guelph contacted my mother. The MSAC has a fine collection of Inuit wall hangings and graphics, but less sculpture. So a donation that is primarily sculpture would complement their collection very nicely.

My mother had three large display shelves in different places in her condo. She gave the MSAC the shelves, and they now cover an entire wall in a small lecture room. The cases display a variety of pieces, some large works in stone and others tiny ivories. In addition, my mother donated a number of large pieces carved of white quartzite. One, a tall sedna, or ocean spirit, will be displayed in the university’s arboretum, and others in the gallery.

Finally, my mother gave the museum an amautiq – a woman’s parka with a large hood for carrying an infant – that she had made. The amautiq, a replica of one in the ROM, is of heavy wool, with 2000 small beads that she added herself. The amautiq required enormous perseverance and discipline.

We attended the reception at which the gift was unveiled last week. My mother was interviewed by MSAC’s director and curator Judith Nasby, and spoke about some of the pieces and how she acquired them. I realized, then, that each piece has at least three stories – the story it tells itself, the story the artist tells about how (s)he came to make it, and the story the owner tells about how (s)he acquired it. Our thanks go to Judith Nasby, curator of contemporary art Dawn Owen, and coordinator of education and development Aidan Ware for organizing the event.

I greatly admire my mother for the role Inuit art has assumed in her life, in terms of both her passion to gather a fine and deep collection, and her finding a new home for the collection that will preserve it and use it to further the appreciation and study of Inuit art.

With the dust now settling, I’ll interpret the campaign from a narratological perspective. This is substantially different from the traditional electoral politics approach. In the latter, political parties are seen as dividing the electorate up into segments (“slicing and dicing”) and in their platforms proposing sets of policies to appeal to these segments. If a party wins the support of enough voters in enough segments, it will win the election. One challenge in this approach is classification – how to reduce people’s multi-dimensional lives to homogeneous population segments – and a second is coherence – how to write a platform that is more than a shopping list of (possibly conflicting) policies.

The narrative approach to campaigning focuses on leadership, historical continuity, and coherence. It postulates that people are voting as much to choose a leader as to choose a set of policies. In choosing a leader, they are evaluating a candidate’s (that is, a party leader’s) life experience and inferring from it about how he or she would perform in office. Candidates present essentially the same set of experiences – the same story – to the entire electorate. When a leader presents a platform, he or she is telling a comprehensive story relevant to the entire electorate. In this approach, candidates are talking about where the country has been and where they have been, and, if elected, where they would take the country and how they would lead it.

In the electoral politics approach, competition involves either parties bidding against each other by offering more to particular groups of voters, or going negative by attacking policy proposals that they claim will hurt the interests of segments other than the one at which it was directed.

In the narrative approach, campaigning involves a struggle of competing narratives. Each party and its candidate is trying to frame an attractive and compelling story for itself and a repellent story for its opponents. The goal is to make both stories stick.

As in previous posts, I’m using my four quadrant narrative model to categorize these stories. The vertical axis refers to the country and whether it advances or declines. The horizontal axis refers to the candidate and whether he or she achieves or fails to achieve a personal ambition. An incumbent party wants to tell a story that under its stewardship the nation has advanced, and that that its leader has in some way grown in office. If that party is elected, the nation will continue to advance, which justifies the fulfillment of the prime minister’s personal ambition. This is the upper-left quadrant of the four quadrant model. An opposition party wants to take issue with the incumbent party’s interpretation of recent history, and argue that its policies promise the best hope of national advancement, and that its leader is therefore worthy of personal advancement to prime minister. The upper left quadrant is the high ground, and incumbents and opposition struggle to seize it.

In contrast, the lower-left quadrant represents the low ground, and each party is trying to force its opponents onto it. It associates decline for the country – either in the past or projected into the future – with the realization of ambition on the part of a party leader. In effect, the country will suffer if the leader achieves his personal ambitions.

The results of the election can be interpreted as three leaders (Elizabeth May, Jack Layton, Steven Harper) successfully claiming the high ground in the upper-left quadrant, with two, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, being forced to the low ground of the lower-left quadrant.

Elizabeth May’s policy goal is to preserve and enhance the Canadian environment. She wisely chose to run in a constituency that is among the physically most beautiful in the country. Her winning message, given force by her exclusion from the leaders’ debate, was that she would most effectively advance this goal from a seat in the House of Commons. This outcome represented a clear alignment between her vision of national renewal and the achievement of her ambition.

As I argued in my most recent post about Jack Layton, he combined an optimistic personal narrative of cheerfully overcoming illness with advancement for the voters through improving health care and more generous public pensions. He had the advantage that both the Conservatives and the Liberals ignored him until the last ten days of the campaign. Because of his personal circumstances, when the attacks did come, they focused on the cost of his promises, but did not attempt to disrupt his personal narrative.

Stephen Harper’s initial narrative, as I argued in my post of March 28 that analyzed his first television ad, focused on a story of successful economic recovery for the country combined with Harper becoming an internationally significant statesman. That message changed during the campaign, and Harper redefined personal advancement as becoming the leader of a majority government. By portraying himself as the facilitator of economic renewal, Harper argued that his personal ambition served the public interest: a win-win. His surrogates, for example, Preston Manning, emphasized that Harper is a “trained economist.” And, given the widespread perception of economists as people who don’t have the personality to become accountants, Harper’s low-key self-presentation was certainly in keeping with his message.

Michael Ignatieff made the fatal mistake of allowing the Conservatives to write his narrative through their attack ads that associated bad economic policy (from a conservative perspective, tax-and-spend) with the fulfillment of his personal ambition. That a market-oriented party succeeded at portraying a man who has spent his career thinking about the mutual obligations of state and citizens as acting solely out of personal ambition is deeply ironic. The fact that as thoughtful a group as the Globe and Mail editorial board saw fit to ask him the question posed in the attack ads – why did you come back to Canada ? – meant that Ignatieff never developed a compelling personal narrative encompassing his pre-political career as scholar and public intellectual and his return to Canada as a political actor.

Not adequately responding to what he now calls a campaign of “personal vilification” had, I believe, another effect on Mr. Ignatieff. He carried a huge burden of pent-up anger against the Conservatives and Mr. Harper, in particular, for his role in authorizing the campaign. The anger was finally released in the debates and in his campaign. By and large, voters are more attracted to cheerful optimists than angry prophets. When Michael Ignatieff chose to play the latter role, it was easy for Jack Layton to assume the former.

With the clarity of perfect hindsight, Mr. Ignatieff should have responded to the attacks when they first came. But how? The Liberals didn’t have the money to buy negative advertising. What Mr. Ignatieff could have done, inexpensively, was to have spoken in depth and unapologetically about his career as writer and scholar. He could have associated himself with the internationalism of the careers of Mackenzie King, Mike Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau. He could have shrugged off addressing Americans in the first person plural as intended only to get their attention, hardly a renunciation of citizenship. He could have presented his returning to Canada not as an ego trip, but a decision to personally fight for Liberal values. Perhaps the Liberals could have introducing an amendment to the Elections Act to ban political advertising when there is no formal election campaign. Or perhaps Ignatieff could have sued the Conservative Party for defamation. The Liberal Party might have sponsored a competition to crowd-source the best anti-Harper attack ads and “not just visiting” responses to the Conservative attack ads, and posted the winners on its website.

Finally, Mr. Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois. They were seen by the Quebec electorate, particularly nationalists, as having done little to advance Quebec’s interests, while having enjoyed the salaries and perks of federal MPs. They were ripe for the picking when the NDP came up with a better story.

If there are lessons to be learned from this election, and I think there are, the most compelling is Mr. Ignatieff’s on the necessity of preventing your opponents from writing a story you cannot revise or replace.

When the Liberals moved non-confidence in the Harper Government, I was surprised that the NDP went along. Jack Layton was ailing, fighting prostate cancer and recovering from hip surgery. A campaign with a leader who looks tired or unwell does not often succeed. Examples that came to mind were Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and Ernie Eves in Ontario in 2003. Yet Jack Layton was willing to take the risk of a grueling national campaign.

Starting in the debates and continuing since, Layton has managed to project himself as engaged, self-confident, and regaining his health, despite the demands of a national campaign. Jack Layton’s personal story has come to reinforce, perhaps even to dominate the NDP’s policy narrative. In terms of our four-quadrant narratological analysis, the NDP campaign is staking out the upper-left quadrant, combining policies that it claims will benefit the country – more spending on popular programs like training doctors and nurses and improving public pensions – with Jack Layton’s story of personal renewal. Notice that his story isn’t about renewal by achieving an ambition but rather a much more elemental struggle of renewal against illness.

The latest NDP commercial – “you do have a choice” – blends the two narratives of policy and personal renewal very skillfully. It shifts from policy – “I will fund more doctors and nurses and strengthen your pension” – to personality: “you know I’m a fighter. And I won’t stop until the job is done.” Layton presents himself as a fighter, both for policies and for his own health. The ad runs 30 seconds, and Layton, in 12 different clips, is present the entire time. Layton has now become the NDP’s best asset, and the party is shrewdly putting him front and centre for the remainder of the campaign. I want to make clear that Layton isn’t eliciting sympathy or pity because he is ill, but rather that he is eliciting admiration because he is, or at least appears to be, overcoming his illness.

I titled this post “Teflon Jack’s Narrative,” because for the remainder of the campaign Layton will be Teflon. The Liberals and Conservatives will continue to attack his policies. But because his main adversary is his health, it would be unseemly to attack him personally. In contrast, the Conservatives’ constant attacks on Ignatieff have done considerable damage to his image, and the attacks on Harper at least some damage to his. Layton, personally, will be above the fray.

Layton’s powerful personal narrative is strengthening the NDP in the polls, and it may be very difficult for the Liberals (or Bloc in Quebec), by focusing on policy alone, to drive the NDP vote down to its historic level. While I’m not a pollster, it seems to me that the NDP is taking votes from the Liberals, Bloc, and Greens, rather than the Conservatives, in the Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Ontario.  In the west, however, the NDP may be taking votes from the Conservatives. Say that the Conservatives maintain their vote share at 35 percent, but the NDP gains a bigger share of the 65 percent who oppose the Conservatives. The ultimate beneficiary would be the Conservatives. With a deeply split left and centre-left, a majority government of the right might be a possibility.

If a Conservative majority is the outcome, on May 3 the Liberals, NDP, Greens, and at least some Bloc supporters, rather than denying Harper’s coalition accusations, might start to think about some sort of coalition, alliance, or even merger that would allow the majority of the population to regain power.

The tributes that have been paid Allan Blakeney have focused on his achievements as minister of health when the Douglas Government introduced comprehensive public health insurance and as premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982. Blakeney, however, had three careers, first as a public servant; then as a politician, serving as minister, MLA, Opposition Leader, Premier, and again as Opposition leader; and for the last two decades of his life as teacher and writer. The third career received the least attention in the Canadian Press obituary, only a short concluding paragraph. Since my relationship with Allan Blakeney was entirely within that third period, I will focus on it.

Blakeney and I met when he came to Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and wanted to teach a public administration course. I was already doing that at the Faculty of Administrative Studies (now Schulich School of Business), and we decided to combine our efforts. From our first conversations, it was clear to me that he had thought deeply about statecraft, the practice of government, at both the political and public service levels. In our preparations for each class, I would provide a set of questions and he would take them away, and come back with well-thought-out answers, written in clear, flowing hand writing – a marker of his generation – on a yellow legal pad.

I thought it was essential to preserve his ideas, and he came to agree, and so we had the classes taped and transcribed. This was the origin of our book Political Management in Canada. In it, Blakeney did something unique at the time, recounting how he managed his government and why he did it that way. Thus he took us inside the cabinet room, not to recount particular decisions, but to explain how his cabinet made decisions. In the years since our book, Jean Chretien, in My Years as Prime Minister (2008), and Eddie Goldenberg, in The Way it Works: Inside Ottawa (2006) have, to an extent, applied Blakeney’s approach to the Chretien Government. Students of government will benefit if other ministers and first ministers follow Blakeney’s lead.

I recently donated the audio tapes of our classes to the Saskatchewan Archives. The better to preserve Blakeney’s voice, I hope the Saskatchewan Archieves will digitize them.

The middle of a federal election campaign is an appropriate time to revisit Blakeney’s views on politics and policy. He titled his political memoirs An Honourable Calling because he believed politics IS an honourable calling. In this view, politicians regard one another as people of principle and integrity who differ over policy and base their campaigns on these differences in policy.

Discussing his electoral defeats in Political Management in Canada (p. 237), he wrote “Ideally an election defeat would be regarded as a rejection of one group of policies in favour of another, and there should be little sense of personal rejection. But if this was ever true, it isn’t now in today’s climate of personalized politics. … [the media] regard politics as a contest of salesmanship rather than a comparison of products. [Elections] are increasingly becoming contests of personalities rather than policies. Canadian politics is poorer for this.”

Blakeney was a strong advocate of public enterprise and critic of the privatization of the potash and uranium industries in Saskatchewan. He saw Crown corporations as making a social as well as economic contribution to the province. Thus, he supported SaskPower keeping its rates down for local curling rinks during the winter because “they were almost always the heart of village life in January” (Political Management in Canada, p. 138). This was a classic example of reducing the cost of living in rural areas.

Blakeney warned that if Crown corporations were privatized, the head office would de facto move outside Saskatchewan and senior management would be paid as private sector executives rather than as public servants.

And his view of public enterprise was part of a broader commitment to equality, a belief that society as a whole would be better off if the state helped those most in need and reallocated some of the wealth the economy produced.

At the end of An Honourable Calling (p. 250), he wrote: “Our challenge in the future will not be primarily to produce more goods, but rather to distribute the goods more fairly. … When governments have intervened to distribute education, health, and many other services at low or reduced cost, society has been better for it. .. A look around the world tells me that where able and active governments (and there are many) intervene on behalf of people with special needs or lower incomes, society works best.”

Blakeney’s views on political campaign, Crown corporations, and the distribution of income are certainly contested, and likely he was in the minority in all three areas. But Blakeney did not despair, and maintained to the very end both an optimism and willingness to advocate for his vision of Canada. Thus his advocacy after leaving office is just as much part of his legacy as the decisions he made while in power.

Earlier this week I was at former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney’s Toronto launch of his new book An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs, published by the University of Toronto Press. Blakeney and I were co-authors of an earlier book Political Management in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1998). Here are a few impressions from the evening.

Two of the guests were former Ontario Premier Bill Davis and Attorney-General Roy McMurtry. While Davis and McMurtry were and are Tories and Blakeney was and is a NDP’er, they were politicians during the same period, and were all deeply involved in the repatriation of the Canadian constitution in the early Eighties. This was clearly a significant life experience, and their mutual affection is far stronger than the differences in their political allegiances.

Rather than the traditional reading from his book, Blakeney and I continued the dialogue we initiated in Political Management in Canada. In Blakeney’s view, political campaigns should involve parties presenting their ideas in some detail, and providing opportunities for voters to meet the leader face-to-face and unscripted. We agreed that the American presidential primaries – particularly the early ones – live up to this ideal, but Blakeney decried the Canadian practice of leaders campaigning in a tightly-controlled cocoon, reciting a purposely vague message.

Looking back at Blakeney’s eleven years as premier (1971-1982), he was called upon to guide Saskatchewan’s transition from what the late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset called “agrarian socialism” to a resource rich economy. In this, Blakeney’s challenge was to balance three priorities: prosperity for the province, efficiency in government, and equity for the entire society, in particular its large aboriginal population. I asked him to focus on current-day Saskatchewan, and one development of which he was particularly critical was the privatization of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan and of Cameco Corporation. Both were crown corporations started during the Blakeney Government, and Blakeney believes that they should have remained as Crown corporations, which would have searched within Saskatchewan rather than outside for their leadership, and would have been more likely to allocate their earnings to benefit all the people of Saskatchewan.

I urge you to read Blakeney’s book. It is in part a history of the policies and programs of one of Canada’s most effective and creative provincial governments. It is also a personal narrative about how someone from a Nova Scotia Tory background – and Blakeney reminded us that none of his ancestors ever voted for the CCF – came to join the political left, embracing democratic socialism as an ideal and a program. Blakeney also writes about his post-political career of the last two decades, encompassing academe and numerous public causes such as world federalism, aboriginal development, and political institution-building in South Africa. Blakeney is very experienced and very wise and there is much we can learn from him. I recognized that two decades ago when we taught public management together and recognize it just as much today.