The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Saying Goodbye

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Funerals are never easy, funerals at a time of Pandemic are even harder.Saying goodbye to John Turner

Thank you. You know, for a lot of Canadians, this has been a very difficult year. And it's been difficult, obviously, because of COVID-19. And what COVID-19 has meant for many Canadians who lost loved ones in this year, it's meant the inability to kind of close the circle on the life by having a proper funeral and get-together, a wake, whatever you might want to call it. In some cases, they've been able to manage something, but in many, they have not been able to manage anything at all.

Well, today I was at a funeral. It was a state funeral. And it was a state funeral for the 17th Prime Minister of Canada, John Napier Turner. The government of Canada determined that there should be a state funeral. There always is for former prime ministers, former governors general, and some other dignitaries. Jack Layton had a state funeral.

So the Government of Canada decided John Turner should have his state funeral, and today was picked as the day, and the venue was St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica in downtown Toronto, right in the heart of downtown Toronto. Now, it's a huge, famous cathedral. Beautiful inside. Gorgeous. Extremely high ceilings, beautiful stained glass, the whole bit that you would expect in a cathedral basilica.

It's there. Now normally, it can hold a congregation of upwards of 1,800 people. But COVID protocols took charge today, and it was determined there could be no more than 200. It was by invitation only, the family deciding on who they thought was appropriate to be at the funeral for the former prime minister. And that's how I ended up being there. Now, most of the people who were in attendance, not all, most were fairly elderly.

I mean, I'm elderly. I'm 72. But I look pretty young compared with some people there who are more John Turner's age. He was 91 when he died. Born 1929, died in 2020. And a lot of his fellow friends, politicians, business leaders, academics, people from the church, schoolmates of his, were there. There were some younger people, certainly some young members of the Turner family, grandchildren and I guess great-grandchildren. But for the most part, it was an elderly audience who I'm sure were appreciative of the fact that all the protocols were in place. You know, there was lots of hand sanitizer around

and extra masks if you didn't have one. Masks were to be worn throughout the service. No singing, because they didn't want droplets going around the place. John McDermott, the great Canadian singer, was there to sing Amazing Grace and Ave Maria. He sang up at the front of the church. But in terms of those in attendance, they did not have a singing role. A lot of people in that audience, I mean, the thing about John Turner was he was partisan when it got to politics. Absolutely, he was a liberal. But he was non-partisan

when he got around to picking his friends. And he had a lot of friends. And they crossed the whole, there was a cross-section of politicians there today who had either served with him or served against him, argued with him, what have you. But they were there today to say goodbye. And John Turner, you know, loved his political foes as much as he loved his political friends. You know, one of the priests told a great story today

that I'd forgotten. But there used to be a fellow, a conservative MP, a young guy who used to work for John Diefenbaker, actually. And then he ran for office himself in Hamilton. His name was Sean O'Sullivan. He was quite a character, well-liked by a lot of people. Strong in his beliefs. Conservative. Roman Catholic.

Been a conservative since he was 11 years old. He worked for Ellen Fairclough. Ellen Fairclough was the first woman in a Canadian cabinet. She served as when she was appointed to the cabinet, she served as immigration minister. Citizenship and immigration. I was searching for the correct title. And I know that because when I became a Canadian citizen in 1959, it was Ellen Fairclough who signed those papers. So I have a little bit of Canadian history in my portfolio of documents,

and that is the citizenship and immigration papers signed by Ellen Fairclough. And one of the people who worked on Ellen Fairclough's campaign was 11-year-old Sean O'Sullivan. Well, Sean O'Sullivan, as I said, made a name for himself when he became an elected politician, and he was well-liked, well-respected on Parliament Hill. And then he got sick. He had leukemia, I believe. And the first battle against it went well. Strong in his beliefs. As I said, he was a Roman Catholic. He was a priest, as well as an MP. Well, it looked like he'd beaten leukemia.

But then it came back. It's around 1989. And it was bad. And the situation looked very difficult. So he's in a hospital in Hamilton. John Turner, 1989, is the leader of the opposition. He's commuting back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto. And he decides one day in Toronto that he wants to go and see Sean O'Sullivan,

his friend, fighting for his life in a hospital in Hamilton. That's the way the priest told the story today. So off he went to Hamilton, to the hospital. And he spent a considerable number of hours with Sean in the hospital. Apparently they, you know, relived some old times. They got the Bible out.

They read verses. They prayed together. So that's a John Turner story, you know, which talks about an era, and it still exists in some cases, but not much. It talks about an era where there were friends and foes, but there was a time at which, when the debate ended, they were all kind of friends. So that was the was story was told.

The prime minister was there, Justin Trudeau, along with his wife. And he told a story, which I think I've told, but I might have told this on the podcast. I certainly did it on some of the interviews I did before. But the prime minister was asked to speak, and so he was there with, as I said, his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, and he got up and went up to the front of the church,

and he started off by saying, John has been a friend of mine even before I was born. It was his way of getting into the story about Christmas Eve 1971, I believe. When John and Jill Turner were sitting at home in Ottawa, he was the Minister of Justice then, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, phones them up. It's like 9 o'clock at night, Christmas Eve. And John Turner phones, or sorry,

Pierre Trudeau phones John Turner and says, John, I really want to go to, and Margaret wants to go to a midnight mass tonight. Being Christmas Eve, we want to do that. Can you help us? Can you tell us where we could go? So John says, absolutely, I'll pick you up at, you know, whatever, 1130. Hangs up the phone and goes, oh my gosh, where are we going to go? So he starts phoning around.

He finds one of the Catholic churches that's having a midnight mass that night. I think most of them do, but he needed to find one that could accommodate the prime minister and everything comes along with that. So he finds one. He and Jill Turner, his wife, drive over, pick up the Trudeaus. They go to the midnight mass. It's all very nice, just the four of them. And then they go back to, I think they went back to Turner's place and had a nightcap. And then the Trudeaus headed home, back to 24 Sussex.

So I guess John and Jill Turner felt pretty good about that. The Prime Minister had asked them to be their date, so to speak, for the night, and off they went to bed. They get up in the morning, and what's happened? Margaret Trudeau goes into labour like at 4 o'clock in the morning, and off she goes to the hospital. And that's when Justin Trudeau was born. So it was not long after their midnight mass together.

And so that's why Justin Trudeau says, so it was not long after their midnight mass together. And so that's why Justin Trudeau says, I've known him all my life, even before I was born. So that story was part of today as well. I can tell you another story. Now, you have to stop me because I can't remember whether I told these stories on the podcast today. We gave our tribute to John Turner at the beginning of, you know, a couple of weeks ago just after he died,

or whether I told it on a radio interview or a television interview, but here's another one. I like this one. I told it on television this morning, because I think it also says something, once again, about, you know, that special relationship between politicians, no matter what stripe they are. So John Turner, who was this rock star of a young guy, you know, he'd been, was a Rhodes Scholar, he was a great athlete, he was the fastest runner in Canada at one point.

And he was dating Princess Margaret in the late 1950s. That's before he met Jill. I don't know whether dating is technically the term you can use, but they were good friends, and they remain good friends, and it was John Turner who gave one of the eulogies at Princess Margaret's funeral. That's how close they were. So anyway, in the early 60s, after he'd met and married Jill Turner, and he was first a lawyer in Montreal and then became an MP from Montreal

when Lester Pearson was the leader of the Liberal Party. So Jill and John go to Barbados on a holiday one winter in those early 60s, and they're on the beach, and suddenly John Turner looks out in the water and sees what looks like a guy in trouble in the water. It looked like an elderly guy. So athlete that he was, he jumps up, runs to the water,

dives in, swims out to this guy, and sure enough, he is in trouble, and Turner helps him, brings him back to the beach. Who was it? It was John Diefenbaker, who at the time was the former Prime Minister of Canada, and just lost an election to Lester Pearson. So John Turner, in effect, saves John Diefenbaker. So I'd heard this story,

and I was having, as I think I've told you before, you know, I covered John Turner for almost 20 years. After he retired, we became friends on a different level in the sense that we had lunch every once in a while, and we'd talk about politics, both past and present. And it was a great relationship. And I really enjoyed it. And I'll miss those lunches. Anyway, we're having lunch one day and I said, you know this story about Dieffenbaker and Barbados and the water and you saving him? Is that really true? Or is that just sort is that just sort of built up over time? He said, I don't know.

Absolutely it was true. I said, well, what happened when you got back to the beach and what happened in the years later? Would he bring it up? Would you guys talk about it? He said, no. He said, when we got back to the beach, we never mentioned what had just beach, we never mentioned what had

just happened, and we never mentioned what happened in the years later. And we'd become good friends, but we never talked about it. Never talked about it. It was just between us, which is, I guess, the way it stayed for years. Diefenbaker died in 79 or 80, and I think the story came out at some point after that. But Turner had respected Diefenbaker's obvious wishes not to talk about it publicly and didn't. So on the weekend, I was talking to another former Prime Minister,

Brian Mulroney. We had done a thing together on Friday, last Friday, for the Monk School at the University of Toronto. It was the 30th anniversary last weekend of the reunification of Germany. And the Munk School asked me if I'd moderate a panel, which was not really a panel.

It was initially, it was a one-on-one, me and the former prime minister, because he had been instrumental in working towards the unification, reunification of Germany after the end of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall came down. He had great relations with, as you know, George Bush Senior, with Helmut Kohl of Germany, with Margaret Thatcher of Britain, and all these guys,

and Francois Mitterrand in France, all these guys and gal were in play as powerful leaders at that time. And if there was going to be a deal on a reunified Germany, it was going to have to involve all of them, and there were tensions within that. And one of those who helped ease those tensions was Brian Mulroney, also Mikhail Gorbachev. He had to be on side too, or it never would have happened.

Anyway, short story. Let's get back on focus. So, talking to the former Prime Minister Obviously, we did the program on last Friday, and it was actually really good. It was very good. We had about a thousand people in attendance virtually from all over the world. And then I had to talk to him again over the weekend about something else. But the issue about John Turner came up. Now, these two had perhaps the most famous political debate in Canada

in terms of a TV leaders debate of any of them, both 84 and 88. Those were big deal debates. And if you're not old enough to have seen them or remember them, pull them up on YouTube or wherever. They were classics and remain classics today. And they were real. In other words, they weren't all pre-programmed and rehearsed lines and everything.

They were great. You know, Mulroney won the first one hands down. He thinks he won the second one. I think Turner won it based on one line around the free trade issue. But nevertheless, they were great. But they were combatants, right? They were never friends in the sort of classic sense of friendship. They weren't friends.

But Mulroney told me that, you know, before he left office and John Turner had announced he was leaving the Liberal, not leaving the Liberal Party, but stepping Liberal, not leaving the Liberal Party, but stepping down as leader of the Liberal Party, and he was going to go back into private practice. And so, you know, there's kind of an unspoken deal among prime ministers that former prime ministers or former leaders, you know,

are given the opportunity of an appointment. It could be an ambassadorship, it could be the Senate, it could be any number of different things. So Brian Mulroney was thinking, what could I offer John Turner? And so he decided, because John Turner is a very, and you can see it today, is a very strong Catholic, very much a churchgoer, very much a believer in the scriptures. Now, Mulroney decides, Mulroney, a Catholic himself, decides, well, maybe the best thing I could offer him is ambassador to the Vatican.

And I've been to the residence of the ambassador of the Vatican, and I'll tell you, it's great. It's right along, I believe it's the Apian Way. So there's this beautiful garden and a beautiful, you know, many centuries old wall in the backyard, which leads right on to the way. Anyway, he, as it turned out, John Turner said, you know, I really appreciate that offer, but I don't think so.

You know, I've already got a planned return to private life, and I'm anxious about it. I'm going back into the law offices in Toronto, and I'm really looking forward to it. So Mulroney decides, I'm not going to give up yet. He literally doubles down on the offer because Canada has two embassies in Italy. They have the ambassadorship to the Vatican

and the ambassadorship to the country of Italy. Right? So he offers them both to Turner, says you can do them both. Now, I mean, think of that. That's not a bad deal. I mean, aside from the work as an ambassador, you get all that great food and all that great wine. What an appointment.

But no, turn their sides. I really want to do this. I really want to go back into law. So he says no. So I told Mulroney, I said, listen, that's really too bad. Why didn't you call me? I mean, I'm not Catholic, but hey, that's a heck bad. Why didn't you call me? I mean, I'm not Catholic,

but hey, that's a heck of a job. Anyway, just some of the things I was thinking about as I sat there today, listening to family friends. His daughter, Liz Turner, gave a beautiful eulogy about her dad and about his relationship with the family at large. It was just, you know, a nice service. It was communion, which is odd in a time of COVID,

and the Catholics in the audience, some of them, took communion. Prime Minister and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, they took communion. Tricky, you know, because of distancing and being concerned about who touches what. But overall, the service, which ran, it ran quite a long time, a couple of hours. And it seemed like everybody was comfortable with the setup. I was a little anxious about it all, but it seemed to work.

And people were very respectful of the rules in play inside the church to respect all the protocols surrounding COVID-19. Anyway, as I was walking back from the church early this afternoon, I thought, you know, I think I will just share this story about what that was like. As people inside the church and those who were watching on television across the country had a chance to remember, to reflect, and to say goodbye

to the country's 17th Prime Minister. He was only there for a couple of months as PM, but he was in public office much longer. He had a distinguished career as a cabinet minister, both in the justice portfolio, the finance portfolio. He was involved in some of Canada's big decision-making in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he fought on principle for what he believed in on the free trade deal.

He lost, but he made a heck of a fight, made that campaign interesting in 1988. It was about to be a slaughter. And suddenly, with a couple of weeks left, it turned into a real fight. Mulroney still won it, won it big, won a majority government, second majority government. First time in 35 years anybody had won two majorities back to back. But Turner did himself and his party proud at that point and was respected by a lot of people for that fight. But as he always used to say, you know, democracy doesn't happen by accident.

You've got to participate. You've got to make your arguments. You've got to serve. Not necessarily in elected office but there's lots of ways of serving the public. You might volunteer to be in a soup line on the weekend.

Serve in a soup line. Lots of different ways you can serve the public. That's all part of democracy too. Anyway, tomorrow's Wednesday midweek. Usually it's the race next door. Won't have it this week tomorrow. We'll have it Thursday instead,

as tomorrow night is the vice presidential debate. So Thursday we'll deal with what happened there and have some fun talking with Bruce Anderson about that. So tomorrow is kind of wide open. I will think about it. I'm sure there's going to be things

to talk about, probably on the COVID front. We'll see. We'll see then tomorrow about that. So, that is the Bridge Daily for this Tuesday of Week 30. Got to love it. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.