Martin’s earliest memory is of his father taking him by the hand, at age three, to visit the Parliament buildings. He remembers scampering through the brooding panelled corridors and sliding across the gleaming marble floors. At the Martin dinner table, insider anecdotes about the great names parading through the headlines were served up with the meat and potatoes. Who else’s father could recount a trip to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch to sign the Auto Pact, only to discover the U.S. president raiding the fridge at dawn in his pyjamas while checking out bombing reports from Vietnam?

By the time Martin was a teenager, the family had moved to Ottawa, but virtually every weekend, his father went back to Windsor to tend to riding affairs and press the flesh in coffee shops and autoworkers’ union halls. Often, he took his kids, Paul Jr. and Mary-Anne, on the long overnight train ride across Ontario. A brilliant man whom former Liberal cabinet minister John Roberts counts as “one of the best-read men I’ve ever known, next to Trudeau,” Martin Sr. learned to hide his intellect under the guise of a gladhander—a pose that would eventually prove his undoing. “The tragedy in his life was he developed a sort of persona he thought he had to have to be successful in politics,” Roberts says, “and eventually he grew into it.” For years, Paul Martin Jr., winced whenever journalists reported his father working a room in no-matter-what-country, demanding, “Anybody here from Windsor?” That may account for his own long ambivalence about a political career—and, when he finally capitulated, his initial ineptitude at mainstreeting. “He’d ask, ‘What’ll I say?’” recalls former Trudeau aide Patrick Gossage, who helped coach Paul Jr. for his first parliamentary race in 1988. “He didn’t have the charm of his father. Now he’s got the charm and the twinkling eyes down pat. He’s so polished I’m sure raindrops would hit that little Simonized shield around him and bounce off.”

In his memoirs, Martin Sr. makes clear that he tried to groom his son for politics, only to find him determined to make his own mark. But in retrospect, Paul Jr.’s life seems a filial fugue: He abandoned his own choice of courses to study philosophy, as his father suggested, at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. Then he followed in his father’s footsteps to prepare himself for a legal career, which Martin Sr. considered the only suitable stepping stone for public life. Even The Windsor Star noted on the occasion of Martin’s September, 1965, marriage to Sheila Ann Cowan, the daughter of his father’s law partner, that it was patterned on his parents’ wedding twenty-nine years earlier, almost to the day.

One story has become a staple in the Martin mythology. In 1960, when he was still at U of T, Maurice Strong, who would become Martin’s professional god-father, offered him a summer job as a roust——about at Ajax Petroleums, an Alberta gas producer Strong had just taken over. As Martin tells it, he got bored and went awol to party at the Calgary Stampede. On the way home, he smashed up the company truck and ended up being sacked. Strong cautions the story makes betteranecdotal fodder than fact: As soon as he learned of the firing, he offered Martin his job back. “It wasn’t a bad lesson,” Strong says, “but it was not at all hostile.”

Roberts remembers the young Martin as an idealist, chafing to work in the Third World or at the UN, where his father had been the official Canadian delegate at the opening session. The summer before his bar exams, he landed a job in Luxembourg working for the European Coal and Steel Community, a precursor of the European Union. It was there, watching the first rustlings of globalization, that he made a weekend pilgrimage to Geneva to consult Strong, by then president of Montreal’s Power Corporation.

Strong warned Martin that he risked spending years bucking sluggish international bureaucracies. “I told him, better to make something of yourself in business,” Strong recalls, “and then go in at a level where you can have some influence.” Strong takes credit for persuading Martin to pass his bar exams before accepting the keys to the business kingdom that he proffered: a job as his executive assistant at Power Corp. Most media accounts cast the meeting as a stroke of serendipity, but, of course, Martin had known Strong for years as his father’s business partner. In 1947, when Strong was trying to wangle a job at the UN, he’d had a pal arrange an introduction to Martin Sr. By the Fifties, they were deep in deals together with Martin Sr.’s lifelong friend and legal client, Paul Nathanson, the multi-millionaire heir to the Famous Players movie fortune. Among their holdings was an Alberta company that bore their initials, mns Investments Ltd.

Nathanson, who would become so reclusive he was dubbed Canada’s Howard Hughes, played Martin Sr.’s financial angel, helping craft a safety net to cushion him from the vicissitudes of public life. Such confidential arrangements, the stuff of scandal now, were not uncommon for political comers in those days. In 1957, when the Liberals were tossed out of office and Martin Sr. was already being touted as a potential Liberal leader, Nathanson helped orchestrate his acquisition of three Vancouver movie houses through Nellmart, a private company named after the politician and his wife. Paul Martin Sr. then leased the theatres back to Nathanson, ensuring himself an ongoing income.

Nellmart would continue in various transmutations as the Martin family’s holding company for years, one version amalgamating into another across an assortment of jurisdictions. It was not a financial cushion of which Paul Jr. was unaware: Later, he would replace his father as a director and shareholder. To this day, Nellmart, with its two remaining cinemas and modest real-estate portfolio, continues as one of Martin’s direct private holdings, never included in the blind management agreement that governs his shipping empire. That omission, which appears to have had the federal Ethics Commissioner’s blessing, would later provoke questions in the House of Commons.

The Power job that Strong handed Paul Martin Jr. kick-started his business career, lifting him straight into the loftiest corridors of influence in a new corporate establishment then emerging in Canada. No tedious slogging up the middle-management ladder or scraping together an entrepreneurial grubstake. Martin was propelled directly to the presidential suite, where he could watch the wheeling and dealing of a man who would later juggle the chairmanship of UN environmental summits with stints tending his personal oil-and-gas portfolio. Not that Martin Jr. appeared impressed with having landed that front-row seat. “It wasn’t a prestigious job,” he told Canadian Business. “Carrying Maurice’s bags was what it was.”

Martin was, in fact, doing just that on a trip to New York when Strong offered him a sobering lesson. They were exiting a meeting with top U.S. insurance honchos on Park Avenue, when Paul Jr. demanded to know how he’d done. “I said, ‘Well, Paul, you’re not going to make it,’” Strong recalls. As Martin’s jaw dropped, Strong tore a strip off him for laying out his opinions instead of listening and posing penetrating questions. “We were just in a room of very important people, and there’s not a single one who would have hired you,” Strong recalls saying, “and I wonder why I did.” These days, Strong speaks of Martin as if of a prized pony being groomed for show who had to learn the meaning of the whip. “He was always bright and hard-working and exuberant,” says Strong. “I didn’t want to break his spirit. I just made sure he went through the hoops.”

Six months after Martin began his corporate apprenticeship at Power, Strong left to work for Martin Sr., by then Lester Pearson’s Minister of External Affairs. For Strong, it was the plum post he’d long been lobbying for: director-general of External Aid. He promptly transformed that obscure backwater into the Canadian International Development Agency (cida)—the first step on his route to becoming a backroom global powerbroker.

Still, Strong has never been far from his protegé’s side. Over the years, Martin has been a shareholder in at least two of Strong’s companies, including the now-defunct Cordex Petroleums, formerly known as Baca Resources. But Strong’s chief influence has been in shaping the trajectory of Martin’s career—business first, politics later, the eye on the prize always. “My basic advice to him was, ‘Paul, don’t try to ride two horses at once,’” Strong says. When it came time to move to the next horse, Strong was waiting to give him the nod at the starting gate. When Martin was ready to throw in the political towel after Chrétien made it clear he was sticking around for another election, Strong invited the finance minister to his log retreat in the Kawarthas for a weekend of cheerleading. “I said, ‘Paul, you’ve got a big investment in public life,’” Strong recounts. “‘You’ve come this far, you should stay in there.’”

Last summer, just as Martin’s Liberal leadership bid threatened to founder on the shoals of its own success—his rivals all but vanquished, the inevitability of his
victory threatening to reduce his campaign to a yawn—Strong arranged a timely lifeline: a UN appointment. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who counts Strong as one of his closest confidants, announced Martin would co-chair a new committee to help boost private-sector investment in developing nations. The committee was, insiders confide, entirely Strong’s brainchild, and it brought Martin full circle to the idealism of his youth. But it also lifted him above conflict-of-interest charges then threatening to tarnish his winner’s gloss. That image-doctoring was no accident. Strong admits he hoped to leaven the former finance minister’s reputation as a flinty deficit-slayer with the righteous lustre of a Third World champion. “People think of him as a very tough finance minister who made some very tough decisions,” Strong says. “But now they’ll see the other side of him. He’s driven genuinely by a desire to do something useful for society.”

Reporters have already pounced on the fact that Strong has just bought a condo in Ottawa, a convenient perch from which to offer advice to a likely prime minister. But Strong recoils from suggestions he may soon play the éminence grise to a future Martin government. “I’m trying not to be a big actor on the public side,” he confides. “I simply don’t want anyone to be looking at Paul somehow as a creature of our relationship.”