Guided — not without a certain wariness — through the newsroom on my first day at the Vancouver Sun in 1963, I paused near an office where a woman was assaulting a smokin’ typewriter and radiating a palpable don’t-bother-me-now aura.
The designated tour guide stated that this was finance pages columnist Pat Carney. I, and millions more, had never seen a live woman finance columnist for a newspaper, let alone one with a valued private office. We moved on to more accessible new colleagues.
Pat was, unbelievably, 28. As was I. The calendar lies. Surely.
The friendship formed later, deepening during Pat’s distinguished political career. When she died July 25, half the pleasure of holidays on Saturna Island, where my wife Elizabeth’s father, Bill Robertson, bought waterfront property (for a steep $600) in the 1950s, died with her.
Saturnian and Globe and Mail columnist Jean Howarth had urgently hissed such bargains to other word people — humourist Eric Nicol, Paddy Sherman (who rose to Southam newspaper chain president), the Province’s Aileen Campbell, Sun movie critic Les Wedman, wildly popular and wildly unpopular Doug Collins, Simon Fraser University’s Susan Jamieson-McLarnon among them.
This arguably bestowed on the island a claim to be the most densely populated word-shuffler community per capita (pop. 350-odd even now, area 35.75 sq. km) on Earth.
Pat was one of these originals. After residences including in Victoria, Sidney, Ottawa and Vancouver, her Saturna cottage, Little Cove, became her unchallenged permanent home. Lunches for my wife and me on her leafy deck and at the seaside pub were happy ceremonies. Not for the pub waiters. They feared serving Pat. She always ordered shellfish. Always demanded their source. If P.E.I., she bristled. Had to be local, B.C. or nothing. Pat had a thereness about her: She was there. Arrived fully-formed. No foot-kissing. No name-dropping. No womanly or any wiles. Down to business.
In Ottawa, Pat had a reputation for being a demanding, if not scarifying to the sensitive, boss. She publicly joked about it. She was — stereotype alert! — more male than many males.
Over gin at her place, where her beloved cat eyed me suspiciously, she never spoke an off-the-record word of inside politics. On iron-clad principle? Or in experienced cynicism, that in the scoop-shaped journalist’s rulebook nothing is off the record? Or safe, because I didn’t rise to the distinction of flair for scuttlebutt?
But two conversational memories stand out. One, something I’ve never encountered in the media (but who can read everything?) about residential schools’ meanness: Pat calmly cited the government’s food budget per pupil per day, and it was then a miserly matter of nickels and dimes.
The second so impressed Pat that she recalled it in her 2000 book Trade Secrets. In a speech to UBC students, John Kenneth Galbraith, then a distinguished American economist — but born in bustling Iona Station, Ont., as all Canadians know — declared, history-backed, that every war is about real estate. Not deep thought, but worth recalling when the state’s trumpets tootle and the youth-summoning drums beat.
The tributes, of course, have heavily dwelt on Pat’s feminism. All men, even the most alert, are a bit thick about women. All women are conquerors, brains over brawn, but it was long thought best to keep this quiet. (That French king on his wife’s death: “This is the first time she has disappointed me.”)
Yet in our countless meetings over half a century I never heard a word of ideological feminism from her mouth. No need to preach to the converted? Or to those beyond conversion? A little of both, madame, a little of both.
Sonorous tributes to Pat’s senatorial role in keeping abortion legal have been sounded — but omitting that she added that she wouldn’t have one herself. Both praiseworthy, consistent positions.
“Underappreciated,” said a Vancouver Sun headline reporting Pat’s death. If so, the major contribution to its accuracy rests with her distinction as minister of international trade responsible for the historic Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, a glory role grabbed by Canada’s chief negotiator, the obnoxious Simon Reisman.
Pat’s Trade Secrets — the unacknowledged source of at least one parched obituary, the flesh-and-blood woman absent (she didn’t lack for real flesh, blaming Ottawa’s calorie-loaded official dinners) — detailed the agreement’s twisting road.
Reisman’s pitch was that negotiations were up to the negotiators, so the government should mostly bug off. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney shrewdly spied the politically positive ploy this offered: “If we fail to get an agreement I don’t want Simon to say we didn’t give him the whole nine yards.”
And, pressing the point for slow learners, Mulroney warned that if the talks failed the Opposition would blame his government — and Pat perceived that, as international trade minister, she’d be “the sacrificial lamb.” She and Mulroney exchanged their own scorching words, which the PM shrugged off as just two Irish.
In the event, marked by Reisman’s walking out of and then returning to the talks, the trade agreement was signed Dec. 10, 1987.
Allow this aside: Reisman once, and never again, came to a Sun editorial board meeting where he bellowed, knife-eyed — saw too many Hollywood noir movies, perhaps? — “Who wrote that editorial?” One board member’s gorge rose to the point of considering the response of a knuckle sandwich. (Possibly he’d seen the same movies.)
The news reports I’ve encountered have been all but silent about Pat’s marriages. The first was to a Vancouver Sun staffer who acquired then-chronic Newspaperman’s Disease and descended to Skid Road, the term genteel-tossed today as the Downtown East Side.
The second: Paul White, a wide-ranging mining engineer and resource developer met in school years and again when Pat and her twin brother, Jim — who predeceased her by just three months — had formed a business consultancy in Yellowknife. All three were strong jazz aficionados, and Paul a top jazz critic and scholar.
In his Saturna years, he used his music business contacts to draw outsized concerts to an undersized island (pop. 350, did I mention that?). Some would say a match of two such strong, brilliant personalities couldn’t last, and it didn’t.
The highest accolade one can pay anyone: I never left Pat’s company without feeling lighter of foot and cheerier of heart. Flow gently, sweet Afton.
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