rfmcdonald | [LINK] Two Canada-centric Tony Blair tie-ins (Reply)

It turns out that Tony Blair did see analogies between his relationship with Gordon Brown and that of Canada's Jean Chrétien with Paul Martin. Blair/Chrétien were the canny politicians who took their parties back to the top of the electoral heap, with Brown/Martin being the canny finance ministers who managed things well, eventually taking over the party from the inside and running the party such that it ended up losing and giving way to Conservative minority governments.

It’s apparent from the book that Blair felt a kinship with his “friend” Chrétien, describing him in warm terms.

“He was a very wise, wily and experienced old bird, great at international meetings, where he could be counted on to talk sense and as Canadians often are, firm and dependable without being pushy,” Blair says.

“All in all, a good guy and a very tough political operator, not to be underestimated,” he says.

Blair was in Canada just as Britain was hit with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and credits Chrétien with immediately identifying it as a serious crisis.

“Watch that, young Tony, watch it very carefully. That’s trouble,” Blair recounts Chrétien as saying.

For all his effusive praise of Chretien, he is silent on Martin, suggesting that the personal tie to Canada had disappeared once Chrétien left office.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail's Conrad Yakabuski exclusive interview, wherein he argues that the "special relationship" with the United States is something that Canada and the United Kingdom must exploit, that the iraq War was justified because of (among other things) falling infant mortality, et cetera.

For all the flak he has taken at home for his perceived kowtowing to the foreign policy agenda of the United States, former British prime minister Tony Blair still thinks there could be no better partner with whom to have a “special relationship.”

This is an overarching theme of Mr. Blair’s newly published memoirs, and one he thinks governments in Canada and Britain alike should internalize as they seek to buttress their countries’ influence in a multipolar world.

“Canada has got to decide – in a world that is opening up, [with] power shifting to the East, where America is looking at its own alliances shifting – what its place is,” Mr. Blair confided in a far-ranging interview in Washington, where he is taking part in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

“You want to maximize the strengths of your relationships, so that in the evolving policy decisions that will determine the future – whether in trade, the economy or security – you’ve got a voice and a say that, looking ahead 20 or 30 years, is bigger than your size will permit you on your own.”