Radwanski

[OddSox]

(is this the wrong forum area?)

Was he the guy who said "I'm entitled to my entitlements"?

Regardless, it's hard to understand why some of these people get paid at all. Apparently he doesn't know how to balance a credit card, let alone a chequebook. He also seems to have trouble running his office - the only way to get "15 minutes uninterrupted" is to go out for a 3-hour lunch meeting to the most expensive place in town...

[August1991]

Was he the guy who said "I'm entitled to my entitlements"?

That was David Dingwall:

In the midst of the controversy over his resignation and compensation package, Dingwall drew the scorn of opposition parties when he told a Commons committee: "I'm entitled to my entitlements."

CBC

Dingwall meant that he had helped the Mint to make money. What he ignored is that the Mint succeeded because of his contacts within the Liberal Party and the federal bureaucracy. Dingwall was entitled to his entitlements because he was an insider. He probably still doesn't under the distinction.

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Radwanski was a good writer and an editor at the Toronto Star. I reckon that he went to Ottawa because he wanted to relax and enjoy life.

OTOH, Radwanski performed a tremendous deed for Canadian political junkees. Trudeau was low in the polls in the late 1970s and he faced a federal election in 1979 at the latest (previous federal election was 1974). In Quebec, Levesque had been elected in 1976 and vowed to hold a referendum during his first mandate.

Levesque was waiting for Trudeau to lose in a federal election so that the PQ could run a referendum against an anglophone PM (Clark) with no seats in Quebec. Trudeau was desperate to keep power. And in desperation, Trudeau turned to Radwanski in 1978 and gave him a series of long interviews to explain who he was and what he wanted. Trudeau thought that if he opened up to English Canada, he might keep power. The strategy didn't quite work (Clark won the 1979 election) but it also worked because Clark was held to a minority - with the balance of power held by six Creditistes elected from the same Quebec region where Harper now has his 10 Tory seats. (Harper gets along with them whereas Clark never did.)

Anyway, Trudeau's interviews in 1978 with Radwanski lead to by far the best biography of Trudeau. It's far better than any other in French or English. At the time, Trudeau was desperate for English-Canadian votes and really let down his guard to a sympathetic listener.