He is famous on Parliament Hill for his outrageous statements and over-the-top questioning of committee witnesses, and, when Pat Martin speaks, MPs fall silent, curious about what he’ll say.
So is he.
“I never really know what I am going to be able to say until it comes out,” says the veteran NDP MP from Winnipeg. “I am changing words constantly [in his mind to find one that will work for him at that particular time]. It drives people at the party crazy.”
The paradox of the outspoken Pat Martin is that he was – and, to some degree, still is – a chronic stutterer. And with the release this week of The King’s Speech, a film about King George VI, his stutter and his speech therapist, Mr. Martin reflects on how his own stutter changed his life.
“I never thought for the life of me that I would make my living with my mouth,” says the 54-year-politician, who never went to university and sought out jobs that did not require him to speak. So profound was his “invisible disability,” he says, that he was “quite unable to communicate normally until … well past puberty.”
As a child, he was called Martin or Marty because he couldn’t pronounce his first name, Patrick – hard consonants were nearly impossible for him to say without tripping over them. In grade school, the nuns would force him to the front of the class to read the catechism aloud, believing that would break him of his “habit.” Instead, he says, it was “absolute torture.”
“I’d resent it profoundly,” he recalls. “The best way to drive somebody into a shell is to humiliate them in front of their peers. And at school you want to fit in more than anything else. It’s the most important thing in the world to you.”
His parents hired counsellors and speech therapists; one used the so-called candle technique, which forced him to say words in front of a candle flame, learning how to breathe from his diaphragm so as not to blow it out.
None of it helped. What did help was running away to the Yukon. He was 17.
“I quit high school and ran up to work in the mines because I wanted to find a place where you didn’t have to talk,” he says. “It was a great comfort, you know, [the stutter] really does shape and define who you are to a very large degree.”
Alcohol helped too, at least in the short term. “If you’ve had a few drinks or you’re hung over – magic, it’s gone. You can speak and it is a more liberating and wonderful feeling. But, of course, that way lies madness.”
After eight years in the North, Mr. Martin moved to the West Coast and then, finally, returned to Winnipeg to work as a carpenter on a hydro project. He was elected a shop steward; the political bug took hold. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1997.
Mr. Martin’s particular genius is the way he found to compensate. While during the interview he still stumbles over some hard consonants, he says he keeps a “huge thesaurus in my head and change words constantly.” As he speaks, he is thinking of three or four synonyms for the words to come, and vetoing ones he knows may trip him up.
“That one’s not going to work so you have to make the second or third best choice,” he says. “It can weaken your sentences as often as it strengthens them. I think that’s a technique a lot of stutterers have to get their mind around.”
Following a script is nearly impossible, ruling out delivering questions written by NDP researchers. Instead, he has to craft his own. “I can’t read something somebody has prepared for me. I have to craft it in a way that I can deliver it, whether it’s in an interview or a question in Question Period,” he says. “It has to be customized. So that’s sort of part of why the odd things sometimes come out.”
Fatigue trips him up, too. In fact, he says just the night before the interview he slept badly and, as a result, gave an “appalling” radio interview that morning. And speaking publicly – even for this 13-year veteran of the House of Commons – makes his palms sweat. “You just never know when it’s going to hit,” he says.
Meanwhile, Mr. Martin is looking forward to seeing The King’s Speech, hopeful it may bring the issue of stuttering into the spotlight and “be a comfort to those who are suffering quietly.”
A way with words
Pat Martin on...
the West Block renovation controversy, October, 2010
“Mr. Speaker, this is the government that rode into Ottawa on the horse of accountability. It said it would clean up Ottawa, but all it has done is replace dirty Liberal lobbyists with its own dirty Conservative lobbyists. So, now it is Conservative cronies who are using their connections to sell privileged access to juicy government contracts. The Public Works gravy train is alive and well. It just changed engineers.”
the renovation scandal again, November, 2010
“It is a bloody disgrace, there is – there is a rat’s nest of kickbacks, corruption, bribery, influence peddling. I mean our Department of Public Works has been compromised by a parcel of rogues who are selling contracts like party favours at these cocktail parties. The testimony we heard today would curl your hair, honest to God, the public should be horrified by this.”
