The wisdom of John Crosbie

“He’s intelligent in a technical sense,” Mr. Crosbie says. “He’s a good lawyer, but his overriding characteristic is tremendous stubbornness and an absolute conviction that his own view is the right one. There can be no deviation from his own view.

“That’s a characteristic he’s always displayed, as a lawyer and in everything else. … He’s dogmatic and unyielding, inflexible. He’s extremely dangerous,” he says.

“He’s exactly the wrong type to be in politics. Politics is a system where you’ve got to be prepared to compromise and accommodate. He’s not prepared to do that. There’s no accommodation. There’s no compromise. And the man is in danger of wrecking the country as a result.”

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“This is one of [his] major accomplishments, giving the view that he’s a person of great principle, and the rest of us are compromisers and crooks or whatever the hell we are. But he’s a man of principle. This is his line, and people have bought it at least to this date.

“I say that men of principle are the bane of democratic politics. This man is a menace to the democratic process. He’s a menace to Canada, simply because he thinks he’s a man of principles and he won’t deviate from his goddamn principles.”