A Businessman’s Adventures in Politics
Alastair W. Gillespie, with Irene Sage, Ph.D.
Alastair Gillespie was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and served in the navy during World War II. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford after the war, he went on to become a successful businessman before entering politics. Swept into office as a Liberal MP on the wave of Trudeaumania in 1968, he served in three different cabinet positions. He was successively Minister of State for Science and Technology, Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, and Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources.
Gillespie mounts a vigorous defence of controversial measures of the Trudeau period that have been oversimplified in retrospect and unduly criticized, such as the Foreign Investment Review Agency. While never an opponent of foreign investment, he believes that it must benefit Canadians, not just absentee owners. One of the major challenges of Gillespie’s period as energy minister was reconciling the demands of Alberta with the need of all Canadians to have a secure supply of energy and an equitable distribution of economic windfalls. It was the era when oil crises dominated the news and the OPEC cartel of oil-rich nations was forcing up prices.
After his political career Alastair Gillespie returned to the world of business, pursuing a promising scheme to extract oil from coal in Nova Scotia, which ran afoul of bureaucratic and political duplicity possibly connected with Karlheinz Schreiber’s ventures.
In this time of financial crisis, struggling economies and volatile markets resulting from years of the “hands-off” approach by governments, Alastair Gillespie reminds us, provocatively, that it was not always so, and that governments can play a constructive role in partnership with business. His book is the account of a full and remarkable life in the two worlds of business and politics.
