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In the early 1960s, a young reporter pitched up at Eric Kierans' ministerial office in Montreal for an interview just after the former McGill professor and head of the Montreal and Canadian Stock Exchanges became minister of revenue in the powerhouse ministry of Quebec Premier Jean Lesage.

The reporter was ushered in by the side door to see Kierans' desk on a raised dais at the end of the room that was easily 10 meters long. "This was Sir Herbert Holt's office," explained the affable minister. "Every supplicant who came to see him had to walk the 10 meters to his desk so you can imagine what a disadvantage they were at by the time they got there. Needless to say, he usually got his way in any interview."

Holt was a legendary figure in Canadian finance and industry who died in 1941. At one time he is said to have controlled or had investments in 300 companies. Kierans, who grew up in a lower middle class house in a neighbourhood near the Lachine Canal in Montreal and spent his early years climbing the hill to get his education from the Jesuits at Loyola College, clearly was no admirer of Holt's personal style or business methods.

Whether Holt coloured his views about large corporations or not, Kierans spent most of his life in and out of politics railing against them. And the anti-corporation theme pops up again and again in this short, punchy memoir he wrote last year in his 87th year. (Remembering, by Eric Kierans with Walter Stewart; published by Stoddart, 2001) In fact, his fixation about corporations is the flattest part of this otherwise sprightly dash through Quebec and federal politics in the 1960s into the early 1970s.

Kierans was chums with all-stars of the Canadian political scene in those years because he served in the governments of Quebec Premier Jean Lesage (1960 to 1966), ran and came last in the 1968 federal Liberal leadership race and served in the first government of Pierre Trudeau (1968-1972), as postmaster general and later communications minister. He also had at least four other vocations and avocations; as a professor of economics and head of the School of Commerce at McGill; as president of the Montreal and Canadian Stock Exchanges; as a commentator on Peter Gzowski's popular CBC weekday morning show and as owner of businesses whose profits gave him the independence to do the other things.

Eric Kierans was born of an Irish father, who worked as an electrician in the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, and a German mother. It was his Irishness that illuminated most of his career - his tenacity, his energy, his humour, his scrappiness and his sturdy opinions on most everything. He didn't concentrate on one target, though.

On occasions he flailed at ministers in Ottawa and Washington, including Walter Gordon for his budget in the first Pearson government of 1963, and Henry Fowler, the American treasury secretary, for trying to extend U.S. policy to subsidiaries in foreign countries in 1965. In later years he took on big labour as well as big business.

His most successful and, it seems, his most enjoyable years in politics were as a partner of René Lévesque in those heady days of the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s in Quebec. Kierans supported the iconoclastic Lévesque in many of his political initiatives from nationalizing the private hydro companies in Quebec to fighting Ottawa's centralizing policies.

Yet it was Kierans who had Lévesque drummed out of the Quebec Liberal Party at a convention in 1967 ("perhaps the saddest day of my life") when Kierans was the party president and Lévesque was attempting to push the Liberals towards separatism. Despite that, they remained friends until Lévesque's death in 1987. The proof of that close friendship is Kierans' final, poignant comment about the separatist leader: "If there was only one other man in the world, I would want that man to be René Lévesque."

Kierans admitted to many faults that kept him out of the top rung in politics. He was prone to "verbalizing" too much, he was often confrontational and he knew he was regarded as a "heretic" in the Liberal Party even though he was a life-long member of it. But politics aside and even with his considerable achievements in that field, he shone brightly and was probably best known as a commentator on Canadian politics every Tuesday morning in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the CBC with former Tory party president Dalton Camp and the flowery former Ontario New Democrat leader, Stephen Lewis.

Kierans has many friends in the media and that helped him promote his causes. Reporters liked him because inevitably his robust orthodoxy-challenging speeches produced a win-win situation that guaranteed both the reporter and Kierans top billing whether in newspapers or on TV.

In the end, though, he never played the role he could have in politics. And one of the final lines in this book that sparkles with good anecdotes may explain why: "My basic positions have not changed in 40 years." His detractors and his friends might reply with a touch of irony. "Yes, Eric and that's why you didn't make it to be Prime Minister."

That said, he was an engaging supporting actor on the Canadian political scene and he has produced a lively memoir of his time on stage.