Authors: Craig Oliver
Back in Ottawa and once again in the business of managing people, I took a leaf from the Reagan playbook. Perhaps I should have felt less confident than I did, but the simplest thing in the world seemed to be to hire people smarter and more talented than myself, then provide a supportive work environment in which they could succeed. If, as part of the bargain, their accomplishments made me look good, that was fine too. I was able to hire a bevy of new individuals, many of whom went on to enjoy distinguished broadcasting careers. One of the first new faces was Kevin Newman, whose work as the network correspondent in the Maritimes had long impressed me.
Newman was a must-have, but the bureau I inherited from Wallin was all male and the testosterone levels were way too high. By the next election four years later, fully half the editorial and reporting staff were female. I had always found myself comfortable with women colleagues and with a consensual style of operating, rather than a top-down hierarchy.
Head office in Toronto was as demanding as ever. Yesterday's triumphant scoops were soon forgotten if today's CBC or Global coverage delivered an angle that we had not. We were under pressure to match our broadcast competition story for story, even when we suspected, but could not prove, that their pieces were faulty. If we fought off the national assignment desk and were proven right, this too was forgotten at the next skirmish.
Management obsessions had not evolved much during the near-decade I spent in Washington, but political Ottawa was undergoing a sea change. More and more I found the capital on the Rideau resembled its counterpart on the Potomac. There was less civility and more partisanship, although in some ways this made for livelier coverage. Conflict is a good fit with television and television now drove the coverage at all the bureaus. If a newspaper broke a story, it lay virtually dormant until it was broadcast on television. Certainly the atmosphere was made more stressful by the sudden arrival of new and numerous ethical dilemmas. Daily, it seemed, we were called upon to balance the demands of special interests or fierce partisans with journalistic truth and fairness.
Not long before I departed for Washington, two friends, Mike Robinson and David MacNaughton, had left their jobs in the office of a Cabinet minister to set up a consulting firm. I offered them lunch and some fatherly advice: Don't do it. That kind of business might thrive south of the border, but it will never work in Ottawa. So few individuals actually make the decisions in this town that outsiders have no need of consultants to knock on doors. How wrong I was. Today both of these men are millionaires, and reporters are buffeted by swarms of industry flacks and private lobbyists.
Within government, communications specialists and press aides became equally aggressive. Sometimes the approach would be presented as well-meaning concern. A Mulroney press assistant inquired solicitously whether I might be troubled or puzzled by a particular issue, lest lack of information affect my presentation of the government's position. How could they help? Sometime later, it was widely believed that Mulroney had
intervened with the friendly owners of another news organization to sideline a reporter whose columns on the prime minister were notably inflammatory.
My worst experience of this kind happened during the Chrétien era and involved a communications officer whose minister seemed constantly to be in hot water for a series of misdeeds. Naturally the CTV bureau was reporting the minister's travails for all to see. In an effort to shut down our coverage, the press aide decided to go nuclear. The network was in the process of applying to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for a raft of new television licences. I was told outright that if we did not cease our unflattering news stories, the minister would see to it that the network's applications were rejected. Of course the CRTC is supposed to be an independent semi-judicial body, but that did not seem to restrain the press aide.
I pondered how to deal with this. I did not have the conversation on tape, so a denial was entirely likely. Indeed, I did not know for certain that the politician involved had even uttered such nonsense. I decided to go directly to the source and requested a private meeting with the minister. He expressed astonishment that a member of his staff would make such a gross threat. Within a few weeks the fellow was quietly let go, although not without one final and delightfully obscene phone call to me. He was not the first or last of his ilk, and although the threats were rarely that flagrant, his style of operating with the media became much more commonplace. The trend began with the first Mulroney government, when a cadre of influential political assistants took up residence in the corridors of power, all with their own urgent agendas.
The presence of lobbyists also intensified. Not long after he had led the Conservatives to an unprecedented majority victory in 1984, Mulroney invited his political supporters to belly up to the trough, promising that no Liberal would get a cent until every deserving Tory had been looked after. After that kickstart, friends and party hacks poured into town. They set up consulting firms that offered little more than a promise to open Cabinet ministers' doorsâfor a price. The right Tory connections won millions in government contracts and commissions, a sorry imitation of the practice in Washington, where Ronald Reagan's pals grew rich as lobbyists. Much of this was going on well behind the scenes, and the press gallery did its best to keep on top of it. The same applied to the RCMP, one of whose top criminal investigators told me he was well occupied following up on suspected financial hanky-panky in the awarding of contracts, some of which led to the laying of charges.
Mulroney's connections to doubtful money were evident very early on in the contests he waged against Joe Clark for the leadership of the Conservative Party. It was at the party convention in Winnipeg in January 1983 that Mulroney effectively won the prize, filling the floor with delegates bused in from Quebec. I recall watching these confused men and women disembark from their buses and follow their minders to the voting booths, all the while being instructed to vote against Clark's leadership. We were doing exit polls, so I asked one of these delegates how he had voted and he replied, “to get rid of Clark.” His minder leaned in with a word in his ear. The delegate then corrected himself to say he had voted to keep Clark. The result was that our exit numbers projected much greater support for the leader than actually existed and set up high but ultimately false expectations
among Clark's workers. The actual tally of 66 percent in Clark's favour was deemed too lowâat least by Clarkâand he called a leadership convention that we all knew Mulroney would win.
Reporters wanted to know who was bankrolling this questionable and expensive operation. That Sunday, on the long-running CTV interview show
Question Period
, Conservative stalwart Dalton Camp revealed that the money to defeat Clark had come from offshore. He was referring to German businessman Walter Wolf, who later sought contracts with the government and who also introduced Mulroney to Karlheinz Schreiber, another German businessman.
My personal relationship with Mulroney did not start well. In 1976, he had emerged the bruised loser in his first leadership contest with Clark, but he was already thinking ahead to next time and was determined to maintain a high profile. That year he attended the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. It was precisely the kind of venue at which a hungry, upwardly mobile self-promoter like Mulroney would feel comfortable, mingling with the Governor General, the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition, and the most influential journalists in the country.
At the pre-dinner cocktail party, Mulroney and I chatted together over drinks. Evidently Mulroney was still nursing resentments at his leadership defeat. Before I could offer words of commiseration, I spotted Jim Munson, then a private radio reporter, vigorously shaking a bottle of beer and approaching Mulroney from behind. Munson had a wild look in his eyes. I dropped my drink and reached over the shoulder of the startled target to try to disarm Jim Munson. Too late. He shoved the foaming brew down the back of Mulroney's tuxedo. Mulroney turned and lunged at him, shouting, “I'll kill you, you little
bastard.” Munson was a famously aggressive reporter as well as a prodigious hockey scrapper, but the future prime minister would have floored him had I not stepped between them. I tried to make the preposterous argument that Munson had accidentally stumbled with a beer in his hand. Mulroney understood I was not involved, but he associated me with the incident and was too proud a man to forget such a humiliation.
At least Munson was nonpartisan in his assaults. On one occasion when then prime minister Pierre Trudeau was trying to dodge the media after a Cabinet meeting, Munson pushed a microphone into his face. Trudeau bounced him back with a judo hip toss. Undaunted, Munson countered with a hard check. Trudeau was coming off the boards with a snarl when his RCMP bodyguards intervened to prevent a brawl. Munson's bosses were mortified and intended to fire him, but when Trudeau heard of it, he insisted that he, not Munson, had started the fracas and that the reporter should not be disciplined on his account.
Brian Mulroney never learned the wisdom of ignoring slights and insults from lesser mortals, and seemed incapable of understanding that settling scores is a waste of energy better spent achieving the goals that are the ultimate revenge. He appeared supremely confident, but I often wondered if he suffered selfdoubts that sprang from his working-class boyhood on the north shore of Quebec. An amateur psychologist might conclude that these insecurities explained Mulroney's desire for the approval of others and the reassurance of positive exposure in the media. His daily question to his staff was, “What are the boys saying about me?”
Ronald Reagan, Mulroney's mentor and friend, knew by training and instinct that overexposure could be fatal. Yet
Mulroney had to associate himself publicly with every minor issue or crisis. When his government ran into trouble, as all governments do, he became the lightning rod for Canadians' frustration and anger. In Mulroney's first term in particular, scandal dogged his Cabinet colleagues, but the ignominy stuck to him.
Adding to Mulroney's image problem was his tendency to overblown rhetoric and galloping hyperbole, excesses that his advisers could never rein in. He overacted on the public stage, leading many to question his sincerity and authenticity. I was astonished by his actions at the Shamrock Summit in 1983, where it appeared to me that he dragged a reluctant Ronald Reagan into their famous duet, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Others were offended by Mulroney's attachment to wealth and showy consumption. Tales of extravagant spending by his wife, Mila, were rampant, whereas her dedicated fundraising for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation was unfairly dismissed as a public relations gimmick.
I returned to Ottawa just as the Conservative government was ending its first term in 1988, and I prepared the bureau to cover what we knew would be a historic election on the issue of free trade with the United States. I assigned myself to cover the prime minister's campaign.
By this time the relationship between the Prime Minister's Office and the press corps was poisonous. Most of my colleagues hated Mulroney, and they seemed to seek out stories to justify their opinion that his was a dishonest and unworthy government and that he himself was unfit for leadership. Typical of those were the rumours regularly published by
Frank
magazineâ now defunctâsuggesting that Mulroney was under treatment
for alcoholism. Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had shared a room in a drunk tank with the prime minister. These stories were so persistent that our own desk in Toronto asked me why we were covering up Mulroney's alcoholism. Time and again I asked those who repeated these claims for a name, a source of any kind, but the trail invariably led nowhere. One of my bosses once called and said ABC in New York had a witness who had seen Mulroney being admitted to an alcohol treatment facility in Miami the preceding Saturday. Could I dig around Ottawa and find out whether he was in fact out of town? “No need,” I replied. I had dined with Mulroney at Harrington Lake that Saturday, along with Don Newman and Charles Lynch. Unless the prime minister had sent his double to dinner, he could not have been in Miami that night.
Of the many elections I covered, including presidential campaigns, none was more arduous and gruelling than that of 1988. Those of us in the media understood that the outcome could transform the national economy and change Canada's relationship with the United States in ways that might not be clear for years to come. Mulroney hit the road as if the hounds of hell were pursuing him. In fact, he was chased only by an unruly pack of Liberals led by John Turner, who upped the ante by declaring the election the fight of his life and free trade a threat to the nation's sovereignty.
I had spent countless hours with Turner, discussing politics and economics over many a Scotch and soda. Turner believed in and tried to live by old school virtues: loyalty to the cause, devotion to duty, and most of all trustworthiness. This put him at a tactical disadvantage against Mulroney, Trudeau, or Chrétien, whose teams were far less fussy about such matters. Turner was
rusty when he returned to politics in 1984 after years spent in Toronto's corporate boardrooms. He was badly out of touch with real people's problems, as were the advisers he gathered around him, and he discovered that the parliamentary press corps was no longer a cozy gang. When he asked me to explain the new rules, I had to tell him there were none anymore. In 1988, his campaign against free trade was courageous, but it put him at odds with his own instincts and, even worse, those of many in the Liberal Party.
Those late November days on the campaign trail began before sunrise and ended not with the final evening election rally or the filing of the latest story, but back on Mulroney's plane. He insisted on travelling to the location of the next day's events during the night before. En route, the press corps devoured cold hamburgers and beer and napped fitfully. Once arrived, we checked into hotel rooms in the middle of the night. Many mornings my first act on waking was to phone the front desk to inquire what town I was in.