Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  But Manning was thinking beyond regional grievances. He believed real change was possible only by taking hold of the levers of power at the national level. If Reform’s activism were confined to one or two provinces, its ambitions would be frustrated. In the early going, even after Reform had won its first federal seat with Deborah Grey’s victory in a 1989 by-election, most of us in the national press corps regarded the party as a prairie fire that would burn itself out as quickly as it had ignited. I began to pay more attention when two old Vancouver friends confided that they had become financial supporters. One was my cousin, Tony Allen, a criminal lawyer and long-time NDP supporter; the other was a wealthy businessman and a Conservative. These were no Prairie rednecks.

  While I may have been late seeing Reform coming, Brian Mulroney was not. During Mulroney’s second term, his office called me to advise that the prime minister would be making a keynote speech to an audience of heavy hitters at the Palliser Hotel in Calgary. Recognizing that Manning posed a serious challenge to the Tories in the West, Mulroney focused in his speech on the evils of Reform. He hinted strongly that the Reformers were a nest of racists and bigots, and warned that an economic policy based on massive tax cuts and deficit elimination would break the country and destroy its social fabric. No doubt he also recognized that this upstart movement could undermine the western pillar of the coalition that sustained his own success. When I spoke to audience members afterwards, I was surprised at the hostile reaction to Mulroney’s words from individuals whom I expected to be loyal Conservatives.

  No better rule obtains for a reporter than to go and see for himself. In the fall of 1989, I went on the road with Manning, touring Manitoba and northern Ontario. Not since the days of the CCF in Saskatchewan had I witnessed such earnest grassroots politicking. There was almost no advance work beyond renting a hall, and there was no attraction beyond a slight man with a Prairie twang, owl’s glasses, and a stock speech that was long on detail and short on bombast. Yet he packed them in. All it took were handwritten notes nailed to telephone poles or circulated in stores and the crowds appeared out of nowhere. Manning was a preacher, sure enough, though personally anticharismatic. The power was in the message. The crowds were not jaded enough to dismiss his ideas—direct democracy, an elected Senate, no special status for Quebec—as impossible objectives, though they seemed like pipe dreams to hardbitten reporters.

  I found Manning sometimes irritable with reporters but also candid in his relationships with them. He was not a man to tell an easy joke, but he did not lack a sense of humour about himself. The CTV cameraman assigned to Manning’s first national campaign, Bill Purchase, had a great talent for mimicry and his imitation of Manning could fool the leader’s own staff. One day Purchase was re-enacting a speech in that familiar high-pitched drawl when the man himself walked into the press room. Purchase froze, but Manning immediately picked up the recitation where Purchase had left off.

  In public settings, Manning was serious and occasionally distant. Fortunately for him, his wife, Sandra, possessed an outgoing friendliness that helped warm her husband’s image. The three of us went horseback riding together in the Alberta foothills and I could not help but be impressed by Manning’s obvious delight in his wife. At dinner in the ranch house later, Sandra took the lead in the conversation around the table, while Manning listened with respect and admiration. They made a good team, each complementing the other’s personality.

  After the 1997 election, when Reform ousted the Bloc Québécois to become the Official Opposition, friends who represented a Canadian Jewish organization visited me in my office. We made small talk while I tried to guess why they’d wanted to see me. Finally, after some delicate tap dancing, they came to the point. I had covered Manning and his party for some time, they noted. Was there, as some believed, an anti-Semitic bias in the leader and the organization?

  Though the party had its share of right-wing zealots and haters of gays and lesbians, Manning used precious political credit to heave them out. No party can control the private prejudices or statements of its members, but I never heard from Manning or any of his senior people even a whiff of anti-Semitism or intolerance of any kind. Those few closest to Manning were thoughtful and honest characters, fired up with the need for change. They included the wise Ray Speaker, the acerbic Rick Anderson, and the rough-hewn but fair-minded Jay Hill. All were moderates from the centre right but far from typical among the early Reform MPs.

  My impression was that most of these rookies had never visited eastern Canada, let alone travelled abroad. They brought a fierce partisanship and a stiff moralism that verged on the sanctimonious. To them, Ottawa was Sodom and Gomorrah on the Rideau, full of soft-on-crime judges, lazy civil servants, spendthrift Liberals, and a complicit national media. They were the “antis”—anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-government, and anti-Quebec.

  In time, however, more than a few of the rookies showed themselves as susceptible to human frailty as the rest of us. During the sixteen years between the arrival of Manning and the Harper government’s second re-election, quite a number retreated from politics after finding public life more than they could handle. Some left to save their marriages, others abandoned their families for the doe-eyed assistants who provided the admiration they did not get at home. At one point I estimated that as many as 20 percent of the 2010 Harper Cabinet had left their spouses, openly taken lovers, switched sexual preferences, or otherwise been undone by lonely nights and alcohol. None of this was new to Parliament Hill; the difference was that their fellow MPs did not pretend to moral superiority.

  Manning at least was flexible and open to ideas. While he was a dedicated Christian fundamentalist, he did not wear his religious heart on his sleeve. For that reason, few thought he would try to impose his personal moral beliefs on the country, as might some of his caucus.

  In the moment of Canadian history that Manning inhabited, he may have done the country a great service in another way. The Western provinces and the Prairies in particular nursed a cauldron of resentments and grievances against centralized government and eastern Canada. Manning could have exploited and inflamed those sentiments; instead, he chose the slogan “The West wants in.” By doing so, his movement caught the voice of the West, but also spiked the guns of growing Western alienation and Western separatism.

  In 2000, the momentum to unite the right led to the formation of the Canadian Alliance, a coalition of Reformers and a few prominent members of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. The Alliance chose Stockwell Day over Manning as party leader, assuming the youthful, photogenic Day could win the new entity votes in Ontario. But Day communicated a message that most Ontarians didn’t want to hear, backed up by a perceived record of anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-gun, and pro-hangman rhetoric—all of which his opponents put to devastating use in the election campaign later that year. The party seemed headed for the extreme right, rather than the political centre that Manning had steered for and where the vast majority of voters in eastern Canada felt comfortable.

  Had Manning contested the 2000 election, I have no doubt he would have been a formidable challenger to Jean Chrétien. Normally we hope for too much from fresh arrivals on the political scene: We want perfection and they inevitably disappoint. With Preston Manning, it was different. Little was expected from him at the start, but by the time he left in 2001, I felt that Manning and his wife, Sandra, had lent a fleeting grace to the political life of the country.

  It would be hard to say as much for Kim Campbell or Stockwell Day. They are the unforgiven, never to be forgotten for taking their respective parties into the abyss. Both soared unexpectedly to the top of their parties’ hierarchies, even though they were relative newcomers. They barely knew the key aides and advisers they’d inherited, inviting mistrust on both sides, and their campaigns were hobbled by infighting. The contrast with their common rival, Chrétien, who had operated for thirty years with the support of a savvy kitchen cabinet, could not have been greater.
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  Certainly Campbell and Day had charisma. They looked like leaders, and in the early going, their glibness was taken for profundity. Unlike Campbell perhaps, Day was never a serious contender, especially after a devastating CBC mini-documentary featured his evangelically inspired view on evolution. Canadians began to believe Day was simply an oddball, possibly a dangerous one. He had embarked on a campaign with all the superficial elements in his favour, and then talked voters into defeating him with a series of embarrassing pronouncements. On election day 2000, the Canadian Alliance added two seats to their Opposition ranks, but the breakthrough in Ontario never materialized.

  Thereafter the internecine struggle to oust Day was a circus of intrigue and betrayal. Almost daily, willing caucus sources kept me informed of the latest plans and timetables to remove the leader. My informants will remain unnamed, as Stephen Harper later gave many of them plum Cabinet posts. Day at least had the satisfaction of becoming one of the most competent and mediafriendly members of that front bench and of shifting attention away from the most contentious of his early beliefs.

  Harper elbowed aside all comers and won the leadership of the Alliance in 2002. After that one of his closest advisers, John Reynolds, admitted they were watching greedily when, on May 31, 2003, Peter MacKay won the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. The defeated candidates, including Jim Prentice and Scott Brison, were furious when it emerged that MacKay had secured the backing of another rival, David Orchard, by signing an agreement promising never to merge the party with the Alliance. The race was tight, and MacKay captured it only on the fourth ballot amid accusations of duplicity. By that August, polls showed that his personal standing with Canadians was in the low single digits and support for the party near an all-time low. None of that much mattered, because before long MacKay took the party and his own leadership of it and smothered both in the cradle. In mid-October 2003, following a series of secret meetings, Harper and MacKay shook hands on a deal to merge the two parties.

  As far as anyone could tell, MacKay had thrown away his party for a song. He did not even drive a bargain for the post of deputy prime minister in any future government, which left many believing he had been badly outmanoeuvred by the more cunning Harper. In March 2004, Harper took the helm of the united Conservative Party, having dropped the “Progressive” from its name, and pulled off a historic coup.

  Soon after my return to Ottawa, Anne-Marie Bergeron and I were married. Little more than nine months later, enough to claim truthfully to her parents that Anne-Marie was not pregnant at the ceremony, we had a daughter, Annie Claire.

  This time around, the role of father was a revelation. In the sixties, when my son, Murray, was born, the hospital would have considered my presence in the delivery room peculiar, if not medically unwise. But in 1989 I was there as Annie emerged into the world. She was silent for the first few seconds, but my apprehension ended soon enough and then it was bawling all around. Like all fathers at this moment, I was awestruck—a brand new life, safely delivered, and from where? I understood the mechanics of the process, but the train of events that had created a human being totally unique among the billions of others in the world remained a mystery. Albert Einstein was right when he observed that God does not play dice with the universe.

  Unfortunately, the joys of second fatherhood coincided with my mother’s accelerating decline. Her depression had led to heavy drinking bouts and recurring health problems. Every attempt I made to spend time with her ended in calamity, as if she couldn’t bear to be with me for more than a few days. Perhaps my presence reminded her of the years we spent apart in Rupert, a period she was unwilling to confront or explain.

  At my wedding, she became inebriated and created a scene by shouting racy obscenities at me during the after-dinner speeches. This was acceptable behaviour at most of the weddings I had attended in Prince Rupert, and Mom was truly funny, but my in-laws must have wondered what their daughter was in for. Even then, Mom’s self-loathing was such that she refused to appear in any of our wedding photos.

  Two years later, there was a less forgivable incident when Mom came to Ottawa for Christmas. My wife and I went off to work leaving two-year-old Annie in Mom’s care. When I tried to call at noon to see how things were going, I got no answer and rushed home full of foreboding. I found Mom drunk and out cold on the floor, my daughter howling beside her. Fortunately, Annie had not crawled away or come to harm elsewhere in the house, but the incident was enough to shatter my composure. I shook Mom violently to wake her up and then refused to help as she crawled up the stairs to her room on her hands and knees. To this day I regret my reaction and wish I had understood more about the nature of manic depression. In the years following, Mom sent wonderful gifts and delightful books to Annie, but I was too frightened ever to have her in our home again.

  I made a last attempt to save Mom from herself. She realized that the time had come to leave the stifling confines of Rupert. All her closest friends had died, many of them too soon from cancer. Sometimes I wondered if the heavy pollution of the air and water by a once highly toxic pulp mill might have contributed to so many early deaths. I bought Mom a two-bedroom condo near Vancouver’s Jericho Beach, where I hoped she might find some peace and serenity. For a year or two, she seemed to manage, but the old demons eventually returned. Once again she was incoherent in phone calls, even as she tried to persuade me she was not drinking. Then came messages from well-meaning friends with reports of “falls” at the golf club and fender-bender car accidents.

  I proposed an evening together in Vancouver on a working trip. She seemed enthusiastic. When I arrived at the condo, I found Mom’s car parked outside with her beloved dog locked inside, gasping in the heat. There was no response to the buzzer, so I summoned the building security man who had to force the door. We found Mom face down on the kitchen floor, unconscious and intoxicated. More was to follow, including warnings that she was trying to kill herself. Twice she overdosed on pills and alcohol. On one occasion she refused to go with the ambulance attendants. There was no reasoning with her, nor would she accept professional help. Her two-pack-a-day habit inevitably led to lung cancer and a series of surgeries.

  Like many in their late fifties, I found myself caring for a parent at long distance while coping with the needs of my own family and a demanding professional life. Mom’s parting words on her last visit to Ottawa had been, “You will never have to look after me.” I feel still a keen sense of guilt in confessing that, in my heart, I had hoped she was right.

  Before leaving Washington, I had drawn another significant inspiration from the example of Ronald Reagan. His Saturday morning ritual of a horseback ride at Camp David and the obvious joy it brought him recalled for me those carefree summers on horseback at the ranch in Williams Lake. I decided to reclaim that pleasure permanently. Over the next few years I took winter vacations at guest ranches in Arizona and Texas, avoiding the big resorts in favour of small operations that focused on horsemanship rather than golf. Adherents of the equestrian sports insist there is scientific evidence that the four-dimensional movement of a horse releases a chemical in the brain that creates a feeling of well-being. It certainly did so for me.

  For my fiftieth birthday, Anne-Marie bought me a fifteenhand Chestnut mare named Katy. She was four years old and we had a lot to learn together, but after years of lessons from an Austrian riding master, I was able to compete in amateur horse shows, jumping fences. Charging at a three-foot fence on a cantering horse was almost as exhilarating as heading into a swirling rapid, except that hitting the ground was considerably more painful than plunging into the drink. The challenge became greater as my vision dimmed, but Katy was a natural Seeing Eye horse. I found the physical relationship between horse and rider so intimate that it seemed I had only to think about our direction before she responded as if reading my mind.

  An engagement with horses also brought me closer to a colleague. Lloyd Robertson and I had been friends since his earliest
days at CBC, but any time together was usually work related. That changed in 2002 when Lloyd was invited to be parade marshal at the annual Calgary Stampede, an honour extended in the past to sports heroes, Hollywood celebrities, leading politicians, and even royalty. Lloyd was unfamiliar with horses, so he was expected to ride in an open convertible. I thought this would make him look like some effete entertainer or politico, and I held out for horseback. When Lloyd put this to the organizers, they proposed to put him in the saddle but have his horse held by a cowboy walking ahead. This was even worse, the eastern dude being pulled along by his nose.

  Although the stampede folks were thinking purely of Lloyd’s safety, they did not know him. He took himself to a western-riding school near Toronto and spent hours learning to get comfortable in the saddle. When the day of the stampede arrived, Lloyd was greeted with roars of approval from the crowd, especially when the horse got it into his head to turn around and go back to the stampede barn. With a command reminiscent of John Wayne himself, Lloyd calmly reined in the animal and legged him on. Lloyd had found his sport.

  Thereafter we took many horseback vacations together at a ranch I had frequented in the Alberta foothills near Bragg Creek. The Homeplace Ranch is owned by one of Alberta’s leading horsemen, Mac Makenny. One day he took us on a mountain ride with trails so steep we had to climb up, leading the horses behind. Reaching a stone outcropping at the peak, we were able to view the mountains on all sides and found that our voices echoed across the valleys. Lloyd could not resist shouting to the peaks, “Good evening, I’m Lloyd Robertson and this is the news.”

  It was one of countless delightful moments in a friendship that has deepened with the years. Both of us experienced hard times and dysfunctional families growing up, but we learned to look to the future rather than regret the past. After such a start, we agreed, life could only get better, and it did.