by Craig Oliver
10
SPARRING WITH HARPER
Whether the assignment is city hall or Parliament Hill, it’s critical for a reporter to know the key players, and that means keeping ahead of the casualties by spotting the comers who will one day take centre stage. It was obvious to me in 1993 that Stephen Harper, a newly elected Reform MP from Calgary, was a cut above the rest, good-looking, smart, and—unusually for someone representing a Western constituency—bilingual. He was an intensely private person, a trait he shared with Pierre Trudeau. He was also seriously intelligent, but he lacked Trudeau’s charm and ability to project personal warmth. He was not a backslapping, hand-grabbing, press-the-flesh politician; in fact, he was stiff and awkward in social situations. Even informal photos caught him ramrod straight, barely tolerant of physical contact beyond the obligatory handshake. Nonetheless, while Preston Manning could be more congenial, he would never win the Prime Minister’s Office for his party. It seemed to me that Stephen Harper might.
Shortly after Harper had lost the 2004 election, his first as leader of the Conservative Party, a mutual friend asked if I would meet with Harper to try to persuade him to be more open and approachable with the media. I agreed, hoping that a frank conversation might serve reporters on the Hill generally, as well as those in my own bureau. Such one-on-one sit-downs were not uncommon in my experience, especially with Opposition leaders. These informal and usually private encounters offered an opportunity to suss out the essential character of the individual, free of the protective wrapping usually held in place by the image-makers.
Harper and I met alone at his office and had a conversation that was remarkable for its candour. He did not disguise his distrust of reporters, citing a long history of Parliament Hill journalists leaving the press gallery to work for the Liberal Party. I raised the fact that many in the press gallery and in his own caucus were unhappy with the performance of Caroline Stewart Olsen, Harper’s press assistant. Although she was a creditable woman, she had no training for the position and clearly did not like reporters. (Harper later appointed her to the Senate.)
I urged Harper to follow the examples of Trudeau and Chrétien, leaders who had relied on press officers with very different personalities from their own. He should not hire individuals who would only reinforce his own aloofness. I probably went beyond propriety in suggesting that Harper had already demonstrated the right instincts in his choice of Laureen Teskey as his wife. Here was a woman who was garrulous, witty, and wore her endearing eccentricities on her sleeve—almost Harper’s opposite, and certainly a great asset. He chuckled but was unconvinced.
While frankly acknowledging his own frailties, Harper obviously would never feel entirely comfortable with representatives of the national media, many of whom he believed to be biased against politicians of the Conservative stripe. I thought Harper wrong in his conviction that the public shared his low opinion of those who covered politics and said that I had yet to see a successful leader who did not have at least a civil relationship with the men and women in the press corps. Indeed, I have known many who suffered hostile relationships with reporters and subsequently went down hard. The Canadian public may have a healthy suspicion of extremists in the media, but they give credence to most of what they read and see in the national press.
We chatted for perhaps half an hour, Harper waving off one obviously scheduled interruption halfway through the conversation. He listened, but he did not concede. I rose to leave, not wanting to take up any more of his time.
“I enjoyed that,” he said. “Would you give me a call? I’m not very good at calling people myself.”
That intimation of vulnerability made me feel differently about the man, if no less wary of the politician. Curiously, though, that session was the first of a series of infrequent one-on-one talks between us that continued into Harper’s first term as prime minister. And Harper did call a day or two after he was elected in January 2006.
“So, what advice do you have for me?” he asked.
I replied that he should guard against overexposure; that people soon tire of politicians who are constantly in their faces.
“Great,” he noted. “The next time you ask for an interview, I’ll turn you down.”
I enjoyed the quip and actually looked forward to our first encounter after Harper was sworn in as prime minister, but complications soon arose.
In February, Harper travelled to Afghanistan to view the Canadian and allied war effort for himself. U.S. president George W. Bush had been there just days before, and undoubtedly the sight of Harper dressed in similar quasi-military garb struck the prime minister’s communications staff as a chance to portray the new PM as a resolute leader, clearly in command.
The day the prime minister returned to Ottawa, I received a call from Caroline Olsen, who offered me an interview for Question Period, the first interview Harper had granted to anyone since coming to power. My mind raced ahead. Obviously, there were a lot of issues to be raised: Harper’s legislative agenda for the new Parliament, his budgetary priorities, even the makeup of his Cabinet, announced before the Afghanistan visit. But there would be virtually no preparation time. The aide said the prime minister would be available within the hour for a ten-minute taped interview.
We readied the studio and the set was in place when Caroline Olsen called again. The prime minister was prepared to entertain questions concerning the war in Afghanistan and nothing else, she said; I was restricted to that topic and that topic alone. She reminded me that I was being honoured with the first interview given by the new prime minister.
From a news point of view, the interview was a coup. But clearly this was also the first test of a new strategy by the Harper communications staff to alter the relationship between the prime minister and the parliamentary press gallery. They intended to change the rules, to challenge the influence of columnists and reporters, and to subject them to the same centralized control that they would exert on the Conservative caucus and on government bureaucrats. If the disparate and often-quarrelsome members of the press gallery could be thought of as a union acting as an intermediary between the politicians and the rankand-file public, Harper’s advisers hoped to decertify it.
Much as I wanted an exclusive interview, I knew that making side deals to save politicians from difficult questions was a betrayal of the public trust. Ms. Olsen was astonished when I rejected her offer. With some trepidation, I then notified CTV’s head office, which might have been displeased that their Ottawa bureau chief had risked alienating the prime minister within weeks of his taking office. News vice-president Joanne MacDonald not only supported the decision, but also said that had I agreed, she would have overruled me.
At the time, I felt no resentment toward Harper or his staff over this, regarding it as simply another skirmish in the eternal battle between the media and the politicians, and I was pleasantly surprised that Harper himself did not seem to bear a grudge when I was placed in an embarrassing position a year later.
Harper was making a high-profile visit to Mexico and agreed to an unrestricted interview for Question Period on the final day of his summit with the U.S. and Mexican presidents. In its never-ending attempts at penny-pinching, the network insisted we hire a local Mexican technical crew rather than fly in one of our own. Unfortunately, the complexities of putting the signal up to a satellite and connecting with our studio were beyond the locals. We tried frantically to complete the connection while the prime minister sat waiting, as did his anxious entourage, eager to take off at the airport. After an hour, we finally had to admit it was hopeless. I later sent Harper a note apologizing for our failure, which got me a quick personal call, in which he assured me the incident was unimportant.
This and other small incidents left me with contradictory impressions of Stephen Harper. I have never been able to rationalize the mean-spirited, secretive, and autocratic nature of his government’s conduct in its first two terms with my many personal encounters with an invariably polite an
d thoughtful individual.
Oftentimes, small events, easily passed over, signal the particular stamp that a leader will put on his administration. Six months into office, Toronto Conservative Garth Turner was suspended from the party caucus for committing the sin of criticizing the prime minister on his blog, which eventually led to Turner’s being harried out of the party altogether. Harper’s same failure to read the dynamics of personal relationships had led another Conservative MP, Belinda Stronach, to cross the floor to the Liberal benches the year before, thereby saving Paul Martin’s government from defeat for a brief time. Harper’s message of zero tolerance of criticism only reinforced what his detractors in and out of the government soon labelled a rigid and controlling leadership style.
However, a more serious flaw in Harper’s personality detracted from his considerable capabilities. He seemed to carry a burden of resentments, accumulated hurts, and complaints that occasionally caused him to boil over. In April 2006, Harper nominated the respected oil and gas industry executive Gwyn Morgan to head a new public appointments commission, a body that would ensure the transparency and quality of government appointments. The intention was certainly praiseworthy. But when a Commons committee failed to ratify Morgan’s nomination, Harper was embarrassed and miffed. Rather than name another nominee, he declared the position dead and dropped the idea of the commission altogether. There was a complexity to Harper that led him to throw obstacles in his own path, even when he was at his most innovative and brilliant. Like a character out of Dostoevsky, he seemingly feared success, feeling that it was undeserved.
Observing Harper’s occasional antics, I wondered if they might stem from a childhood plagued by asthma, a condition that isolates children from other kids and may have kept Harper in particular from joining in the roughhouse games that foster male bonding. At the risk of playing amateur psychologist, I think such individuals compensate for their fear of rejection by exerting an unwarranted control and authority over those around them. Harper could not be a hockey player, but he could make himself an expert on the rules and history of the game, thus giving him authority over those who played it.
This distance from others, while not preventing Harper from gaining the respect and obedience of his parliamentary caucus, did not always bring him affection. At the same time, his critics could not deny that he possessed many of the qualities of a natural leader. He was not afraid to lead and brought a stubborn grittiness to the pursuit of his objectives. He projected strength and determination, which Canadians have always favoured in their leaders. Finding a likeable person in Harper was possible, but one had to work at it.
By 2005 I had been CTV’s Ottawa bureau chief for seventeen years. It was a seven-day-a-week job that involved divining the direction of government and Opposition manoeuvres, assigning reporters and producers, staying in touch with sources, and stickhandling endless calls from Toronto headquarters. During that time I had hired more than a score of talented reporters, among them Kevin Newman, Lisa LaFlamme, Dawna Friesen, Joy Malbon, Paula Newton, Roger Smith, and the indefatigable Jim Munson, plus a host of bright young producers who went on to run their own shows at U.S. and Canadian networks or, in the case of Joanne MacDonald and Tom Haberstroh, rose high in the network’s executive ranks. It was exhilarating to work with these journalists, but enervating to carry the administrative load.
I asked for a change and Robert Hurst, president of CTV News and another of my hires some two decades before, was quick to grant it. I recommended that he approach Robert Fife, the canny bureau chief for Canwest News Service and the National Post who had been scooping everyone on the Hill in recent years, to be my successor. I asked that I be allowed to return to my first love as chief political correspondent. In that role, I would happily pursue political stories, offering where possible more than the facts of breaking news. I had long provided the national news with “thumb-suckers” or “talkbacks,” as the networks call them, giving background to, along with interpretation and commentaries on, the events and personalities of the day. Presenting these thoughts without the appearance of bias, while still saying something worth listening to, is not simple. In Ottawa, views on what is really happening and why can vary sharply.
I continued as co-host of Question Period alongside Jane Taber, senior political reporter and columnist for the Globe and Mail. The longest running political news show in the country, the program first went on air in the 1960s. It was taped on Friday afternoons and broadcast on Sunday mornings, a two-day hiatus that was safe in those days of a much slower news cycle, when the whole world seemingly took the weekend off. By the end of the millennium, however, Question Period was looking tired, and audiences were dropping away on the full network. It was taken off the air in 1999.
In 2001, I suggested to the network’s president, Ivan Fecan, that we revive the show by taking it live to air every Sunday. Without a moment’s hesitation, Fecan said simply, “Do it.” There were no lengthy committee meetings or study groups, no audience surveys or marketing studies. Fecan’s words were holy writ at the network, and when I went to the money people for a budget and a new time in the schedule, I had only to repeat those words and all resistance fell away.
To describe Ivan Fecan as a broadcast genius is not too much. He built CTV into an immensely profitable operation through a series of acquisitions, including the money machine TSN. Although he was a committed Liberal and major fundraiser for Jean Chrétien, he never once interfered with the coverage decisions of his most important bureau. This could not have been easy, especially on those occasions when Chrétien’s closest aides publicly expressed their displeasure with us.
For a time I fretted that politicians and pundits would be reluctant to rise early and get themselves to a studio on a Sunday morning. In the West especially, it was brutal sun-up. But the network sent in a wicked smart producer, Jana Juginovic, who created a fresh format with edgy interviews, sharp video, and reports from far-flung correspondents on the scene of breaking news. With a full-time staff of only one and all the others dragooned from other jobs in the bureau, Question Period went on to command the highest ratings in its history.
Today, the nation’s power brokers sit before our cameras every week, and the program itself often breaks stories that make the front pages of the newspapers on Monday morning. The audience is not a large one, ranging from roughly a hundred and fifty thousand when not much is happening on the Hill to three hundred thousand when major events are unfolding. But its tight focus on parliamentary politics draws a national audience of opinion leaders and politicos. Question Period has earned its reputation for setting the news agenda on the Hill for the coming week.
It was inevitable that the Question Period team would deal with the communications staff in the Prime Minister’s Office on an almost daily basis, yet it seemed my earlier suggestions regarding the importance of respectful relations between the national press corps and political leaders did not go far with Stephen Harper. In the wake of Caroline Stewart Olsen’s departure, Harper appointed Sandra Buckler to the more senior position of director of communications. I had never heard of Buckler, but I expected the usual healthy editorial tug-of-war between the chief press aide and our producers, and I was pleased to see a woman finally atop the PMO’s communications ladder.
Unfortunately, my first meeting with Buckler did not go well. She kept me cooling my heels for an hour at a local restaurant, and when she arrived she explained that she was very busy, suggesting her time was more important than mine. In the brief conversation we had before she rushed off to her next meeting, it became apparent that she had no experience in serious journalism or in the news business at all. Advertising was her professional milieu, and that explained her approach. Buckler regarded news about the prime minister and the government as a property that she alone owned and had a right to manage as she saw fit. There was no evidence that she acknowledged as part of her job an obligation to be open and transparent with reporters, and through them with Canadia
ns, about what the government was doing. Harper had endlessly promised just such transparency when he was in Opposition and on the hustings.
For her first act, Buckler put herself at the apex of the tightly knit structure, dubbed the “Centre,” which directed and controlled communications for every government department. The efforts by Question Period’s staff to deal directly with press officers for individual ministers or those who represented individual departments were rebuffed or referred to Buckler’s office. Not only was she supreme commander of all government information, she was the self-appointed mistress of all political messaging. I soon became aware that senior bureaucrats and even Cabinet ministers feared speaking without Buckler’s approval or coaching. Monte Solberg, a confident and adept minister who had become a friend during his years in Opposition, suddenly would not return calls or agree to interviews. When we met by chance in the halls of Parliament, he would mumble something about the Centre, and then rush off in obvious embarrassment. One of Harper’s liveliest ministers, Jason Kenney, told me candidly, “The communications director for the prime minister does not believe in communicating.”
Before long the bureaus had received the new ground rules. Buckler decreed that Cabinet ministers should not appear in face-to-face encounters with their Opposition critics. At press conferences with the prime minister, the press officer in attendance would decide who among the press corps would be allowed to ask questions. Harper would answer no question from a reporter who had not first been recognized by the officer. Clearly this was a practice designed to favour reporters with easy or planted questions over those with less friendly or more challenging lines of inquiry, and a number of reporters boycotted the PM’s events rather than be subject to such rules of engagement. Eventually a compromise was reached, but it left a bad taste.