by Craig Oliver
In the early months of the government’s first mandate, Question Period made repeated requests to the Centre for on-air interviews with Cabinet ministers, but with limited success. On occasion a department might agree to produce a minister for us, only to call back shamefacedly to say that for one reason or another, the minister was suddenly unavailable. Buckler’s strategy was obvious: If we were able to book only Opposition MPs on a particular issue, she assumed our professional desire for fair and balanced coverage would not allow us to pursue it in the absence of a spokesperson for the government side.
Jane Taber and I and our producers refused to play that game. When the unrepresented government came off second-best, Buckler had no choice but to relent and allow the occasional minister to appear on the show. Invariably they were reliable stalwarts such as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty or Jim Prentice and John Baird, whatever their ministries at the time. Most others were off limits, and when they did come, Buckler wanted questions submitted in advance and an agreement that only those questions would be asked. We would not make that commitment. My first serious run-in with Buckler came when I speculated on air that if Harper could not trust his own ministers to get out front and explain government policy, why should members of the public trust them?
Conservative backbenchers were forbidden to appear under any circumstances, even though it seemed to many of us that there was more talent in the ranks than on the government’s front benches. A number of intelligent and appealing figures had not made it to Cabinet and they smarted under the media restrictions. Without exposure for local MPs, their constituents quite rightly wondered what had become of the representatives they’d sent to Ottawa.
Buckler gradually loosened up a little, but that did not end the hostilities. Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was finally allowed to appear on the show, but she was obviously ill prepared to handle tough questions about the government’s discredited environmental policy. I pressed her hard, and she was not up to the contest. Buckler exploded, accusing me of harassing an attractive young woman in a hostile and unprofessional manner. Not long after, however, the prime minister pulled Ambrose from the environment post.
I knew the relationship between Buckler and me was beyond recovery when she began to send complaints about my allegedly disrespectful style, first to me and then to bureau chief Robert Fife and to Robert Hurst. But by then I had established a healthy rapport with a number of ministers, among them Jim Flaherty, Peter MacKay, and House Leader Jay Hill, all of whom were bold enough to make their own decisions. They were delighted to tangle with the media and gave as good as they got in almost every round. Buckler’s emails were dutifully passed up the line to Toronto, but Question Period received no directives one way or the other.
We were nothing if not persistent in our insistence on ministerial accountability. When a serious economic story arose a few months later, we asked for Finance Minister Flaherty. Instead we were told Secretary of State Kenney would fill the slot. Furthermore, Buckler would determine the ministers who were to appear on any given Sunday in future, as she would the topic on which they were to be interviewed. This attempt to dictate the content and lineup of our program took PMO imperiousness to new heights, and I rejected Kenney as being irrelevant to the issue. The following Sunday, the Opposition MPs predictably savaged the government, and I announced that the government had refused to provide us with an appropriate minister.
Buckler responded at once with an email to Hurst: “If you insist on preventing the government’s spokespeople from appearing on your show based on your own criteria, which I absolutely do not agree with, I would respectfully request that you be honest and say that you rejected the designated spokesperson put forward by the government.” She went on to say that I had misled viewers on the matter of government spokespersons and asked that my comments be corrected in any repeat broadcast of the show. Instead, I went on air and detailed her efforts to control and intimidate us. I explained that this was an issue of who was producing CTV television news programs: the network’s reporters and producers or the Prime Minister’s Office?
I never heard from Buckler again, but a few days later she announced her resignation. After trying out a few unfortunate replacements, Harper appointed a young Montrealer, Dimitri Soudas, who put the government’s press relations on a professional footing.
In January 2005, three Liberal überactivists—lawyers Dan Brock and Alf Apps, along with television producer Ian Davey, son of Keith Davey, the party’s famous rainmaker—made a pilgrimage to Boston in search of a messiah. Their objective was to persuade Michael Ignatieff to return home and run for Parliament. They made their pitch over a dinner that lasted until midnight, and when it ended Ignatieff was intrigued but unconvinced. He knew, and so did they, that he was ill acquainted with the country’s political terrain after more than three decades abroad.
The three succeeded in winning Ignatieff’s agreement to a coming out of sorts as the keynote speaker at the national Liberal Party convention in Ottawa in March of that year, an event that was expected to be a routine affair with few fireworks. Ignatieff was not familiar to most Canadians, but he had enormous credibility with the chattering classes: son of a respected Canadian diplomat, George Ignatieff; nephew of a nationalist icon, philosopher George Grant; award-winning author and broadcaster; and esteemed intellectual. The comparisons to Trudeau were immediate and irresistible. In the event, Ignatieff’s speech stole Paul Martin’s convention thunder, the neophyte upstaging the prime minister.
Ignatieff’s supporters expected him to contest a seat in the next election, spend the requisite time in Cabinet while he built a national reputation, and then run for the leadership when an older Martin stepped down. (Shades of Trudeau and Lester Pearson.) They did not expect Martin’s government to collapse in 2006, leaving Ignatieff with his seat in Parliament but contending for the party’s leadership well before he was ready for it.
During Ignatieff’s inaugural interview on Question Period, I decided to make him earn his airtime as a way of judging his temperament. I knew viewers wanted to hear him answer questions about how he could entertain prime ministerial ambitions after three decades of avoiding his country. The comparisons to Trudeau seemed wrong to me, since Trudeau had fought against corruption and separatism in Quebec for years before Pearson recruited him to national politics. I believe I used the word dilettante. It was an ambush, plain and simple, but Ignatieff parried every thrust with a cool and cocky demeanour, even inquiring at one point whether someone might have slipped something into my breakfast cereal.
Later, at lunch, I had a chance to make a personal connection with the man. He was open and engaging, not the least annoyed by the rough ride I had given him on television or my recent critical commentaries. As so often happens, it was an odd coincidence that shifted the discussion away from dry policy talk. Ignatieff’s wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, was contending with vision loss after a botched eye surgery in London. Her condition was serious enough that Ignatieff sometimes read to her at night. She had so far not found a specialist in Canada, and I insisted she see my own doctor at the Eye Institute in Ottawa, an institution at the forefront of Canadian research and surgical practice. She agreed but would not allow herself to go to the head of the line, waiting four months for treatment even though I felt it was unwise to delay.
After our initial encounters, I concluded that Ignatieff was a man with brains and presence but still uncertain of what he stood for. This policy mushiness could be dangerous. Politics is no different than any other job, with success demanding years of training and experience. Despite his obvious talents, I wondered if he had the time to acquire the necessary skills.
At that stage, Ignatieff’s only obvious rival for the party’s leadership was a man whose apprenticeship was far behind him. Bob Rae is fond of reminding me that I was the first person who took him for lunch when he arrived in Ottawa as an NDP Member of Parliament in 1978, trailing a reputation for intellectual brilliance. He later swi
tched to provincial politics and in 1990 became Ontario’s first NDP premier. After six tumultuous years at Queen’s Park, Rae left the field for a decade, returning as a federal MP in 2008, this time as a member of the Liberal caucus.
Rae had justifiable ambitions to the party’s leadership and the Prime Minister’s Office, and he had not been pleased when Ignatieff announced at a social dinner with the Raes that he intended to jump into national politics. Rae did not welcome his old friend to the inevitable competition for the party’s top job. The announcement marked the beginning of the end of a friendship that dated to their student days at the University of Toronto, a loss both would regret.
Lloyd Robertson and I were in the broadcast booth in Montreal in December 2006 when the Liberals gathered to choose Paul Martin’s heir, the individual whose job it would be to bring down the Harper Conservatives and restore the Liberals to their accustomed position in power. To almost everyone’s astonishment, the victory went to Stéphane Dion on the fourth ballot, with Ignatieff running second by fewer than two hundred votes. Rae bowed out after the third ballot and released his delegates, but would not declare in favour of any of the others. He might have handed the prize to his old friend then and there, had it not been for his pride.
Former Chrétien Cabinet minister Brian Tobin was high above the convention floor with Lloyd and me and noted that half the delegates below were sitting on their hands, refusing to applaud, when the winner, Dion, took to the stage. By the time the convention had ended, the party was suffering from a profound case of buyers’ remorse. Everyone knew that the next leadership campaign was already under way.
No other political party in my lifetime has chosen a leader so inept and ill-prepared for the job as Stéphane Dion. In personality he was intensely serious and even sullen. Though intellectually bright—he was an architect of the Clarity Act and his dedication to action on the environmental front was sincere—he was unable to convey his ideas in an easy and informal conversational style in either official language. Once on the campaign trail, he disappointed audiences with flat addresses that were painful to endure and that failed utterly to deliver the necessary partisan attacks on the Harperites.
On October 8, 2008, even the Liberals stayed home and the party was reduced to seventy-seven seats, one of its worst showings in many decades. Within a week, Dion announced he would resign as soon as a new leader could be chosen. By December 10, 2008, Michael Ignatieff had been installed as acting leader until a formal convention vote could make it official the following spring.
In the fall of 2008, Canadians watched the American election campaign, pitting Barack Obama against John McCain, with perhaps as much interest as their own. The pace of those political events, the aggressive tactics used in both arenas, and the increasing influence of new media raised obvious questions. What is truth in news coverage? Who is telling it to us? And where do we go to find it? With so much information blasted at us from so many different sources, the genuine article has never been harder to discern amid the cacophony.
For good or ill, the digital age has given rise to the never-ending news cycle and a need to feed the information machine. We have the gift of instant coverage of any event that can be recorded with a cellphone, and we have the curse of sophisticated campaigns of deception that can go viral in seconds. Anyone with access to the internet can set herself up as a reporter, columnist, or analyst and peddle what may or may not be accurate information via personal blogs, YouTube clips, or online forums. The unsuspecting consumer cannot know if the authors are legitimate journalists, or hired flacks in the pay of political parties or special interests, or simply mischief-makers out to perpetrate a hoax.
It will surprise no one that I believe in the veracity of the mainstream media, by which I mean the professional newsrooms, big and small, which have standards of fairness and balance that the public can trust. Their reporters are sent into the field to witness events for themselves, stories are supported by teams of editors and fact checkers, and the work of all is subject to scrutiny, not just by the bosses but by press councils, ombudsmen and, in the case of broadcasters, the CRTC, not to mention the civil and criminal courts.
But the mainstream media itself has in some ways opened the door to abuses in this brave new news world. In October 1997, CTV brought its twenty-four-hour News Channel to air. (The CBC had preceded us by a few years with its own CBC Newsworld.) There were no more final editions: We were producing and broadcasting stories around the clock, piling fresh items on top of old with less time for context, analysis, and evaluation. In general, mass media managers were more interested in ratings, hence the demand for colour and drama, if not actual crisis, and a focus on celebrity, crime, and oddball trivia. In some respects, the enemy is us: The explosion of news programming time has created such a need for material that we have debased the coin of what constitutes news itself.
Media minders—the spin doctors, public relations consultants, and communications assistants who now inhabit every government department and minister’s office—are delighted to help meet the insatiable appetites of the news channels by creating news events for us. Though billed as public gatherings, these usually involve a “public” of partisan loyalists, summoned to provide the necessary backdrop to a well-staged and professionally produced performance by the minister. Reporters need not even attend and frequently are not permitted. When these events are given airtime, the viewing public is rarely aware that the events have been packaged and produced by a political party.
Unmediated news coverage today is ubiquitous and caveat emptor the consumer’s only protection. Those of us in the serious-news business can only hope that the public will learn to distinguish between the real thing and the offerings of talk-show barkers, internet snake-oil salesmen, and political hacks.
Stephen Harper won a second term in October 2008 but was denied the majority he coveted. He had promised open, transparent, and accessible government, yet the perception was of an obsessively secretive administration. A few acts, such as the apology to Canada’s Aboriginals for the abuses of the residential school system, were universally applauded, while others, like the record number of Senate appointments designed to ensure Conservative control of the upper chamber (including the naming of my former CTV colleague Mike Duffy), inspired only cynicism.
The former initiative, surely one of the most positive and uplifting in the history of the Canadian Parliament, struck a personal chord with me. Speaking on behalf of Canada and with genuine emotion, the prime minister apologized to native Canadians for the policy of assimilation that had done so much harm to their communities and to those students at the residential schools who had suffered cruel mistreatment in those institutions. After my story on the event had appeared on the national news that night, Carole Helin, the widow of my boyhood friend, Art, called to say that for the first time Aboriginal people could feel real self-respect.
But such moments of harmony were all too few. In their first two mandates, the Conservatives endeavoured to govern not like the minority they were, but like a majority. As long as they were able to retain the loyalty of their hard-core base of about 30 percent of the Canadian electorate, they had nothing to fear from the other four parties who split the remainder among them.
Throughout his second term, Harper showed no hesitation in breaking the furniture of the hallowed conventions of the past. Twice the combined Opposition parties threatened his government with defeat, and twice Harper shut down Parliament through prorogation. No other Canadian government had had the audacity to use such heavy-handed tactics so frequently, yet Harper did not flinch.
Another significant innovation of Harper’s government was the perpetual election campaign. The Conservatives’ election machine and its stokers never shut down between campaigns; fundraising and polling continued apace. Hence the appearance of television attack ads even before the writs were dropped. These messages, paid for by the party and advertised as such, were pure propaganda and sometimes contain
ed outright falsehoods. More than once, the ads had to be withdrawn on grounds of poor taste or objections to gross inaccuracies. The other parties reciprocated with between-election ads of their own, but their spots leaned far less on the personal and more on the issues.
Viewers might claim these ads don’t affect them, but surveys indicate that voters go to the polls believing the arguments they have heard in negative advertising. Most people regard themselves as wisely skeptical of any kind of advertising; in fact, they are not. Citizens hardly believe they can be lied to. Radio and TV ads for political ideas are just like those for any other product, and their messages have a way of settling into the public mindset, either by subtly persuading the undecided or reinforcing the biases of the converted.
Much of the government’s positive approval rating in its second term was due to the perception that it was a competent and prudent manager of the economy. Faced with the global economic crisis in 2008, the Conservatives’ first instinct was to stick with their no-deficit and balanced-budget promises. Only when the Opposition parties threatened to defeat a stand-pat budget did the Conservatives wake up to the political benefits of big spending. Their 2009 stimulus budget outlined a two-year spending program of nearly fifty billion dollars. There was not a city in the country that did not receive a degree of federal largesse, and to the government’s credit, the money was disbursed without any financial scandals.
At the height of the international financial crisis in March 2009, the prime minister gave Question Period an exclusive interview in advance of a G20 summit in London. In the midst of what appeared to be a global economic meltdown, Harper was cool and on top of every issue facing the summit. Undoubtedly, his steadiness helped to calm the nerves of a jittery nation. Two years later, heading into a third election, Harper told me in one of our private conversations that he believed his unruffled performance during those tense months was responsible for the credibility his government continued to enjoy on the issue of financial management. Harper made clear that if an election came, the economy would be the crux of it, an issue on which he believed he could win. The deficits his government had racked up were not mentioned.