by Craig Oliver
For all its quirkiness, CFPR set me on my professional path and fostered my ambitions beyond Prince Rupert. It was natural to look for wider horizons, but there was too the insistent inner voice of my eight-year-old self, the child who had been taught to be wary of depending on others, who resisted any ties that might bind. We have to escape this town, he told me; we’ll be trapped if we stay. Let’s move on and re-create ourselves.
Ironically, he had an unintended ally in the first woman with whom I fell seriously in love, Evelyn Carpenter. She was regarded as the most beautiful girl in Rupert and, like all the women I would become deeply involved with thereafter, she possessed a reticent and reserved nature that disguised a keen intelligence. Although we shared intimacies, Evelyn held out on me sexually, not wanting to make the mistake that unhinged the lives of so many young women and their boyfriends in small towns. In those days, marriage was the only possible outcome of an unwanted pregnancy, and I could never have left Evelyn or Rupert in those circumstances. For all the trouble sex would get me into in the future, its absence at that crucial moment proved to be enormously important.
After two years I had almost worn out the office copying machine, producing resumés and application forms that I sent to radio stations all over North America. No station was too rinky-dink to hear from me, yet there was nary a bite. The CFPR crowd was not encouraging and predicted only disappointment and frustration.
Then one day in the early spring of 1959, I was summoned to Hankinson’s office. I feared that my efforts to abandon him had tried his patience, and he intended to sentence me to the night shift forever. Instead he told me that the CBC radio station in Regina liked my audition tape and was prepared to offer me a job. Was I interested in a transfer to Saskatchewan? Apparently there was no resistance on his part: No one in living memory had been promoted out of Rupert to another position in the Corp. Regina, a provincial capital of ninety thousand people, represented the big leagues to me. There I might have a chance to be heard network wide, and making it to the network was what career advancement at the CBC was all about. I responded to Hankinson’s question with an unequivocal yes and literally danced out of his office.
Within a few weeks, my mother was standing at her front door, fighting tears as I threw my suitcase into the trunk of the Meteor. She knew better than I that I’d never be back. The dirt road out of town followed the Skeena River, its current flowing swiftly past me as the river made its way to the Pacific. We were hurrying in the opposite direction, my alter ego and I, exulting in a new beginning. I turned east at Prince George and headed at last into the Prairies, the mountains fading from view, perhaps for a lifetime. I felt prepared for whatever lay ahead. Rupert had given me a graduate degree in the vagaries of life.
Early spring on the West Coast was late winter in Saskatchewan, and I was completely unprepared for the cold. Real winter was so beyond my experience that I fell for an old trick often played on innocents from British Columbia. After any lengthy exposure to temperatures well below freezing at an outdoor parking lot, my car would refuse to start. I could not help but notice that those cars plugged in to the lot’s accessible electrical outlets had no such difficulties. Making inquiries, I was told that it was necessary to buy a car with an electric engine. I went from one smiling car salesman to the next, each directing me to another dealer who might have an electric car in stock, before I finally got the joke.
I could take no offence. Regina was the first city I had lived in, and its sophisticated bars and restaurants, its colleges and arts institutions, and its vigorous political life were rife with opportunities for learning and advancement. Plus it had television, a transfixing medium that had not arrived in Rupert before my departure. I watched so much of it in Regina that the family with whom I boarded called me the “test pattern kid.”
CBK Saskatchewan was radio only, the CBC network not yet having granted television broadcasting to the province. Its offices and studios occupied two storeys of a downtown building and accommodated a youthful staff of twenty, including announcers, producers, engineers, a sportscaster, a farm commentator, and a record librarian, plus a bevy of young female secretaries. It was, in sum, nirvana.
Regina, while far from the centre of power in Toronto, was an important regional station and the only one in the province. For that reason, there was much more airtime for original local programming, especially in the afternoons and early evenings. I had been at the station a year when the network created a new position in the department known as “Outside Broadcasts.” Its elite group of producer/commentators was responsible for just about everything that was broadcast outside the studio, except entertainment programming. Famous CBC names like Byng Whittaker, Frank Willis, and Thom Benson were among its members. I applied for the job and joined them, still based in Regina.
It was the closest thing to a news department that CBK could boast, since it offered no local newscasts. But clearly there was a hunger among listeners. Next to the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the province’s favourite obsession was politics. The average citizen was ready at the drop of a Wheat Pool hat to debate national or international affairs. Farmers read Hansard for entertainment. Decades of identifying themselves as the hapless victims of forces beyond their control no doubt contributed to the locals’ strongly held opinions. The weather, the railways, those eastern bankers, and the devils in Ottawa were easy targets.
Although I had no formal journalistic training or experience, I persuaded the program director that our audience needed to hear a summary, once or twice a day, of happenings at the provincial legislature. I told him it was a service no different from the weather or the daily farm broadcast, and just as essential. The technicians put a broadcast line into the legislature’s press gallery and I set up the first bureau there. Before long I was spending as much time at the bureau during sittings of the legislature as I was in the office. So much of life is watching for chances and being prepared for them when they appear. More than any other opportunity, the decision to cover politics in that fervid political climate set me on a lifetime course.
The Regina station was run by one of the originals of Canadian broadcasting, R.H. “Herb” Roberts. He had been an announcer with Canadian National Railways Radio Department, the first national radio network in North America. In the 1920s, the CNR set up small transmitters along the rail line so that firstclass passengers could listen on earphones to one of the wonders of the age. Anyone within range of the station transmitters could listen to broadcasts, making the network truly a national one. The CNR system became the forerunner of the CBC.
Born in Liverpool, England, Roberts managed his station after the fashion of a British colonial administrator. Head office regulations were followed to the letter, discipline was strict, and exemplary behaviour was expected. There was no written order to this effect, but all male staffers knew they should present their prospective brides for inspection and approval. An obviously poor choice might lead to a gentle father-and-son chat. Roberts once called me into his office for a reprimand after I’d played a number from a new Fred Astaire musical: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You, When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?” Such a sentiment was suggestively immoral in Roberts’s opinion, and he ordered the record destroyed.
If he was narrow in his personal views, Roberts made up for it with a generous heart. There was no end to his helpfulness (and therefore that of the corporation) when an employee was dealing with illness or personal problems. That was the upside of the paternalism that reigned at most CBC stations. In my case, Roberts arranged a shift schedule that allowed me to take university courses while working. I was chosen for a fast-track training program that the Outside Broadcasts Department offered in those days, and by 1961 I was preparing items for national network radio shows.
Anyone who covered Saskatchewan in those days was privileged to see nation building up close. In the fifties and sixties, the provincial legislature was both laboratory and battleground for th
e issues and ideologies that were debated nationally for the balance of the century and beyond. Yet history was not forgotten. In their early fervour, the farmers, preachers, and social reformers who founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1932 had pledged to “eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism.” When they came to power in the province in 1944 under T.C. Douglas, they were determined, as Marx had advised, to control the means of production, and they set up government-run shoe and blanket factories. The poor should never again be taken advantage of by those capitalist exploiters who were responsible, the CCF believed, for the Depression and the suffering of millions. Of course, the most impractical stateowned enterprises failed, but other experiments with public power companies, pensions, job-security legislation, and health insurance broke new ground. The provincial opposition parties, and the Liberals in particular, bitterly opposed every one of those programs.
Many of the early organizers of the CCF were still alive and as committed as ever in the late 1950s. I developed an enormous admiration for men like J.H. Brocklebank, a terrific orator who had spent many Saskatchewan winters travelling from one isolated farm to another carrying the message that democratic reform was possible through united interests. “Brock” travelled by horse-drawn sleigh and carried a tiny stove; many nights he had to huddle beside it in a makeshift shelter to wait out a blizzard. He and others like him were principled and earnest, but they were never doctrinaire. They were ahead of their time in believing that government spending was necessary to achieve their aims, but not to the point of burdening taxpayers with onerous deficits. The CCF founders were not profligate spenders; they feared debt would make them the slaves of the big banks.
When I arrived in Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas had been the highly successful CCF premier of the province for fifteen years. His governments had pioneered the social safety net that became one of the defining features of Canadian nationhood. His impact on the nature of Canadian society was immense, not only through his social policies but also through the brilliant men whom he influenced. Among the gifted civil servants in the Saskatchewan government were Al Johnson and Tom Shoyama, both of whom went on to become senior mandarins in Ottawa. Under Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, they adapted the Douglas doctrine to national policy. In 1961, when Douglas moved to Ottawa as leader of the CCF’s successor, the New Democratic Party, he made that doctrine more politically palatable on the hustings. It was Tommy Douglas, not Pearson, who created the modern welfare state that Canadians cherish. Pearson was only a willing instrument.
Tommy was never a firebrand or socialist hard-liner. Many times he had to oppose the far-left wing of his own party. At one provincial convention, he fought hard against a faction that was demanding Canada pull out of NATO. There is a lesson in his political success for a modern generation of New Democrats, and that is to broaden the base of support and never allow the party to become captive to special interests, whatever the cause.
Douglas was the most stirring public speaker I have ever heard. Trained as a Baptist minister, he used his rhetoric to inspire trust and confidence in his listeners. He had a rare ability to arouse emotions while at the same time conveying the intellectual and practical merits of his argument. Invariably, his remarks were leavened with a charming self-deprecating humour.
None of us ever called him anything but Tommy, and he always enjoyed good relations with reporters. It helped that he had an irresistible personality, a warm Scottish burr, and considerable media smarts. In the days before digital video was even dreamed of, the reels of film in our bulky cameras often ran out at inopportune moments. When we were to film one of his speeches, Douglas instructed us to signal him when we had to change film magazines. At that point, he lapsed into an anecdote until, at a wave from a reporter, he knew we were rolling again. He did this so seamlessly the audience did not notice and no important part of the message was lost to the camera.
As everyone knows, Douglas championed the greatest social policy reform in the nation’s history. His campaigning for government-sponsored universal health care coverage in the 1960 provincial election pitted his party and his administration against most members of the medical profession in the province, the right-wing establishment across the country, and the formidable health industry of the United States whose proprietors knew very well what was at stake.
By 1962 the CCF government had introduced the necessary legislation, but before it had passed the doctors withdrew their services and the hospitals shut down. With the public in a near panic and tensions high, the government sought to break the strike by bringing in sympathetic physicians from elsewhere in Canada and from the British National Health Service. The College of Physicians and Surgeons responded with fear tactics, questioning the competency of the imports and threatening that doctors would flee the province if the act went ahead.
Douglas could be passionate too, but he tried to defuse the general atmosphere of anger and hysteria. On one occasion he stood before an enormous outdoor crowd of pro-government supporters. Before the speech, a group of doctors had packed the front rows. They tried to blend in with the CCF crowd, but their well-pressed work shirts and new jeans were a dead giveaway. Just as Douglas began to speak, they let out an ear-splitting roar, followed by shouts, taunts, and booing. Douglas let the waves of protest flow over him. With perfect timing, he waited until they paused for breath, and then asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
The crisis attracted all the CBC News heavies from the East, even for a time the corporation’s Washington correspondent, James M. Minifie, a famous internationalist who had lost an eye in the London Blitz. I was designated as an aide and temporary travel agent, getting the new arrivals around and helping with local connections. My youthful sensibilities were somewhat shaken when a Toronto television crew invited me to join a production meeting at their hotel. I found it hard to concentrate while the producer chaired the meeting from his place under the sheets, an apparently unclothed female script assistant asleep beside him. Everyone else carried on as if all were normal.
However vicious the health insurance fight, Douglas’s proposed legislation was widely supported by the people. Saskatchewan’s hardbitten grain farmers and their families believed in the value of co-operative action and government intervention, designed as they saw it to protect the vulnerable and powerless. The doctors and the government eventually struck a compromise, and within a decade every Canadian citizen was protected by a national health insurance program, the scheme we cherish as medicare.
Those Saskatchewan years shaped my own world view and political philosophy. I saw that government can be a force for good, that the state must intervene to ensure economic fairness, and I learned from the example of Tommy Douglas that generosity and warmth trumps cold calculation and hard-heartedness every time. The experience led me to believe that state power exercised with restraint and judgment was preferable to rampant individualism.
No one fought universal health care more fiercely than Ross Thatcher, ironically a former CCFer who had become provincial Liberal leader just in time to contest the 1960 election campaign against Douglas. I came to believe that Thatcher was at times unbalanced. When he went into the out-of-session legislature one day at the height of the medicare crisis and tried to kick in the door of the chamber (repeated a few times for the cameras and shown around the world), I thought I was watching a man out of control.
After he became premier in 1964, local reporters, often under pressure from editors loyal to the Liberal Party, gave Thatcher a free ride. Tape recorders were not widely used then, and politicians could later deny their dumb remarks, leaving the reporter vulnerable. Journalists felt obliged to translate or at least soften some of Thatcher’s more incendiary comments. Speaking to one group of reporters, he allowed that the trouble with natives was they were “breeding like fucking rabbits.” In newspaper accounts, this became a sympathetic reflection on action to deal with an exploding Aboriginal population. More famously, he dec
lared during a dispute with francophones in the province, “I am not going to let those goddamn frogs blackmail me.” Translation: The premier indicated the government was anticipating difficult negotiations. We all knew that if we quoted Thatcher directly, he would simply issue a denial. If it was the word of a reporter against that of the premier, the friendly provincial press barons knew where their interests lay.
Thatcher was ahead of his time in one regard: inventing the enemies’ list long before Richard Nixon. Shortly after Thatcher had moved into the premier’s office, he called me in for a chat. Out of his desk he pulled a sheet of paper and waved it in the air. “Here,” he said, handing it to me, “are names of all those goddamn socialists I intend to fire.” There were dozens of civil servants, including a number of the most capable deputy ministers of the day.
Covering the Saskatchewan legislature in those days had its share of drama, but also plenty of mischief. A fair number of socialist politicians, whose wives would never allow them to drink, regarded the illicit press gallery bar as a home away from home. Reporters played low-stakes poker every second Friday and were regularly cleaned out by a young Cabinet minister named Allan Blakeney, later to become an outstanding provincial premier. Whenever it became necessary to throw caution to the winds and ante up another nickel for the pot, Al discouraged timid gamblers by ordering, “all ribbon clerks out of the game.”
The parties that marked the end of the legislative sessions were always riotous—and usually all-male—affairs. The Douglas government had developed a well-oiled propaganda machine that churned out copious press announcements. To demonstrate our independence, we journalists piled a stack of press releases on the marble gallery floor and set them on fire. The blaze was then extinguished through the simple expedient of reporters urinating on it.
