by Craig Oliver
Saskatchewan had curious news priorities all its own, as I learned one quiet lunch hour at the office in November 1963. I received a call from an obviously distraught woman. Was it true, she wanted to know, that President John F. Kennedy had been shot? I assured her this was not the case and she was immensely relieved. I pointed out that had anything of such earth-shaking import occurred, I, the local representative of the vast CBC News organization, would know about it. Having satisfied her, I decided to check the wires anyway. In the teletype room, the bells were ringing wildly. There it was in one terse line: “Dallas … the President has been shot.”
I rushed to the control room and told the producer we must interrupt the daily farm broadcast with a bulletin. I admit I was eager to read it. He looked at me like I was mad. “Not a chance,” he declared. “Farmers need to know stock and grain quotes and nothing can stop the daily agricultural market reports.” In the studio, the farm reporter continued his tedious recitation of the prices of common-to-medium cows on the Winnipeg Exchange until finally the network broke in from Toronto with a special on the Kennedy assassination.
The shift to the Outside Broadcasts Department opened the door to occasional television opportunities. Whenever an eastern-based unit came to town, they did not miss the chance to exploit my contacts, and occasionally I was asked to do interviews with the individuals selected to appear on-camera. After a time, I was teased for having the most recognizable back of the head on the Prairies. No matter, I was working with top writers, directors, and crews and learning the ropes.
The country had a chance to see my better side during federal election night in 1962, when the television news department pulled me in to cover Tommy Douglas. As leader of the NDP, he was seeking election to Parliament in a Regina constituency, and his supporters were so certain of the outcome, they had mounted a huge sign at the Saskatchewan Hotel identifying his headquarters there as the Victory Ballroom. The news department thinkers in Toronto were likewise confident of a Douglas win and assigned an inexperienced kid to report the predictable outcome.
I had never worked so hard to prepare as I did that night. As I came to know the players and the constituency, I began to sniff out evidence of a massive campaign against Tommy by an alliance of business figures and medical professionals. They could not defeat medicare, but they could defeat the man who fathered it. The nation was stunned when the capital city of Saskatchewan rejected its popular former premier, but I was ready with the backstory and delivered it to a national television audience.
In 1965, the network brass singled me out again to appear on the network’s national election night broadcast covering John Diefenbaker. Dief had set himself up in his private railway car, parked in the station siding in Prince Albert. By then I knew the Chief pretty well and accepted that he had little use for the national press, much preferring the local media, which in his mind included me. I had interviewed him many times. On the first occasion I recall asking him nervously for his opinion on how the Liberals were running the country. “Young man,” he scolded me with mock impatience, “you must learn to spell. The Liberals are ruining the country, not running it.”
The election was on my birthday, November 8, which one of Dief’s aides drew to his attention. I was outside on the station platform with the television crew when Dief invited me in for a drink. He was famous for such small courtesies toward his staff and others he liked. As any reporter would, I inquired how he thought the night would go. To my astonishment he replied, “I think we may lose the night.” This was news, but I was sure he believed the conversation was off the record. To assuage my conscience on the matter, I went on television and announced that senior aides to the Opposition leader believed they were about to lose the election to the Liberals. That sent reporters on the train scurrying down to his car, demanding the names of the loose-lipped aides. Dief killed the story, stating that no staff member of his had ever said such a thing, which was literally true. Nonetheless, Dief was correct and his party was defeated that night.
Diefenbaker was a wonderful storyteller, with a laugh that dissolved into a maniacal cackle, but he was also a puzzle to his contemporaries. I discovered one clue to his nature when I interviewed the man who was his first law partner in the village of Wakaw, Saskatchewan. The fellow described Dief as “an old bullshitter,” a successful defence lawyer who owed his triumphs to an ability to act. I came to believe that was both his strength and his weakness as a politician. In Opposition, where he could thunder in the Commons and on the stump against the sins of the Liberals, he was unsurpassed. But as a prime minister, confronted with the challenge of holding a caucus and a country together while implementing policies and solving problems, he found that acting was not enough.
Though some are better than others at hiding the fact, all politicians are vain and possessed of oversized egos. Dief’s was larger than most, and he became paranoid and vindictive to those he considered his enemies, a group that grew as he aged. Dief was such an instinctive partisan politician that after a while he became a one-man party, estranged from many fellow Tories.
Surprisingly, Pierre Trudeau always enjoyed and respected John Diefenbaker. When Dief became seriously ill on a vacation to Ireland in his later years, then Prime Minister Trudeau sent a government jet to bring him home. On his first day back in the Commons after his recovery, Dief rose to attack the Liberal government for its excessive use of government aircraft. Trudeau doubled over with laughter at his desk across the aisle.
Dief stayed on in Parliament after the Conservative Party ousted him as leader in 1967 and spent much of his time undermining his successors, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark. He was particularly spiteful to Clark, often referring to him in conversations with me as the “so-called leader.” Since he could bring himself to trust only the most supine loyalists, he had few real friends toward the end of his life. He came to national politics as a Conservative but, more than that, as a genuine Prairie populist. He could have achieved so much with the gifts he undoubtedly possessed if not for his inability to rise above the flaws in his character.
Increasingly I found myself working less for the Outside Broadcasts Department and more for various national news programs, in those days small operations with few resources of their own outside of Montreal and Toronto. I was also starting to have qualms about the soft and fluffy nature of the OB stories I was assigned. Our Toronto bosses were largely veterans of wartime radio, a league of gentlemen who did not approach their jobs as journalists or even as serious news executives. Their preferred story was the uplifting, positive event; their ideal correspondent, the man who reported it in a way that reflected the best interests of the country. The folly of this old guard philosophy was fully revealed during coverage of the one event that delighted them above all others, a royal tour.
In 1964 the Queen visited Atlantic Canada to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the series of conferences that had led to Confederation. From Atlantic Canada she would travel to Quebec, and I was given a plum assignment as commentator for her arrival in Quebec City. Premier Jean Lesage had launched Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, but the separatist movement he had unwittingly unleashed was anything but subdued. The arrival of a British monarch at the Anse au Foulon and thence to the Plains of Abraham was to the separatists a red flag. The Queen’s route followed the footsteps of General James Wolfe, a humiliation intolerable to Quebec nationalists, who announced that if the monarch went ahead with this plan, they would stage a massive protest. British security meanwhile demanded reassurances from the RCMP regarding the Queen’s safety.
In advance of the tour, at least a hundred CBC personnel were brought to Ottawa for a week of special training in the art of covering royalty. We joked about classes in Hushed Voices 101. We were told never to refer to “the Queen,” only to “Her Majesty.” We were instructed in the differences between half-mast and halfstaff, as well as how to recognize military rank insignia and the varieties of horse-drawn carriages. Bill Herb
ert, the executive producer, took aside those of us who were to do live commentary and gave us a stern and unequivocal order. If the Queen was attacked or, even worse, injured, we were not to mention it and our camera crews were under similar orders to cut away from such a shot. No royal blood would ever appear on the CBC. Moreover, we were not to give exposure to the separatist protesters.
On the day of the Queen’s Quebec City appearance, the crowds were huge, noisy, and emotional. They were kept under tight control until the Queen alighted from her carriage for a walk across the lawn and into the National Assembly. Hundreds of demonstrators rushed police lines, and just as many Quebec provincial police stormed into the crowds with truncheons swinging. The scene was a full-blown riot, but television viewers saw only a tight close-up of Her Majesty making her way serenely along the roped-off walkway, gracious and unperturbed. In my earphones the director was shouting instructions to stay with the shot. The sound engineers did their best to muffle the tumult, though some ugly noise surely leaked through. Just out of camera range, a furious melee was threatening to spread, but I followed the prescribed script.
The true nature of the event could not be suppressed, of course, and Canadians soon knew the essential dishonesty of the CBC’s coverage. My own role in the mess convinced me it was time to make a change to the news side.
Mom had not been out of Rupert for years, so in 1962 I invited her for a prairie visit. From the moment she arrived, she was uncomfortable and so insecure she needed to telephone friends back home every day. She did not want to go anywhere or see anything and insisted on staying in a hotel. A dinner that I arranged to introduce a girlfriend of the time deteriorated into a tension-filled standoff between the two women, which I could neither ease nor end. Mom could not operate out of her comfort zone, it seemed, and while I had suspicions about the extent of her drinking and worries about her emotional state, I chose to believe that she could pull herself together once home.
My father died later the same year. Our time together after I’d moved in with Mom and Cliff could be measured in hours rather than months or years. Even before he died, then, my father was no more than a ghostly presence in my life, a character from an old home movie. I felt no deep sense of loss upon his passing, only regret at never finding the opportunity to untangle our family history. I did not have the courage to call Mom; no doubt she learned of his death from his sister, as I did. She never mentioned him or their marriage again.
My father died alone, just as he had lived in his final years. After a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking, he was felled by a stroke and found slumped over a writing desk in a rented basement room. According to my aunt, in front of my father was a half-finished letter to me, though I never saw it. I was the sole beneficiary of his will, and it astonished me that he had actually had a lawyer draw up a proper document. There was money, quite a bit of it, left over from his bootlegging years. Although I never remember him saying so, he obviously loved me. That, at least, was no mystery.
During much of my Saskatchewan sojourn, I was a loner. I worked irregular hours and filled any leisure time with university classes and lessons in voice and drama. There was little opportunity for close relationships, a condition that suited the child within me, always warning against commitments that would slow me down. My usual pattern was to jump ship as soon as things got serious, leaving a string of women to wonder what had gone wrong.
But meeting them in the first place was not difficult for a bachelor in the broadcasting business, and in 1964 I met Linda, a winsome blonde whose supple figure rendered even the alter ego temporarily speechless. She exhibited a quiet character that only enhanced her appeal, and soon we were involved. A wedding date was set for August 1965, but the night before the nuptials I panicked. While the bride-to-be and her mother and sisters fussed over arrangements, I bolted from the house into the dark. The next day I fought the eight-year-old through the ceremony and the reception afterwards, attempting to drown out his protests that this was a huge mistake, that I was incapable of enduring the intimacy of marriage.
I took it as a good sign that Linda was one of the few women in my life that my mother truly liked. No matter how bad Mom’s behaviour, Linda was non-judgmental and forgiving. She had to be when Mom failed to show for our wedding with no explanation. Still, we had her blessing from afar and that, I hoped, would be enough.
Shortly before my marriage and despite the debacle in Quebec City, the head of Outside Broadcasts in Toronto offered me a promotion to Winnipeg and another dramatic change in my working environment. The CBC’s home on Portage Avenue, where some five hundred employees served the corporation’s needs, rivalled the nearby Eaton’s store in size. For all that, this headquarters of the CBC’s operation in the Prairie provinces did not produce out of its numerous television studios a single national show on a regular schedule. But it did produce segments for shows originating in Toronto and lots of local programming, alongside a strong radio operation. I was lucky to be in the rare position of working for both services and, better still, I was expected to contribute to their respective news departments when required. I intended to ensure that I would be required, and often.
Making television programs in those years felt very like showbiz, and we imagined ourselves as a snowbound Hollywood North. Certainly, many did their best to imitate the frenetic lifestyle, with booze, sex, and, infrequently, drugs. Producers were kings, constantly orbited by talented writers, editors, technicians, make-up artists, and an endless stream of female script assistants. The bar next door was named the “Riviera” and anxious callers were told their spouses were in Studio R, unable to return calls. The city’s print and broadcast journalists imbibed daily at the Winnipeg Press Club, conveniently located in the basement of a comfortable hotel. It was not a milieu to sustain marriages, and mine was no exception. My son, Murray, was born in November 1967, but I almost missed the event, caught running between the hospital and live coverage of the Conservative convention that elected the hapless Walter Weir premier of Manitoba.
Linda deserved better than the short marriage we had, which ended amicably after five years. It is a tribute to her kind nature that she allowed me unlimited access to my son, and I worked hard to have time with him. Mercifully, we have built a close and enduring friendship.
Almost as soon as I had joined the three-person OB staff, it became clear that the airtime assigned to it by the network was being squeezed. We still had jobs and salaries, but we were broadcast orphans. Fortunately, one of the greatest of the CBC’s broadcasters, Harry Boyle, had come up with an idea for a daily half-hour news and public affairs show he called Across Canada. Each region of the country produced one show a week, and every show had its own anchor. The young Lloyd Robertson, like me a refugee from the OB Department, fronted the Toronto version.
One of my first items for the show caused something of a furor. I learned that German troops and tanks would soon be training in Canada for the first time since the end of the war. They would be rehearsing mock battles at the vast military training ground at Shilo near Winnipeg. When I relayed this information to Winnipeg’s feisty Jewish community, seeking comment, they organized a protest rally at the site. Germany was our NATO ally, but many members of the city’s large Jewish community were either Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors. Almost everyone had lost someone and the Canadian government had not considered the affront that this represented.
The story broadcast that week on Across Canada highlighted the striking similarities between the uniforms worn by presentday Wehrmacht soldiers and those of the Nazis. Perhaps unwisely, I interlaced pictures of their training routines with archival World War II footage. Only the swastika was missing. I was accused of provoking an incident, a charge I could not deny, and the corporation’s bosses felt it necessary to issue an apology. I was given a verbal dressing-down, but the producer who worked with me was demoted. He was assigned to the religious program that opened the station each morning and, ever afte
r, when I ran into him in the hallway, he greeted me with hands clasped in prayer.
I spent most of the following year writing and producing programs around the country’s centennial celebrations. If there was a small town on the Prairies I did not visit, I would like to know its name. I will never know who recommended me for it, but at year’s end I was presented with a Centennial Medal by the federal government. I was so chuffed that I wore it on my pyjamas for a week.
Set against the pure pride and joy of that memorable year was the reality that these were tumultuous times. Both the war in Vietnam and the U.S. civil rights struggle had radicalized the left, and the effects were felt around the world. Closer to home, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was percolating, Canada finally adopted its own flag, and Prairie grain farmers faced an income crisis. The CBC News department was overwhelmed by demands for coverage at home and abroad.
The head of the news department in Toronto was Joe Schlesinger, later to become one of the nation’s most-admired foreign correspondents. He came to Winnipeg for a meeting that ended with an offer to make me the first national television reporter in Saskatchewan. I had to agree to go on the cheap: There would be no crew of my own, just local hires. I was also expected to report for national radio. But what an opportunity! Still in my twenties, I was working full-time for the nation’s largest and most influential news operation. Mom would be able to see me in Rupert, where TV had finally come to town. It was back to Saskatchewan and my old nemesis, Premier Ross Thatcher.
Perhaps because I was always inclined to play a story for all it was worth, maybe even to overplay it, I seemed to attract trouble to myself and to Mother Corp. At a massive anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Saskatoon, a group of protesters asked me for a match. To my surprise, they used it to set fire to a large American flag. The footage made great viewing on that night’s television news, but the Mounties had seen me hand over the match and accused me of staging the event. More criticism from CBC executives followed, and Thatcher sent a letter of regret to the U.S. ambassador.
