by Craig Oliver
I came to grief on another occasion when Otto Lang, minister for the Canadian Wheat Board, was to make a major grain sales announcement. I planned to film a group of farmers as they watched the announcement and then reacted to it. A few members of the Farmers’ Union were duly invited to gather in a spacious beer parlour at Indian Head, Saskatchewan. They were willing but insisted that, as non-drinkers, they did not want to be associated in the item with the demon rum. I agreed without hesitation. It was a hectic night of editing, and I did not have time to screen the whole piece before it was fed to Toronto and played to a national audience of millions. Unfortunately, the editor needed “cutaways” to cover so-called “jump-cuts” between comments by various farmers. As a result, the item was full of close-up shots of well-filled beer glasses being hoisted from the tables.
The Farmers’ Union organized a protest in front of the CBC building, complete with placards bearing my picture. I was attacked for distorting reality, for making teetotalling farmers look like beer-swilling boozers. Poor Knowlton Nash, then the head of CBC News, spent weeks fending off complaints from outraged farm organizations and Members of Parliament. I had unwittingly broken my word.
I was on the road a lot and became friendly with a circuit judge. He phoned me one night with the details of a horrendous murder-suicide involving six people in the tiny native community of Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan. This honest man wanted Canadians to know the terrible conditions in which natives were living. He told me where and when the bodies would arrive. When the RCMP pulled in to the dark garage of the funeral home in Prince Albert, they were blinded by an explosion of television lights. The lights exposed the bodies stacked in the back of a truck like so much cordwood. This time the new CBC News boss, Joe Schlesinger, had to come to my defence. He did so, citing the value in exposing viewers first-hand to the failure of federal Indian policy and the disregard for Aboriginal lives.
I wish I had been as daring when covering the next royal tour, the 1970 visit to the Arctic by four members of the royal family. The Americans were challenging Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, so the Trudeau government decided to use the high profile of the royals to remind the world that the Royal Navy had mapped the Arctic and claimed it for Britain. It was part of Canada’s heritage as a former colony.
I doubt that there has been another occasion when those of us in the media have had such close access to the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles, and Anne. I related well to Charles, about nine years my junior, and found him engaging and witty. In those days before Diana and his misadventures with the British newspapers, Charles was also disarmingly frank. Over informal cocktails, I told Charles we had met when I did the live broadcast of his investiture as Prince of Wales at Carnaervon Castle, an encounter he pretended to remember. He perked up when I recalled the troubles witnessed by his mother six years before at Quebec City. I suggested to Charles that these did not represent the true sentiments of Quebecers and told him he should make a trip of his own. “No thanks,” he said. “I am afraid the separatists might plant a bomb and blow my ass off.”
Charles’s father went on to lecture me about the fact that Canada was not a colony anymore and if we did not want to have the Queen as our head of state we could simply say so, “and put an end to the thing. We don’t have to be here if we are not wanted.” Both Charles and his father were admirably candid and I wanted to report the exchange, but I was told such chats were considered off the record.
None of us, however, could refrain from using a later comment by Philip to the effect that the Canadian Arctic was “a garbage dump.” He was referring to the thousands of empty oil barrels that littered the landscape. His bluntness upset his Canadian hosts and somewhat embarrassed the Queen, but there was no apology and everyone recognized he was right. Later, the federal government ordered companies operating in the North to take their fuel barrels out with them.
I was just settling in back in Saskatchewan when the ripples of a management shakeup in Toronto hit my shores. Joe Schlesinger had appointed himself CBC’s correspondent in Paris. His replacement, the thoughtful and decent Peter Trueman, asked me to join the national newsroom in a management position. If I could take the heat for two years, he promised me the top reporting job in London would follow. Peter did not last in his own post for those two years and, of course, his replacement claimed never to have heard of our understanding. But I knew none of that when I packed my bag once again and headed for Toronto and the worst two years of my life.
3
DRAWN TO POWER
I had joined the CBC in the final years of its most glorious era. There was very little competition from private broadcasters and the corporation enjoyed a huge share of the radio audience. It was headed by distinguished visionaries like Charles Jennings, the father of future ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, and Alphonse Ouimet, the man credited with creating national television broadcasting in two languages. Its leading broadcasters—reporters like Frank Willis and Norman DePoe, and actors like John Drainie—were admired role models. Many of its producers, such as Lister Sinclair and Harry Boyle, were legends in the News and Public Affairs departments. Boyle and Bill Herbert mentored a younger generation that included Lloyd Robertson and me. But our pride in the CBC as an institution and our respect for its burgeoning upper management began to wobble after the radio era gave way, almost overnight, to television.
In the late 1950s, there was a sudden expansion of the corporation and not enough talent, especially in the management ranks, to fill the need. Many of the old guard from radio couldn’t make the transition to the new medium, and parts of the CBC came under the control of men who did not know their business, administratively or technically. While in Winnipeg, I was called to a meeting at which a senior executive complained that we were shooting too much expensive film stock. He proposed we all be given still cameras. With these we would snap sequential photos, place them on a cartwheel, and spin it, thus creating the effect of film. At first everyone giggled, thinking this adaptation of flip-book art was a joke. When it became clear that the man was serious, we all fell into an embarrassed silence.
Like it or not, however, Toronto was the centre of the country’s broadcasting industry, the centre of the known universe to those of us striving to get there. I believed it was where I belonged. On my first day at CBC Television, I made my way to the Corp’s national newsroom, located in a rundown wreck of a building on Jarvis Street in a neighbourhood that had seen better times. The day before, following a fatal accident, police had disabled the only elevator in the building. I walked up the five floors to my new office.
Stepping into the reception area of the open working space, I was greeted by a tiny figure who sat not behind a desk, but on it. He was a sadly deformed character known as “Snarley,” because of his raspy voice. When I introduced myself, he burst into laughter and announced to the room that the “fucking hayseed” had arrived. Almost as one, the staff stood and walked out as if taking a group coffee break. I understood this to be a gesture by members of the union. I had made the switch to management, and that made me their natural enemy.
My professional home for the next two years was known as the “Boneyard.” It was, like the newsroom in Evelyn Waugh’s satiric novel Scoop, a graveyard of broken dreams. Up until then I had imagined that such a collection of eccentric, self-destructive, and absurd characters could exist only in a work of pulp fiction. Never before or since have I experienced such a poisoned workplace. Years of incompetent bosses and bull-headed unionists had undermined any sense of common purpose. The mandate handed to me was to clean out the Augean stables. I would be joined in the effort by another newcomer, Tim Kotcheff, who had been brought over from the Public Affairs Department, where he had produced numerous award-winning shows. Together we would act as producer-managers of the news department.
The unit employed roughly a hundred individuals, mostly men, as reporters, editors, writers, and assorted hangers-on, all of whom wallowed in rumour, compl
aint, and power struggles. A few were known for treachery and corruption, and some were on the take from organizations and private companies, accepting favours in exchange for positive coverage. Drugs of all kinds were consumed, and fights were not uncommon. I learned that many staffers routinely padded their time cards, adding thousands to their paycheques. One reporter often claimed more than twenty-four hours a day and got away with it. When I refused to sign off on fraudulent cards, one of the news editors took me aside and warned me that I might soon find myself in a dark alley with a knife in my ribs.
Down at one end of the large floor were the offices of my predecessors, men cast aside but not let go in past reorganizations. They came and went silently, morning and night, waiting resolutely, if bitterly, for their pensions. The walking dead cast me a piteous glance as they shuffled by my desk. One advised me to choose my cabal carefully lest I be caught on the losing side in the next management shakeup. Another had been officially dismissed but was so distraught that he refused to leave his office. The old friends who had engineered his demise felt too guilty to have him forcibly removed, so for a time he lived in his office, cooking on a hot plate. When I passed him in a hallway late one evening, he told me with a lopsided grin that he was going to change the sheets on his desk.
A few individuals in the newsroom had been my colleagues as reporters and I thought of them as friends. One in particular sought me out socially, and for a time we seemed on close terms. Then I learned that everything I told him was being passed to the news guild that had assigned him to spy on me. Such duplicity and contempt for the corporation that gave these individuals a good living infuriated me. If employees felt they owed the CBC nothing, not even an honest day’s labour, I had no compunction about firing them—and I did.
In a courtyard next to our building sat a four-storey brick structure known as the “Kremlin.” It housed the offices of more than a dozen Corp vice-presidents, every one of them despised by the lower ranks. One day I sought out the revered Harry Boyle, then chief of national Radio Public Affairs. He stood with his back to me, staring silently out his window overlooking the Kremlin. Long minutes passed. Abruptly, he pulled up the window sash, stuck out his head, and shouted in the direction of his bosses, “Assholes! Frauds!” He closed the window and turned to me as if it had never happened. Harry was known to take a drink or two in those days, but no doubt he had cause.
Perversely, in this environment the inner eight-year-old thrived. He was perfectly at home with the idea that life was a battle, that it took all our strength and wiles to prevail against our enemies, that there was no room for charity or compromise or unguarded vigilance. His delight in our circumstances told me something.
Whatever her frailties, I always respected my mother’s instincts. Her judgments could be swift, yet almost without exception they proved correct, so I didn’t hesitate to seek her counsel on career decisions. Mom had listened for years to my complaints about the CBC’s vast bureaucracy, its management incompetence, and, more recently, its truculent staff. As usual, her advice was blunt and clear: “Get out of that place,” she told me. “They’re all jerks.”
The career-saving rescue she recommended that I accept came at the hands of Don Cameron, a renowned and much-admired news producer, with an assist from Pierre Juneau, then chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the regulatory body of Canadian broadcasting.
Juneau had turned his eye on the nation’s private broadcasters and in particular CTV, the commercial television network that was at its most profitable in the sixties and seventies. Although CTV called itself a network, it was in reality a disparate collection of independently owned local television stations that came together to buy American sitcoms and dramas en bloc. These shows were purchased cheaply, and then peddled to Canadian sponsors at exorbitant prices. Since most Canadian viewers had a choice of only two or three stations in those days, CTV’s market share was impressive and its annual profits typically in the 25 percent range.
The paltry amount spent on Canadian programming at CTV was a fig leaf to keep the regulators at bay: The network did not even have a national newscast worthy of the name. Most news broadcasting and what passed for public affairs was done by the local stations. The network’s idea of national news programming was to fly local film footage to a central studio, first in Ottawa, later at CFTO in Toronto, and hire an anchor to front it on air. There were few national correspondents even in Ottawa. A Globe and Mail columnist of the time branded the private owners as “pirates and buccaneers” for their plunder of the airwaves.
Then in 1970, Juneau announced stringent Canadian content regulations for private broadcasters and attached tight deadlines for implementation. With their federal broadcast licences on the line, the board members at CTV moved quickly to assemble a serious national and international news service. The only place to find people with the necessary expertise was the CBC, and CTV promptly sent out its raiding party. Their first steal was one of the corporation’s outstanding correspondents, Tom Gould, who then brought aboard Don Cameron, my boss at CBC News and a man known in the Corp’s corridors as “Craze” Cameron.
Flamboyant, self-indulgent, and the architect of countless madcap and risky adventures, Cameron was one of the last of the swashbuckling, hard-drinking, womanizing newsmen, a club that included his friends Norman DePoe and Peter Reilly. Shooting wars were his great passion, and he had made his reputation for bravery, if not foolhardiness, in his coverage of the Vietnam War for the CBC. Once in the producer’s chair, he couldn’t resist following his correspondents into the field, just to check on how things were going. He would insist on dragging everyone as close to the action as the local military would allow, then insist equally on their accompanying him on drinking binges at the local bars and whorehouses.
In 1983, one of Cameron’s CTV reporters, Clark Todd, was killed in the civil war in Lebanon. Todd’s crew were forced to flee without him to save their own lives. Don and a colleague left the executive offices in Toronto, flew to Lebanon, and risked their skins going into the war zone to find Todd’s remains. They drove up into the Chouf Mountains in the midst of an artillery barrage of the kind that had killed Todd, found his putrefying body, and brought it home.
My first meeting with Don Cameron—or rather the first time I shook his hand—was a classic “Craze” story. In 1962 a crew from his groundbreaking CBC program Newsmagazine was in Regina covering the medicare fight. They invited me to join them for a drink. While we chatted, the conversation kept being interrupted by remarks that seemed to come from under the large table where we sat. A disembodied voice insisted that we tell him the name of the most beautiful woman we had ever seen him with. Finally, one of the group explained that the voice belonged to their boss, Don Cameron, and he introduced me by name. A hand emerged from beneath the table in a friendly greeting. I clasped it, uttering the usual pleasantries, but I never did see the man’s face.
On my first day at the Corp’s Jarvis Street premises, I had hoped to find Cameron in his office where I would impress him with my readiness for action. His door was closed tight and when I knocked there was no answer, though I could hear murmured exclamations from inside. I banged on the door more insistently and, after a moment, Cameron and his secretary emerged, rearranging their clothing. He gave no sign of discomfort, but welcomed me with a compliment on my “edgy” reporting style and reassurances that we would get along just fine; after all, his son and I shared the same name.
Cameron was a completely undisciplined and self-interested human being. Though he possessed a fierce intelligence, he was ruled by instinct and whim. Yet he had two saving graces: He was capable of enormous and sudden kindness and sensitivity, and he possessed the ability to recognize talent in others, gifts they were often unaware of themselves. Of course he exploited that talent for his own purposes, but in the process he crafted careers for two generations of broadcasting luminaries at CBC and CTV, among them Knowlton Nash, Pamela Wall
in, Sandie Rinaldo, Michael Maclear, Bill Cunningham, and Lloyd Robertson.
Once at CTV, Cameron had the answer to its problem of how to meet the CRTC’s content rules without undermining the lucrative evening schedule. He would create the country’s first early morning news and current affairs show, aiming to repatriate the substantial Canadian audience for the American Today show on NBC. Armed with CTV’s fat wallet, he hired many of his former CBC co-workers as cameramen, film editors, and reporters. He offered me the job of producer. Since I was already producing a news-hour program at the CBC—also a Cameron creation—the position seemed ideal.
The alter ego had no trouble with the idea of fleeing the Corp. Keep moving, was his mantra, stay ahead of enemies and critics. And Mom had caught my mood at that moment: While there were many individuals I appreciated and admired as professionals at the CBC, there were others I could not abide. It was time to take my leave. It helped too that Cameron was one of Mom’s favourites, a man she recognized on first meeting as a boozer and manic-depressive like herself.
Before giving formal notice, I went to see my immediate boss, Knowlton Nash. It took me two days to get an appointment, and when we met, he was pleasant but rather indifferent. His parting words were that CTV’s commitment to a breakfast talk show would not last more than six months and that I would soon be back, looking for work. I submitted my resignation without regret.
