Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  A discouraging number of young Americans with military haircuts were staying at the hotel, obviously members of an advance intelligence unit preparing for the invasion. But their presence made all of us North American reporters seem like marked men to the Noriega gang. Sure enough, as the crew and I were returning from a late dinner, armed men pulled us over in our car. They were in civilian clothes, which was a bit worrying. Again, as in El Salvador, it was out of the car, arms on the roof, and guns pushed into our ribs. And, thankfully, once again, when they learned that we were Canadians, we were allowed to go without further trouble. Shortly afterwards, the Americans invaded, a brief spate of intense fighting took place in the city centre, and it was all over.

  We did a few reports on the dismal outlook for Pineapple Face, as the acne-scarred Noriega was called, and then quit the scene. A nice, neat little war. Great rum, good restaurants, and nothing to contribute to sleepless nights.

  7

  RETURN TO THE RIDEAU

  Pierre Trudeau had submitted his second and final resignation from the leadership of the Liberal Party while I was in Washington, and I admit to watching those events with less than professional detachment. Constant rumours of his possible retirement had circulated for several years, a period that marked a widening gap between dispirited party members and their preoccupied standard-bearers in Cabinet, yet no one (except perhaps William Casey) could discern the prime minister’s intentions.

  By January 1984, party president Iona Campagnolo felt it necessary to report on the state of the party to its leader. The party’s constitution provided for such a report, but Keith Davey refused to allow it, and the faithful Prime Minister’s Office staff blocked every attempt to arrange a meeting between Trudeau and Campagnolo. Finally, Ted Johnson scheduled a lunch for February 28. It was snowing when Campagnolo arrived at the prime minister’s residence, precisely on time. She and Trudeau sat down to a salad lunch during which they discussed each of the party’s regional organizations. She told him that there was a general sense in the ranks that the Liberals would lose the next election and the party recommended he leave office before, rather than after, such a defeat. He should go out as the champion, not the vanquished, as had happened in 1979. The party desperately needed rebuilding, but Trudeau had no interest in that task. It followed that he should consider resignation at a time of his own choosing, but soon.

  After lunch, Trudeau and Campagnolo travelled back to Parliament Hill together in what had become a full-blown storm. Before they parted, she told him that Canadians would expect some sort of drama to be attached to his decision, and he said he would let her know his thinking by morning. That was the night of the famous walk in the snow. Campagnolo also took a stroll in the wintry capital, agonizing over whether she had been too candid and blunt in relaying the feelings of party members. Promptly at ten o’clock on the morning of February 29—a leap year day and hence the element of drama Campagnolo had anticipated—Trudeau’s letter of resignation was delivered to her by hand.

  Not long after, Trudeau was in Washington to accept an award and invited me to his hotel for a visit. I told him I could not travel without a camera. Obviously he wanted to get a few things off his chest because he agreed to be interviewed during our get-together. He was miffed that the Turner-led Liberals were starting to blame his stewardship of the country and party for all their problems. “If they don’t shut up,” Trudeau declared, “I will come back and run against them.” After that remark was broadcast on the national news, his detractors stopped complaining.

  Trudeau was gone, but unlike so many pensioned-off politicos, he was not one to fade away gently. He never lost his ability to influence the country. In 1987, he came out of the shadows to campaign against Mulroney’s Meech Lake constitutional deal and was instrumental in turning the country against it. Around the time he made a brilliant anti-Meech speech to a special House and Senate Committee, I met him at a gathering of the canoe group and told him I thought he was mistaken. I believed Meech might head off an inevitable and painful confrontation with Quebec. He shot me a hard look and got a laugh from the others by announcing that his friend Oliver was in need of remedial reading on constitutional issues. I’d hoped Meech and new leadership might bring closure to those endlessly perplexing issues.

  Years of covering American politics and the Reagan administration, its good and bad features, had taken the edge off my youthful convictions about progressive politics, and although I was no late-blooming Republican, I was intrigued to see how far to the right Mulroney might try to shift my own country. But I was content to follow it from afar, even when Don Cameron asked me to replace Pamela Wallin as chief of the Ottawa bureau in 1988. She was returning to Toronto as a national correspondent and occasional news anchor.

  As happens to all Canadian reporters who live and work there, Washington had expanded my horizons. The thought of returning to the often-suffocating nitpicking of Parliament Hill did not inspire me, but Cameron dispatched Tim Kotcheff, my canoe partner (as Don well knew) and his senior news executive, to deliver an ultimatum. Business was business, after all, and the message was come home or ship out. Tim and I talked during a long and well-fortified dinner in Georgetown until he committed to a generous financial offer, putting it in writing on a paper napkin. When I received my first paycheque, the figure did not jibe with my fuzzy memory of the amount specified, and either I had misplaced the paper napkin or Tim had carefully retrieved it. The matter remains unresolved to this day.

  Back in Ottawa and once again in the business of managing people, I took a leaf from the Reagan playbook. Perhaps I should have felt less confident than I did, but the simplest thing in the world seemed to be to hire people smarter and more talented than myself, then provide a supportive work environment in which they could succeed. If, as part of the bargain, their accomplishments made me look good, that was fine too. I was able to hire a bevy of new individuals, many of whom went on to enjoy distinguished broadcasting careers. One of the first new faces was Kevin Newman, whose work as the network correspondent in the Maritimes had long impressed me.

  Newman was a must-have, but the bureau I inherited from Wallin was all male and the testosterone levels were way too high. By the next election four years later, fully half the editorial and reporting staff were female. I had always found myself comfortable with women colleagues and with a consensual style of operating, rather than a top-down hierarchy.

  Head office in Toronto was as demanding as ever. Yesterday’s triumphant scoops were soon forgotten if today’s CBC or Global coverage delivered an angle that we had not. We were under pressure to match our broadcast competition story for story, even when we suspected, but could not prove, that their pieces were faulty. If we fought off the national assignment desk and were proven right, this too was forgotten at the next skirmish.

  Management obsessions had not evolved much during the near-decade I spent in Washington, but political Ottawa was undergoing a sea change. More and more I found the capital on the Rideau resembled its counterpart on the Potomac. There was less civility and more partisanship, although in some ways this made for livelier coverage. Conflict is a good fit with television and television now drove the coverage at all the bureaus. If a newspaper broke a story, it lay virtually dormant until it was broadcast on television. Certainly the atmosphere was made more stressful by the sudden arrival of new and numerous ethical dilemmas. Daily, it seemed, we were called upon to balance the demands of special interests or fierce partisans with journalistic truth and fairness.

  Not long before I departed for Washington, two friends, Mike Robinson and David MacNaughton, had left their jobs in the office of a Cabinet minister to set up a consulting firm. I offered them lunch and some fatherly advice: Don’t do it. That kind of business might thrive south of the border, but it will never work in Ottawa. So few individuals actually make the decisions in this town that outsiders have no need of consultants to knock on doors. How wrong I was. Today both of these men are mil
lionaires, and reporters are buffeted by swarms of industry flacks and private lobbyists.

  Within government, communications specialists and press aides became equally aggressive. Sometimes the approach would be presented as well-meaning concern. A Mulroney press assistant inquired solicitously whether I might be troubled or puzzled by a particular issue, lest lack of information affect my presentation of the government’s position. How could they help? Sometime later, it was widely believed that Mulroney had intervened with the friendly owners of another news organization to sideline a reporter whose columns on the prime minister were notably inflammatory.

  My worst experience of this kind happened during the Chrétien era and involved a communications officer whose minister seemed constantly to be in hot water for a series of misdeeds. Naturally the CTV bureau was reporting the minister’s travails for all to see. In an effort to shut down our coverage, the press aide decided to go nuclear. The network was in the process of applying to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for a raft of new television licences. I was told outright that if we did not cease our unflattering news stories, the minister would see to it that the network’s applications were rejected. Of course the CRTC is supposed to be an independent semi-judicial body, but that did not seem to restrain the press aide.

  I pondered how to deal with this. I did not have the conversation on tape, so a denial was entirely likely. Indeed, I did not know for certain that the politician involved had even uttered such nonsense. I decided to go directly to the source and requested a private meeting with the minister. He expressed astonishment that a member of his staff would make such a gross threat. Within a few weeks the fellow was quietly let go, although not without one final and delightfully obscene phone call to me. He was not the first or last of his ilk, and although the threats were rarely that flagrant, his style of operating with the media became much more commonplace. The trend began with the first Mulroney government, when a cadre of influential political assistants took up residence in the corridors of power, all with their own urgent agendas.

  The presence of lobbyists also intensified. Not long after he had led the Conservatives to an unprecedented majority victory in 1984, Mulroney invited his political supporters to belly up to the trough, promising that no Liberal would get a cent until every deserving Tory had been looked after. After that kickstart, friends and party hacks poured into town. They set up consulting firms that offered little more than a promise to open Cabinet ministers’ doors—for a price. The right Tory connections won millions in government contracts and commissions, a sorry imitation of the practice in Washington, where Ronald Reagan’s pals grew rich as lobbyists. Much of this was going on well behind the scenes, and the press gallery did its best to keep on top of it. The same applied to the RCMP, one of whose top criminal investigators told me he was well occupied following up on suspected financial hanky-panky in the awarding of contracts, some of which led to the laying of charges.

  Mulroney’s connections to doubtful money were evident very early on in the contests he waged against Joe Clark for the leadership of the Conservative Party. It was at the party convention in Winnipeg in January 1983 that Mulroney effectively won the prize, filling the floor with delegates bused in from Quebec. I recall watching these confused men and women disembark from their buses and follow their minders to the voting booths, all the while being instructed to vote against Clark’s leadership. We were doing exit polls, so I asked one of these delegates how he had voted and he replied, “to get rid of Clark.” His minder leaned in with a word in his ear. The delegate then corrected himself to say he had voted to keep Clark. The result was that our exit numbers projected much greater support for the leader than actually existed and set up high but ultimately false expectations among Clark’s workers. The actual tally of 66 percent in Clark’s favour was deemed too low—at least by Clark—and he called a leadership convention that we all knew Mulroney would win.

  Reporters wanted to know who was bankrolling this questionable and expensive operation. That Sunday, on the long-running CTV interview show Question Period, Conservative stalwart Dalton Camp revealed that the money to defeat Clark had come from offshore. He was referring to German businessman Walter Wolf, who later sought contracts with the government and who also introduced Mulroney to Karlheinz Schreiber, another German businessman.

  My personal relationship with Mulroney did not start well. In 1976, he had emerged the bruised loser in his first leadership contest with Clark, but he was already thinking ahead to next time and was determined to maintain a high profile. That year he attended the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. It was precisely the kind of venue at which a hungry, upwardly mobile self-promoter like Mulroney would feel comfortable, mingling with the Governor General, the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition, and the most influential journalists in the country.

  At the pre-dinner cocktail party, Mulroney and I chatted together over drinks. Evidently Mulroney was still nursing resentments at his leadership defeat. Before I could offer words of commiseration, I spotted Jim Munson, then a private radio reporter, vigorously shaking a bottle of beer and approaching Mulroney from behind. Munson had a wild look in his eyes. I dropped my drink and reached over the shoulder of the startled target to try to disarm Jim Munson. Too late. He shoved the foaming brew down the back of Mulroney’s tuxedo. Mulroney turned and lunged at him, shouting, “I’ll kill you, you little bastard.” Munson was a famously aggressive reporter as well as a prodigious hockey scrapper, but the future prime minister would have floored him had I not stepped between them. I tried to make the preposterous argument that Munson had accidentally stumbled with a beer in his hand. Mulroney understood I was not involved, but he associated me with the incident and was too proud a man to forget such a humiliation.

  At least Munson was nonpartisan in his assaults. On one occasion when then prime minister Pierre Trudeau was trying to dodge the media after a Cabinet meeting, Munson pushed a microphone into his face. Trudeau bounced him back with a judo hip toss. Undaunted, Munson countered with a hard check. Trudeau was coming off the boards with a snarl when his RCMP bodyguards intervened to prevent a brawl. Munson’s bosses were mortified and intended to fire him, but when Trudeau heard of it, he insisted that he, not Munson, had started the fracas and that the reporter should not be disciplined on his account.

  Brian Mulroney never learned the wisdom of ignoring slights and insults from lesser mortals, and seemed incapable of understanding that settling scores is a waste of energy better spent achieving the goals that are the ultimate revenge. He appeared supremely confident, but I often wondered if he suffered selfdoubts that sprang from his working-class boyhood on the north shore of Quebec. An amateur psychologist might conclude that these insecurities explained Mulroney’s desire for the approval of others and the reassurance of positive exposure in the media. His daily question to his staff was, “What are the boys saying about me?”

  Ronald Reagan, Mulroney’s mentor and friend, knew by training and instinct that overexposure could be fatal. Yet Mulroney had to associate himself publicly with every minor issue or crisis. When his government ran into trouble, as all governments do, he became the lightning rod for Canadians’ frustration and anger. In Mulroney’s first term in particular, scandal dogged his Cabinet colleagues, but the ignominy stuck to him.

  Adding to Mulroney’s image problem was his tendency to overblown rhetoric and galloping hyperbole, excesses that his advisers could never rein in. He overacted on the public stage, leading many to question his sincerity and authenticity. I was astonished by his actions at the Shamrock Summit in 1983, where it appeared to me that he dragged a reluctant Ronald Reagan into their famous duet, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Others were offended by Mulroney’s attachment to wealth and showy consumption. Tales of extravagant spending by his wife, Mila, were rampant, whereas her dedicated fundraising for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation was unfairly dismissed as a public rela
tions gimmick.

  I returned to Ottawa just as the Conservative government was ending its first term in 1988, and I prepared the bureau to cover what we knew would be a historic election on the issue of free trade with the United States. I assigned myself to cover the prime minister’s campaign.

  By this time the relationship between the Prime Minister’s Office and the press corps was poisonous. Most of my colleagues hated Mulroney, and they seemed to seek out stories to justify their opinion that his was a dishonest and unworthy government and that he himself was unfit for leadership. Typical of those were the rumours regularly published by Frank magazine— now defunct—suggesting that Mulroney was under treatment for alcoholism. Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had shared a room in a drunk tank with the prime minister. These stories were so persistent that our own desk in Toronto asked me why we were covering up Mulroney’s alcoholism. Time and again I asked those who repeated these claims for a name, a source of any kind, but the trail invariably led nowhere. One of my bosses once called and said ABC in New York had a witness who had seen Mulroney being admitted to an alcohol treatment facility in Miami the preceding Saturday. Could I dig around Ottawa and find out whether he was in fact out of town? “No need,” I replied. I had dined with Mulroney at Harrington Lake that Saturday, along with Don Newman and Charles Lynch. Unless the prime minister had sent his double to dinner, he could not have been in Miami that night.

  Of the many elections I covered, including presidential campaigns, none was more arduous and gruelling than that of 1988. Those of us in the media understood that the outcome could transform the national economy and change Canada’s relationship with the United States in ways that might not be clear for years to come. Mulroney hit the road as if the hounds of hell were pursuing him. In fact, he was chased only by an unruly pack of Liberals led by John Turner, who upped the ante by declaring the election the fight of his life and free trade a threat to the nation’s sovereignty.