Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  I had spent countless hours with Turner, discussing politics and economics over many a Scotch and soda. Turner believed in and tried to live by old school virtues: loyalty to the cause, devotion to duty, and most of all trustworthiness. This put him at a tactical disadvantage against Mulroney, Trudeau, or Chrétien, whose teams were far less fussy about such matters. Turner was rusty when he returned to politics in 1984 after years spent in Toronto’s corporate boardrooms. He was badly out of touch with real people’s problems, as were the advisers he gathered around him, and he discovered that the parliamentary press corps was no longer a cozy gang. When he asked me to explain the new rules, I had to tell him there were none anymore. In 1988, his campaign against free trade was courageous, but it put him at odds with his own instincts and, even worse, those of many in the Liberal Party.

  Those late November days on the campaign trail began before sunrise and ended not with the final evening election rally or the filing of the latest story, but back on Mulroney’s plane. He insisted on travelling to the location of the next day’s events during the night before. En route, the press corps devoured cold hamburgers and beer and napped fitfully. Once arrived, we checked into hotel rooms in the middle of the night. Many mornings my first act on waking was to phone the front desk to inquire what town I was in.

  The stakes were huge and so were the crowds. Noisy anti– free trade demonstrators showed up at every appearance. I had to admire Mulroney’s cool and restrained manner when debating them from the stage. Heading into a rally in PEI, Mulroney was accosted by a man who jumped the rope line, thrust his face inches from Mulroney’s, and shouted, “Fuck you!” Mulroney turned to him and said, “And a good evening to you also, sir.”

  Private moments on the tour revealed a delightful candour from Mulroney. His blunt and obscene characterizations of his opponents were hilarious, the parodies sharp and well timed. But he was utterly committed to the fight. At one packed rally, I took a back stairwell to escape the crowds and ran into him leaving with his RCMP bodyguards. Still sweating and flushed with excitement, he grabbed me by the shoulders and, as if I were an audience of thousands, exclaimed, “It’s going to be a new Canada, Craig. A new Canada!” He won that election with a second majority, a result that was most accurately predicted not by any pundit in the travelling press entourage, but by the driver of Mulroney’s campaign bus.

  The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which was signed with much fanfare in January 1989, was a necessary, but painful, transition. It forced an unprepared country to acknowledge the realities of global competition and ultimately guaranteed Canada access to the world’s richest economy. And it was just one of Mulroney’s ambitious national initiatives.

  Mulroney had undertaken the Meech Lake Accord in his first term in an attempt to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold. In the days leading up to the June 23, 1990, deadline for ratification, the premiers gathered in Ottawa for a final round of tense negotiations. At one point, the CBC announced that a historic deal had been struck. They were wrong, and I reported the pending failure even as they reported the opposite. My sources were two premiers who had unwittingly tipped us off when they were overheard by a source sitting in a washroom stall. We had enough of the true picture to allow us to pursue the balance of the story. When Manitoba and Newfoundland failed to sign on, the deal was officially dead.

  In this case, Mulroney had helped sink his own ship. He boasted to a Globe and Mail editor that he knew exactly when to apply pressure on the premiers, suggesting that he had deliberately created a crisis atmosphere at the negotiating table and picked his moment to “roll the dice.” The notion that he had gambled with the future of the country infuriated Canadians.

  Mulroney tried constitutional change again in 1992 with the Charlottetown Accord, but it too was rejected, this time by a national referendum. He paid a high price for putting the country through a constitutional meat grinder that, had his efforts succeeded, might have resolved a still-existing threat to national unity.

  In 1989, he introduced the goods and services tax, a useful if unpopular economic tool that the Liberals of the day loudly decried. Can Liberal senators ever live down the picture of so-called Honourable Members blowing whistles and sounding horns in the Senate chamber in an effort to stall passage of the legislation? Mulroney enlarged the Senate to push through the legislation, and the tax came into effect in 1991. When the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they broke their election promise to scrap it. Likewise when Mulroney undertook the privatization of a raft of money-wasting state enterprises. The Liberals railed against these measures while in Opposition but did not reverse them once they formed the government. The Liberals eventually defeated the Conservatives, yet they retained Mulroney’s economic policies and enlarged upon them. In many respects, Mulroney was the architect of the historic Liberal victories in the decade that followed, preparing the way for the prosperity that marked the Chrétien years.

  In pushing these major initiatives, Mulroney, it could be argued, was more forthright and open with the country than either Trudeau before him or Chrétien after. The GST, free trade with the United States, and the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords were all subject to vigorous public debate. It’s also true that no leader since Mulroney has put forward significant policy ideas; our leaders have become fearful of national dreams.

  At his best, pressing the case against apartheid in South Africa at the United Nations or offering long-overdue compensation to Japanese Canadians for their losses during the Second World War, Mulroney was as statesmanlike as any prime minister in our history. His understanding and command of the detail and nuances of foreign policy won him high regard and the status of an equal among other world leaders.

  In private, he could be charming, engaging, and generous. I was not the only reporter who received a congratulatory phone call on the occasion of some personal celebration, in my case on the day my daughter was born, when Mulroney offered the loan of a baby carriage. His equally quick expressions of comfort to those who had suffered grievous losses were legendary. Had Trudeau done this, reporters would have swooned. With Mulroney, such gestures were regarded as ingratiating, if not deeply suspect.

  The flip side of an attentive regard for others was Mulroney’s apparent belief that every person had his price. I may have experienced a touch of that. We were both attending a lengthy social event in the House of Commons one night in Mulroney’s second term. He invited me to his office for a chat while he changed his shirt. During our conversation, right out of the blue and with no preamble, he said, “Maybe I should put you in the Senate one day.”

  The offer was made casually enough, but I wondered if Mulroney was holding out the prospect of that comfortable red chamber should my coverage be sufficiently obliging. Had I wanted the appointment badly, I would have been on the hook for years. I replied with some truthfulness, “No, thanks. I can’t afford the cut in salary.” We both laughed off the remark and no more was said.

  By late 1992, public and media distrust of Mulroney was widespread and his standing in the polls at a historic low for any prime minister. That fall, during another conversation in his office, Mulroney commented mournfully that he could rely only on his close family and a few old friends for support. Clearly he was considering a departure from office, so I started to look for hints of the timing.

  At a canoe reunion in February 1993, I chatted with Bill Fox and his admirable wife, Bonnie Brownlee, both former staffers and close friends of the Mulroneys. They could not stay because they were rushing to a dinner with the prime minister. That would not have aroused my curiosity greatly, except that the next day I ran into another Mulroney family friend who had been at another 24 Sussex dinner. She told me everyone at that event, which included close Montreal pals, understood it was something of a farewell party. Without explanation and uncharacteristically, Mulroney was not in the Commons for Question Period the next day.

  I called one of his aides who would not lie to me, I k
new, because of our longstanding friendship. Was something up? “I can’t talk about this,” he said, and signed off abruptly. I sent a camera crew to 24 Sussex to keep watch and, within a few hours, they reported the arrival of several Cabinet ministers’ limos. Working my contacts, I found someone who would have to know if Mulroney were leaving. He was reluctant to be the source of any leak, so we made a peculiar bargain: He would not have to volunteer anything. I would count to five and if he did not interrupt, I would take that as confirmation. He waited through the count, and then wordlessly hung up.

  That night Lloyd Robertson and I broke the news to the nation. Of the hundreds of reporters covering Parliament Hill, no one had a whiff of the story. Robertson asked on air what I would do if Mulroney did not resign. I replied that if he did not go, I would have to. As Mulroney went in to inform his caucus of his resignation the following morning, February 24, he shouted boldly to the crowd of reporters, “Oliver better start looking for a job.” That gave me a few minutes of panic until word leaked out.

  If there is a lesson for aspiring reporters in this exclusive scoop, it is the importance of working one’s sources and developing personal contacts. Ours is not a business for misanthropes. It’s important too to establish the ground rules and stick to them. Do not allow yourself to be compromised by promising that certain information will not be used. No statement is off the record; only the timing of its release may be in question.

  Many a source will ask for anonymity on a story that is worthy of public knowledge, and that is fine with me. But I will always want to understand the source’s motive. I have declined more than one supposed scoop when the person offering it was looking for political gain and nothing more. For me, the value of personal connection with newsmakers and those around them has always been about depth and perception, the ability to bring context and insight into my reporting of events and individuals.

  Many Canadians wanted to believe that Mulroney, or “Lyin’ Brian” as he was called, was a crook. Long after Mulroney left office, revelations surrounding his cash-in-envelopes dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber became the subject of parliamentary committee hearings and a federal inquiry, and lent credence to those who shared that opinion. Long-time political allies felt betrayed and asked themselves what Mulroney could have been thinking. For years Mulroney’s friends had drawn on their own ethical capital to defend him against charges of just this kind of questionable behaviour. In my view, Brian Mulroney became the Richard Nixon of Canadian politics. He could claim significant domestic and foreign policy achievements, but fatal flaws in his character brought him down.

  One long-time colleague summed up Mulroney this way: He was deeply wounded by a childhood of poverty and a resulting low self-esteem. His experience left him with a desperate need for money and status, which ruined him.

  Many Canadians have come to regret another legacy of the Mulroney years. Bitter over the rest of Canada’s rejection of the Meech Lake Accord, Lucien Bouchard quit the Mulroney Cabinet and formed the separatist Bloc Québécois, which went on to win fifty-four seats and take over as the Official Opposition in the 1993 federal election. Bouchard’s departure caused me to question his character. At a lunch not long before he jumped ship, the then environment minister waxed eloquent about his commitment to Canada. To hear him that day, you would have concluded Canada was the perfect union.

  The presence of the Bloc in the Commons destabilized our national politics, making it extremely difficult for any national party to form a majority government. As well, through nothing less than blackmail, the Bloc used its leverage to secure disproportionately large financial transfers from Ottawa to Quebec. If in future Quebecers once again send separatists to Ottawa, English-speaking Canada may question Quebec’s commitment to the larger interests of the country. In another Quebec referendum on independence, the rest of the country might well say, Let’s end this thing as amicably as possible and get on with building a strong and prosperous nation. What one separatist leader once called “the knife at the throat”—that is, Quebec separation— will perhaps have lost its value as a threat.

  After Mulroney’s departure, Kim Campbell narrowly won the Conservative leadership and the prime ministership from Jean Charest. But in the election Campbell called for October 1993, Mulroney’s once-successful coalition of Quebecers and Westerners could not hold, nor could Campbell overcome the electorate’s lingering distaste for the Mulroney government. A week before the election, Bob Rae, then premier of Ontario, called me in the studio. “Are you ready for the biggest defeat of a government in our history?” he asked. He predicted the government would lose all but twelve seats. I told Rae I doubted it, and of course we were both wrong. The Tories returned only two Members to Parliament, one of whom was Jean Charest.

  It is easy now to forget Kim Campbell’s political star power before that disastrous election. Even before the campaign, large crowds came out to see Canada’s first woman prime minister, and they were not disappointed. At her best, she could make a dazzling impression: witty, original, a charming and disarming woman with a good, though occasionally unfocused, mind. I was in the room when she sat down with Bill Clinton at the G7 summit in Tokyo in 1993. She attracted considerable interest at that gathering and impressed reporters with her command of the issues. The American president was thoroughly smitten. “Turned on” and “eager” is the only way to describe his demeanour. When his one-on-one with Campbell was over, he insisted that they share his limo for the return trip to the conference meeting hall. If he did not make a grab for her in that armoured car, I’d be surprised.

  As an election-time leader, however, Campbell was ill served by inexperienced advisers imported from her home province of British Columbia. She sidelined many of the Mulroney-era hands who could have saved her from herself. Nor did she win hearts among the media when she explained that she intended to run a campaign that would be beyond the understanding of old troopers like myself.

  There were public gaffes aplenty and complaints that Campbell was undisciplined. Members of the Cabinet griped that they could not get Campbell’s attention, and one commented bitterly that the prime minister was spending too much time closeted with her Russian boyfriend. Her staff defended the anti-Liberal ad that ridiculed Chrétien based on his personal appearance until public opinion forced them to pull it. After that debacle, I was chosen to ask the first questions at Campbell’s news conference and naturally raised the issue of attack ads. She sat in stony silence for one question, then a second, until another reporter took his turn with a different line of inquiry.

  One of the great what-ifs of recent Canadian history is whether Campbell might have defeated Jean Chrétien had Mulroney left earlier and given his replacement a year of seasoning before she faced the electorate. In the event, the economy was sagging, the Free Trade Agreement had not yet begun to show positive results, and Canadians were reluctant to endorse a prime minister they had not had time to figure out. That famous bare-shoulders portrait of Campbell sent the wrong message. At that point, Canadians needed to see gravitas, not cleavage.

  The final humiliation for Campbell was that she had trouble finding work after the election defeat. Chrétien sent her to Los Angeles as the Canadian consul since, as Eddie Goldenberg remarked, we could not have a former prime minister on unemployment insurance, even if she was a Conservative.

  The Tories attempted to rebuild over the next ten years under the leadership of Jean Charest, one of the most genuine people I have met in politics, and then under the good soldier Joe Clark in his second tour of duty. Neither could stop the tide of change demanded by the hard right from within the party ranks.

  Political influence comes in many guises, and we in the media don’t always recognize a game changer when we meet one. In the late 1990s, a political outrider, a man the press gallery gently derided as “Parson” Manning, undeniably shaped the national agenda. His utter faith in the rightness of his views and the conviction with which he expressed them seemed ver
y like sermons from the pulpit, but I expect history will give favourable reviews to Preston Manning, if only in a sidebar.

  The issues that Manning chose to push into the spotlight— taxes, the deficit, crime, and tough love for Quebec—became the country’s major political preoccupations for nearly a decade. He created a space in the public arena for serious discussion of ideas that were barely mentionable by the mainstream parties. At the close of the twentieth century, the reigning Liberals were once again happy to co-opt the positions popularized by their rivals, and Manning succeeded indirectly in shifting the country to the right. His railing against government debt fed public concern, which allowed Chrétien and his finance minister Paul Martin to take the drastic measures they did to straighten out the nation’s finances.

  Preston’s father, Ernest C. Manning, was the Social Credit premier of Alberta during much of my tenure as a CBC reporter covering the Prairies. Beloved by Albertans for his famous Back to the Bible Hour radio show, Ernest was to me an austere, humourless figure who barely tolerated reporters and rarely spoke to them. Communicating with the press was not a part of public duty as he saw it. We were a pack of peeping Toms, and how he ran his government was none of our business.

  I expected the worst when in 1987 Preston was chosen to lead the newly created Reform Party of Canada at its founding “assembly” (not convention) in Vancouver. First impressions from the stump seemed to reinforce the hard-line schoolmaster image, so it was a surprise to discover a very different man in person. Preston Manning had a quick laugh and, unlike so many political leaders, was a keen listener. As for the party he created with a corporal’s guard of discontented Westerners, it was a modern version of the traditional agrarian protest movements of the 1930s, with the added feature of a strong right-wing religious component.