Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Eventually Martin spoke about the processes of managing government and public policy, which he believed was being done in a haphazard and unintelligent manner. I reminded him of Pierre Trudeau’s near-fatal excursion down that road. Trudeau and Michael Pitfield, Clerk of the Privy Council, had spent their first term in the engine room, determined to make the machinery of government run better. But there was no one up on the bridge, plotting the ship’s course. I thought to myself that Martin seemed to love the details of policy more than the tough business of making decisions. He left the crucial but messy business of politics to others, preferring the tidier precincts of planning and process.

  Behind the scenes, the Martin gang was using strong-arm tactics to sweep aside anyone with the temerity to challenge their man for the leadership. Those who might be tempted were made to understand that there would be no jobs, no contracts, and no access if they did so. The smart ones, like Brian Tobin, Allan Rock, and Frank McKenna, knew it was hopeless and did not try. Sheila Copps was enough of a renegade to leave her name in the ring in what many regarded as a foolhardy but principled bid to stop the Martin juggernaut. Martin always pleaded innocent when such things were brought to his attention.

  No one doubted that Martin would make quick work of the hapless Stephen Harper. Some commentators debated whether or not the massive majority they expected Martin to win in his first election as prime minister might skew the political balance in Ottawa for years to come. So it was that in November 2003, Martin was essentially crowned leader with 94 percent of delegate votes.

  Up in the broadcast booth at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, Lloyd Robertson asked me for an assessment of Martin’s acceptance speech. Amid the clamour of victory celebrations, I could not bring myself to rain on the parade and replied rather lamely that Martin had done what he had to do. In fact, I felt it was a speech devoid of any vision for the country. In his moment of triumph, Martin had offered nothing of substance that might reveal his convictions or values in government. Later we learned that the address was the work of a committee whose members couldn’t agree on its content. He had left this pivotal statement in the hands of others and the result was an inconclusive mess and a harbinger of worse to come.

  Chrétien took his leave earlier than he’d initially announced, giving the prime ministership to Martin on December 12. At the same time, Chrétien handed Martin a poisoned chalice. For some months Auditor General Sheila Fraser had been preparing a report on the sponsorship scandal; in February 2004, she released her findings that approximately one hundred million dollars in federal funds had been misspent, some of it ending up in the hands of Liberal supporters in Quebec. Chrétien’s supporters insist he was prepared to take the heat and make the report public before Martin took over. He would simply have handed it to the RCMP, who would have buried the story for at least a year. In the event, the report was scheduled to be made public two months into Martin’s watch, and many insiders claim that Martin’s brain trust deliberately chose the timing. They considered handing it to the Mounties too, but all the research showed that Canadians wanted to put Chrétien behind them, if not to punish him and his minions. Martin needed to be seen as the agent of change. The strategy was to lay all responsibility on the departed Chrétien, creating a sharp delineation between the two Liberal regimes.

  Martin then made the decision that ultimately doomed his government. His key advisers debated fiercely about whether or not to launch an inquiry. The most experienced of the Quebec MPs were set against it, as was the national director of the Liberal Party, Steve McKinnon. On the Friday before the Auditor General’s report was to be released, Martin seemed to have been swayed by their arguments. By Monday, however, he had changed his mind and the government went into damage control, announcing both a judicial and a parliamentary inquiry. Justice John Gomery would head the former, and his commission hearings in Montreal soon became the hottest ticket in town.

  Despite other measures designed to demonstrate swift and righteous retribution against the architects of the sponsorship program, including the firing of the presidents of the Business Development Bank, Via Rail, and Canada Post, the polls showed that in the minds of most Canadians, Liberals were Liberals. Martin’s government never did succeed in distancing itself from its predecessor on this issue.

  A wise observer of politicians and a friend of Paul Martin’s once told me he sensed in Martin an insecurity at the centre that made him easily manipulated by those who advised him. To me, it appeared that Martin had never been his own man entirely. Was he the creation of other people, a son who had captured the mantle that had eluded his illustrious father, or a respectable face for a group of ambitious policy wonks bent on their own purposes? Others less charitable saw Martin as an instrument of the giant Power Corporation of Montreal for which he once worked and that backed him politically all the way to 24 Sussex Drive. (Ironically, that company had backed Chrétien as well in his time. John Rae, a long-time political adviser to Chrétien, was also a senior executive with the firm. “Power,” as everyone calls it, came by its name honestly.)

  Once in the prime minister’s chair, Martin handed over considerable responsibility and influence to a crew that was dubbed the “Board,” a group that in other administrations might be known as the “kitchen cabinet.” Many of them had no official position in government; one was Michael Robinson, a long-time intimate of Martin’s and a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, then one of the most powerful lobbying firms in Ottawa.

  Lacking confidence in his own political instincts, Martin farmed out the necessary plotting and strategizing to this inner circle and in the process, some believe, he also relinquished his better judgment and principles. These dozen or so aides, pollsters, and assorted hangers-on prescribed the direction and recommended the decisions that guided the political agenda of the Martin government, but the need to settle old scores and punish old enemies forever influenced their counsel. They prolonged the hostilities within the party and the caucus.

  Those who held positions both as close advisers to the prime minister and employees of lobbying firms also drew attention. One deputy minister told me of his astonishment at finding himself answering to Martin aides who worked full-time as private-sector lobbyists. Naturally, bureaucrats were reluctant to discuss privileged government plans in front of individuals whose clients could potentially benefit from inside information. The relationship was so intimate that on a number of occasions when I called the PMO to ask for certain people, I was transferred directly to the reception desk at a prominent lobbying firm.

  Eventually the Gomery Commission exposed the dark underside of the Liberal Party in Quebec and cost Martin his popularity with Canadians. Martin called an election for June 2004, too late according to his critics, who believed he should have gone to the polls before the commission’s revelations provided the new Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, with the rope to hang him.

  The campaign was bruising, with Martin’s coterie desperate to hang on to the majority they’d inherited from the despised Chrétien, and Harper eager to make his mark in this election debut. Both leaders made extensive use of strategists, spin doctors, and consultants for whom this campaign was not just about policy and platforms but about their very jobs. Victory meant access to government contracts and saleable influence worth millions. Bad press coverage could endanger the financial futures of scores of the party faithful in both camps. Knowing that I would have to deal with whichever party formed the government, I was determined that our CTV coverage and my commentary be fair and above partisan reproach. No chance of that. The Liberals turned on me with a fury after the nationally televised leaders’ debate.

  I had been chosen as the leadoff questioner, and Martin had won the draw for the first question. I knew that the hotheads of Martin’s media operation would never forgive anything but a softball question, but I could not bring myself to throw an obviously easy lob. I asked Martin why anyone should believe that, as a finance minister from the
province of Quebec, he knew nothing about the payoffs and skulduggery among Liberals in his home province. He stammered out a weak reply and was on the defensive for the next two hours.

  In my post-debate on-air chat with Lloyd Robertson, I opined that Harper had won the night, and I should have left it at that. But I had been impressed with Harper and went on to say that perhaps Canadians should get used to the sound of “Prime Minister Harper.” A contact in the Liberal war room told me there were shouts of derision and obscenities at that suggestion, and many of my colleagues also roundly condemned me for the remark. Still, I was only one election away from being right.

  I knew I would have to pay for my outspokenness, and the consequences were not long in coming. At a campaign rally the next day, Martin greeted reporters with handshakes but had none for me. I received a baleful stare as he carefully grasped the hands of reporters to either side of me. For the balance of the campaign I was persona non grata with the Martin crowd. Old friends apologized for declining to have a drink with me in public. Every other reporter with a camera was granted a one-on-one interview with the prime minister, but Martin refused to appear on Question Period. As for the Harper Conservatives, they loved me for a brief time only. After I had savaged Harper for his ludicrous charge that Martin supported child pornography, the Conservatives too felt I had done them serious harm.

  The Liberals survived with a minority that June, but drifted badly over the next eighteen months. Martin became known as “Mr. Dithers” and was resoundingly rejected by the electorate in January 2006, losing to Stephen Harper.

  Out of office, Martin bears comparison to U.S. president Jimmy Carter as perhaps the best former leader we’ve ever had. In retirement he has proven the sincerity of his former government’s commitment to improved health and education for Aboriginal peoples by using his private wealth and his fundraising abilities to launch innovative programs. His twenty-first-century policies concerning cities, national daycare, and centres of excellence and research are, some maintain, sorely missed. These were important initiatives advanced by a good man who, everyone believed, possessed the intelligence, character, and experience to become one of the country’s outstanding leaders.

  Yet thousands of loyal Liberals sat out the 2006 election or voted for other parties. The Martinites left town blaming not themselves, but the media and the machinations of backroom plotters within their own party ranks. After the dust settled, one Chrétien strategist told me, “They thought they were better than us but they weren’t. We won.” My thought was that in destroying their party’s unity, both sides had consigned the Liberals to defeat for years to come. How many years remains to be decided.

  Political combat is high drama, if not pure entertainment, for reporters on Parliament Hill, but in those years we were frequently reminded that conflicts of a far more serious nature were affecting Canadians. Four significant foreign wars arose during Chrétien’s time in office: Kosovo, the first Gulf War, the war in Iraq, and finally Afghanistan. Canada was involved in three of them.

  The exception was Iraq, and I felt the whole country breathed a sigh of relief when Chrétien rose in the House of Commons on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003 and announced that Canada would not join the U.S.-built coalition against Saddam Hussein. His decision to reject President George Bush’s request for participation by Canadian troops in the disastrous invasion of Iraq was a bold assertion of our independence. The pressure exerted by the president was intense. Chrétien himself told me that when the two men had met shortly before the invasion at the opening of a new border crossing at Windsor, Bush had physically dragged him into a room alone and told him, “I must have Canada.” Chrétien replied, “If you don’t have the United Nations, you don’t have Canada.” I could forgive Chrétien a great deal for that gutsy act alone.

  A year earlier, I had been with my son, Murray, when news came of the first Canadian casualties in Afghanistan. Murray, then in his thirties, was living and working in Kampala, Uganda, as a reporter with The Monitor, the lone independent daily newspaper in that country. Their columnists and editors were regularly jailed for their opinions and stories. Murray was among the first to report on the invasion of the Congo by Ugandan, Rwandan, and other African forces from 1996 to 1997, which was designed in part to carve up pieces of that mineral-rich failed state. Three million died while the world barely noticed. Later Murray signed on as African correspondent for the CTV News Service, and the dreadful and the harrowing continued to be his beat.

  During a two-week visit in April 2002, Murray and I hiked for hours through the jungle on the Congo-Ugandan border to get within twenty feet of a family of gorillas. Looking one of the big males in the eye, I had the strange sensation of staring into the past at an ancient ancestor and could almost believe that in his level gaze was a similar sense of recognition. Our campsite was outfitted with a bathtub and BBC reception, and on April 18 I was stunned to hear a broadcast announcing the deaths of four Canadians and the wounding of eight others by American friendly fire near Kandahar. Four months before, I had covered the departure of those troops, watching the emotional scene as they marched out of CFB Petawawa’s drill hall and onto buses that would take them to their military flights from Trenton. Now four of them were dead, and Canadians could not imagine the losses that lay ahead.

  From that day, a younger generation of reporters, very few of whom had ever worn a uniform of any kind, found themselves doing work they likely never dreamed of in journalism school: covering a war. The daily news diet had changed for all of us after the events of 9/11, although until the deaths started mounting in Afghanistan, Canadian news people felt somehow immune. That changed when reporters started to accompany the Canadian forces outside the wire of the heavily defended base in Kandahar in the heart of Taliban territory.

  During the Second World War campaigns in Europe and later in Vietnam, correspondents were able to move around the countryside with acceptable risks, linking up with military units when and where they chose. London and Saigon were always available for rest and recuperation. There is no such space in Afghanistan. Roadside bombs are everywhere and anywhere, and to be captured by the enemy is to face near-certain death.

  In the early days of the war, many reporters—my son, Murray, and his cameraman, Tom Michaluk, among them— donned Afghan garb and ventured out of the compounds, without military minders, to chase their own stories. By then, Murray had worked in some of the most lawless areas of Africa, far more alien and dangerous terrain than any I had experienced in Central and Latin America, so he did not need any professional advice from me. He had developed well-tuned instincts regarding risk, and I was not overly worried about him.

  But as the Taliban’s presence grew in strength and deadliness, most correspondents were ordered by their bosses to stay behind the protection of the walled camp, while a few others simply refused to take chances for personal reasons, covering the conflict from the safety of a fortified bunker. One cannot fault them for their individual choices, often influenced by spouses back home.

  In fact, the only reasonable way to cover this war is to be embedded with the army, which means accepting the necessary compromises that effectively place a news organization and its reporters under military command. Reporters are, and should be, skeptical of authority and many find their dependency on the military uncomfortable to say the least. Doubtless, the military are likewise discomfited by the presence of the media in their midst.

  CTV reporter Lisa LaFlamme, who has since taken over the national anchor desk from Lloyd Robertson, made four trips to Afghanistan and spent months in the field with the troops. She found that once she had established a relationship of trust with the soldiers, they always told her the truth; in her view, it was a fair exchange for the limits imposed on her as an embedded journalist. Travelling with the soldiers on combat patrols, she allowed viewers to see what it was like to fight off scorpions along with enemy insurgents, sleep in gravel pits, and drive through mined areas; all taken togethe
r demanded psychological as well as physical courage. She describes her weeks buttoned up in an armoured car with ten men as the closest one can get to life inside a hockey bag.

  The risks are real: In August 2007, two CBC journalists, Patrice Roy and Charles Dubois, were badly injured when their armoured personnel carrier struck a roadside bomb. Dubois lost a leg. In December 2009, Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang became the first Canadian journalist to die in Afghanistan, when a similar device destroyed the vehicle that she and a party of Canadian troops were travelling in south of Kandahar. Four soldiers also lost their lives.

  Earlier that year, in March, CTV had lost an invaluable Afghan contact named Jojo Yazamy, who had arranged for everything from translation to transport to actual film footage in and around Kandahar City. Somehow operating between the Taliban and Western reporters, Jojo had seemed invulnerable, with his access to the powerful on both sides and his apparent ease as an all-purpose fixer. Eventually one side or the other concluded he was a spy or at least a threat, and he was assassinated in Kandahar City by a shooter who pulled up beside his car at a stop.

  For the record, in 2009 I tried to find my own way to experience this controversial and still-uncertain conflict. I had growing doubts that we could ever achieve our objectives there, even if the struggle were winnable from a military perspective or at a political cost acceptable to the Western nations involved. Counter-insurgency wars are more often lost on the home front than in the field.

  Since the war was the subject of many reports and commentaries I filed, I felt obliged to go and witness it for myself. I will confess too that the thought of being up close to a shooting war again got the old juices flowing. The network gently but firmly turned down this suggestion, my poor eyesight counting me out in their estimation. That was the only occasion on which disability put me on the sidelines.