Oliver's Twist (36 page)

It was inevitable that the
Question Period
team would deal with the communications staff in the Prime Minister's Office on an almost daily basis, yet it seemed my earlier suggestions regarding the importance of respectful relations between the national press corps and political leaders did not go far with Stephen Harper. In the wake of Caroline Stewart Olsen's departure, Harper appointed Sandra Buckler to the more senior position of director of communications. I had never heard of Buckler, but I expected the usual healthy editorial tug-of-war between the chief press aide and our producers, and I was pleased to see a woman finally atop the PMO's communications ladder.

Unfortunately, my first meeting with Buckler did not go well. She kept me cooling my heels for an hour at a local restaurant, and when she arrived she explained that she was very busy, suggesting her time was more important than mine. In the brief conversation we had before she rushed off to her next meeting, it became apparent that she had no experience in serious journalism or in the news business at all. Advertising was her
professional milieu, and that explained her approach. Buckler regarded news about the prime minister and the government as a property that she alone owned and had a right to manage as she saw fit. There was no evidence that she acknowledged as part of her job an obligation to be open and transparent with reporters, and through them with Canadians, about what the government was doing. Harper had endlessly promised just such transparency when he was in Opposition and on the hustings.

For her first act, Buckler put herself at the apex of the tightly knit structure, dubbed the “Centre,” which directed and controlled communications for every government department. The efforts by
Question Period
's staff to deal directly with press officers for individual ministers or those who represented individual departments were rebuffed or referred to Buckler's office. Not only was she supreme commander of all government information, she was the self-appointed mistress of all political messaging. I soon became aware that senior bureaucrats and even Cabinet ministers feared speaking without Buckler's approval or coaching. Monte Solberg, a confident and adept minister who had become a friend during his years in Opposition, suddenly would not return calls or agree to interviews. When we met by chance in the halls of Parliament, he would mumble something about the Centre, and then rush off in obvious embarrassment. One of Harper's liveliest ministers, Jason Kenney, told me candidly, “The communications director for the prime minister does not believe in communicating.”

Before long the bureaus had received the new ground rules. Buckler decreed that Cabinet ministers should not appear in face-to-face encounters with their Opposition critics. At press conferences with the prime minister, the press officer in
attendance would decide who among the press corps would be allowed to ask questions. Harper would answer no question from a reporter who had not first been recognized by the officer. Clearly this was a practice designed to favour reporters with easy or planted questions over those with less friendly or more challenging lines of inquiry, and a number of reporters boycotted the PM's events rather than be subject to such rules of engagement. Eventually a compromise was reached, but it left a bad taste.

In the early months of the government's first mandate,
Question Period
made repeated requests to the Centre for on-air interviews with Cabinet ministers, but with limited success. On occasion a department might agree to produce a minister for us, only to call back shamefacedly to say that for one reason or another, the minister was suddenly unavailable. Buckler's strategy was obvious: If we were able to book only Opposition MPs on a particular issue, she assumed our professional desire for fair and balanced coverage would not allow us to pursue it in the absence of a spokesperson for the government side.

Jane Taber and I and our producers refused to play that game. When the unrepresented government came off second-best, Buckler had no choice but to relent and allow the occasional minister to appear on the show. Invariably they were reliable stalwarts such as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty or Jim Prentice and John Baird, whatever their ministries at the time. Most others were off limits, and when they did come, Buckler wanted questions submitted in advance and an agreement that only those questions would be asked. We would not make that commitment. My first serious run-in with Buckler came when I speculated on air that if Harper could not trust his own
ministers to get out front and explain government policy, why should members of the public trust them?

Conservative backbenchers were forbidden to appear under any circumstances, even though it seemed to many of us that there was more talent in the ranks than on the government's front benches. A number of intelligent and appealing figures had not made it to Cabinet and they smarted under the media restrictions. Without exposure for local MPs, their constituents quite rightly wondered what had become of the representatives they'd sent to Ottawa.

Buckler gradually loosened up a little, but that did not end the hostilities. Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was finally allowed to appear on the show, but she was obviously ill prepared to handle tough questions about the government's discredited environmental policy. I pressed her hard, and she was not up to the contest. Buckler exploded, accusing me of harassing an attractive young woman in a hostile and unprofessional manner. Not long after, however, the prime minister pulled Ambrose from the environment post.

I knew the relationship between Buckler and me was beyond recovery when she began to send complaints about my allegedly disrespectful style, first to me and then to bureau chief Robert Fife and to Robert Hurst. But by then I had established a healthy rapport with a number of ministers, among them Jim Flaherty, Peter MacKay, and House Leader Jay Hill, all of whom were bold enough to make their own decisions. They were delighted to tangle with the media and gave as good as they got in almost every round. Buckler's emails were dutifully passed up the line to Toronto, but
Question Period
received no directives one way or the other.

We were nothing if not persistent in our insistence on ministerial accountability. When a serious economic story arose a few months later, we asked for Finance Minister Flaherty. Instead we were told Secretary of State Kenney would fill the slot. Furthermore, Buckler would determine the ministers who were to appear on any given Sunday in future, as she would the topic on which they were to be interviewed. This attempt to dictate the content and lineup of our program took PMO imperiousness to new heights, and I rejected Kenney as being irrelevant to the issue. The following Sunday, the Opposition MPs predictably savaged the government, and I announced that the government had refused to provide us with an appropriate minister.

Buckler responded at once with an email to Hurst: “If you insist on preventing the government's spokespeople from appearing on your show based on your own criteria, which I absolutely do not agree with, I would respectfully request that you be honest and say that you rejected the designated spokesperson put forward by the government.” She went on to say that I had misled viewers on the matter of government spokespersons and asked that my comments be corrected in any repeat broadcast of the show. Instead, I went on air and detailed her efforts to control and intimidate us. I explained that this was an issue of who was producing CTV television news programs: the network's reporters and producers or the Prime Minister's Office?

I never heard from Buckler again, but a few days later she announced her resignation. After trying out a few unfortunate replacements, Harper appointed a young Montrealer, Dimitri Soudas, who put the government's press relations on a professional footing.

In January 2005, three Liberal überactivists—lawyers Dan Brock and Alf Apps, along with television producer Ian Davey, son of Keith Davey, the party's famous rainmaker—made a pilgrimage to Boston in search of a messiah. Their objective was to persuade Michael Ignatieff to return home and run for Parliament. They made their pitch over a dinner that lasted until midnight, and when it ended Ignatieff was intrigued but unconvinced. He knew, and so did they, that he was ill acquainted with the country's political terrain after more than three decades abroad.

The three succeeded in winning Ignatieff's agreement to a coming out of sorts as the keynote speaker at the national Liberal Party convention in Ottawa in March of that year, an event that was expected to be a routine affair with few fireworks. Ignatieff was not familiar to most Canadians, but he had enormous credibility with the chattering classes: son of a respected Canadian diplomat, George Ignatieff; nephew of a nationalist icon, philosopher George Grant; award-winning author and broadcaster; and esteemed intellectual. The comparisons to Trudeau were immediate and irresistible. In the event, Ignatieff's speech stole Paul Martin's convention thunder, the neophyte upstaging the prime minister.

Ignatieff's supporters expected him to contest a seat in the next election, spend the requisite time in Cabinet while he built a national reputation, and then run for the leadership when an older Martin stepped down. (Shades of Trudeau and Lester Pearson.) They did not expect Martin's government to collapse in 2006, leaving Ignatieff with his seat in Parliament but contending for the party's leadership well before he was ready for it.

During Ignatieff's inaugural interview on
Question Period
, I decided to make him earn his airtime as a way of judging his temperament. I knew viewers wanted to hear him answer questions about how he could entertain prime ministerial ambitions after three decades of avoiding his country. The comparisons to Trudeau seemed wrong to me, since Trudeau had fought against corruption and separatism in Quebec for years before Pearson recruited him to national politics. I believe I used the word
dilettante
. It was an ambush, plain and simple, but Ignatieff parried every thrust with a cool and cocky demeanour, even inquiring at one point whether someone might have slipped something into my breakfast cereal.

Later, at lunch, I had a chance to make a personal connection with the man. He was open and engaging, not the least annoyed by the rough ride I had given him on television or my recent critical commentaries. As so often happens, it was an odd coincidence that shifted the discussion away from dry policy talk. Ignatieff's wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, was contending with vision loss after a botched eye surgery in London. Her condition was serious enough that Ignatieff sometimes read to her at night. She had so far not found a specialist in Canada, and I insisted she see my own doctor at the Eye Institute in Ottawa, an institution at the forefront of Canadian research and surgical practice. She agreed but would not allow herself to go to the head of the line, waiting four months for treatment even though I felt it was unwise to delay.

After our initial encounters, I concluded that Ignatieff was a man with brains and presence but still uncertain of what he stood for. This policy mushiness could be dangerous. Politics is no different than any other job, with success demanding years of
training and experience. Despite his obvious talents, I wondered if he had the time to acquire the necessary skills.

At that stage, Ignatieff's only obvious rival for the party's leadership was a man whose apprenticeship was far behind him. Bob Rae is fond of reminding me that I was the first person who took him for lunch when he arrived in Ottawa as an NDP Member of Parliament in 1978, trailing a reputation for intellectual brilliance. He later switched to provincial politics and in 1990 became Ontario's first NDP premier. After six tumultuous years at Queen's Park, Rae left the field for a decade, returning as a federal MP in 2008, this time as a member of the Liberal caucus.

Rae had justifiable ambitions to the party's leadership and the Prime Minister's Office, and he had not been pleased when Ignatieff announced at a social dinner with the Raes that he intended to jump into national politics. Rae did not welcome his old friend to the inevitable competition for the party's top job. The announcement marked the beginning of the end of a friendship that dated to their student days at the University of Toronto, a loss both would regret.

Lloyd Robertson and I were in the broadcast booth in Montreal in December 2006 when the Liberals gathered to choose Paul Martin's heir, the individual whose job it would be to bring down the Harper Conservatives and restore the Liberals to their accustomed position in power. To almost everyone's astonishment, the victory went to Stéphane Dion on the fourth ballot, with Ignatieff running second by fewer than two hundred votes. Rae bowed out after the third ballot and released his delegates, but would not declare in favour of any of the others. He might have handed the prize to his old friend then and there, had it not been for his pride.

Former Chrétien Cabinet minister Brian Tobin was high above the convention floor with Lloyd and me and noted that half the delegates below were sitting on their hands, refusing to applaud, when the winner, Dion, took to the stage. By the time the convention had ended, the party was suffering from a profound case of buyers' remorse. Everyone knew that the next leadership campaign was already under way.