Oliver's Twist (34 page)

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 together 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.

10

SPARRING
WITH
HARPER

Whether the assignment is city hall or Parliament Hill, it's critical for a reporter to know the key players, and that means keeping ahead of the casualties by spotting the comers who will one day take centre stage. It was obvious to me in 1993 that Stephen Harper, a newly elected Reform MP from Calgary, was a cut above the rest, good-looking, smart, and—unusually for someone representing a Western constituency—bilingual. He was an intensely private person, a trait he shared with Pierre Trudeau. He was also seriously intelligent, but he lacked Trudeau's charm and ability to project personal warmth. He was not a backslapping, hand-grabbing, press-the-flesh politician; in fact, he was stiff and awkward in social situations. Even informal photos caught him ramrod straight, barely tolerant of physical contact beyond the obligatory handshake. Nonetheless, while Preston Manning could be more congenial, he would never win the Prime Minister's Office for his party. It seemed to me that Stephen Harper might.

Shortly after Harper had lost the 2004 election, his first as leader of the Conservative Party, a mutual friend asked if I
would meet with Harper to try to persuade him to be more open and approachable with the media. I agreed, hoping that a frank conversation might serve reporters on the Hill generally, as well as those in my own bureau. Such one-on-one sit-downs were not uncommon in my experience, especially with Opposition leaders. These informal and usually private encounters offered an opportunity to suss out the essential character of the individual, free of the protective wrapping usually held in place by the image-makers.

Harper and I met alone at his office and had a conversation that was remarkable for its candour. He did not disguise his distrust of reporters, citing a long history of Parliament Hill journalists leaving the press gallery to work for the Liberal Party. I raised the fact that many in the press gallery and in his own caucus were unhappy with the performance of Caroline Stewart Olsen, Harper's press assistant. Although she was a creditable woman, she had no training for the position and clearly did not like reporters. (Harper later appointed her to the Senate.)