Oliver's Twist (6 page)

Many of the early organizers of the CCF were still alive and as committed as ever in the late 1950s. I developed an enormous admiration for men like J.H. Brocklebank, a terrific orator who had spent many Saskatchewan winters travelling from one isolated farm to another carrying the message that democratic reform was possible through united interests. “Brock” travelled by horse-drawn sleigh and carried a tiny stove; many nights he had to huddle beside it in a makeshift shelter to wait out a
blizzard. He and others like him were principled and earnest, but they were never doctrinaire. They were ahead of their time in believing that government spending was necessary to achieve their aims, but not to the point of burdening taxpayers with onerous deficits. The CCF founders were not profligate spenders; they feared debt would make them the slaves of the big banks.

When I arrived in Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas had been the highly successful CCF premier of the province for fifteen years. His governments had pioneered the social safety net that became one of the defining features of Canadian nationhood. His impact on the nature of Canadian society was immense, not only through his social policies but also through the brilliant men whom he influenced. Among the gifted civil servants in the Saskatchewan government were Al Johnson and Tom Shoyama, both of whom went on to become senior mandarins in Ottawa. Under Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, they adapted the Douglas doctrine to national policy. In 1961, when Douglas moved to Ottawa as leader of the CCF's successor, the New Democratic Party, he made that doctrine more politically palatable on the hustings. It was Tommy Douglas, not Pearson, who created the modern welfare state that Canadians cherish. Pearson was only a willing instrument.

Tommy was never a firebrand or socialist hard-liner. Many times he had to oppose the far-left wing of his own party. At one provincial convention, he fought hard against a faction that was demanding Canada pull out of NATO. There is a lesson in his political success for a modern generation of New Democrats, and that is to broaden the base of support and never allow the party to become captive to special interests, whatever the cause.

Douglas was the most stirring public speaker I have ever heard. Trained as a Baptist minister, he used his rhetoric to inspire trust and confidence in his listeners. He had a rare ability to arouse emotions while at the same time conveying the intellectual and practical merits of his argument. Invariably, his remarks were leavened with a charming self-deprecating humour.

None of us ever called him anything but Tommy, and he always enjoyed good relations with reporters. It helped that he had an irresistible personality, a warm Scottish burr, and considerable media smarts. In the days before digital video was even dreamed of, the reels of film in our bulky cameras often ran out at inopportune moments. When we were to film one of his speeches, Douglas instructed us to signal him when we had to change film magazines. At that point, he lapsed into an anecdote until, at a wave from a reporter, he knew we were rolling again. He did this so seamlessly the audience did not notice and no important part of the message was lost to the camera.

As everyone knows, Douglas championed the greatest social policy reform in the nation's history. His campaigning for government-sponsored universal health care coverage in the 1960 provincial election pitted his party and his administration against most members of the medical profession in the province, the right-wing establishment across the country, and the formidable health industry of the United States whose proprietors knew very well what was at stake.

By 1962 the CCF government had introduced the necessary legislation, but before it had passed the doctors withdrew their services and the hospitals shut down. With the public in a near panic and tensions high, the government sought to break the strike by bringing in sympathetic physicians from elsewhere
in Canada and from the British National Health Service. The College of Physicians and Surgeons responded with fear tactics, questioning the competency of the imports and threatening that doctors would flee the province if the act went ahead.

Douglas could be passionate too, but he tried to defuse the general atmosphere of anger and hysteria. On one occasion he stood before an enormous outdoor crowd of pro-government supporters. Before the speech, a group of doctors had packed the front rows. They tried to blend in with the CCF crowd, but their well-pressed work shirts and new jeans were a dead giveaway. Just as Douglas began to speak, they let out an ear-splitting roar, followed by shouts, taunts, and booing. Douglas let the waves of protest flow over him. With perfect timing, he waited until they paused for breath, and then asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

The crisis attracted all the CBC News heavies from the East, even for a time the corporation's Washington correspondent, James M. Minifie, a famous internationalist who had lost an eye in the London Blitz. I was designated as an aide and temporary travel agent, getting the new arrivals around and helping with local connections. My youthful sensibilities were somewhat shaken when a Toronto television crew invited me to join a production meeting at their hotel. I found it hard to concentrate while the producer chaired the meeting from his place under the sheets, an apparently unclothed female script assistant asleep beside him. Everyone else carried on as if all were normal.

However vicious the health insurance fight, Douglas's proposed legislation was widely supported by the people. Saskatchewan's hardbitten grain farmers and their families believed in the value of co-operative action and government
intervention, designed as they saw it to protect the vulnerable and powerless. The doctors and the government eventually struck a compromise, and within a decade every Canadian citizen was protected by a national health insurance program, the scheme we cherish as medicare.

Those Saskatchewan years shaped my own world view and political philosophy. I saw that government can be a force for good, that the state must intervene to ensure economic fairness, and I learned from the example of Tommy Douglas that generosity and warmth trumps cold calculation and hard-heartedness every time. The experience led me to believe that state power exercised with restraint and judgment was preferable to rampant individualism.

No one fought universal health care more fiercely than Ross Thatcher, ironically a former CCFer who had become provincial Liberal leader just in time to contest the 1960 election campaign against Douglas. I came to believe that Thatcher was at times unbalanced. When he went into the out-of-session legislature one day at the height of the medicare crisis and tried to kick in the door of the chamber (repeated a few times for the cameras and shown around the world), I thought I was watching a man out of control.

After he became premier in 1964, local reporters, often under pressure from editors loyal to the Liberal Party, gave Thatcher a free ride. Tape recorders were not widely used then, and politicians could later deny their dumb remarks, leaving the reporter vulnerable. Journalists felt obliged to translate or at least soften some of Thatcher's more incendiary comments. Speaking to one group of reporters, he allowed that the trouble with natives was they were “breeding like fucking rabbits.” In newspaper accounts,
this became a sympathetic reflection on action to deal with an exploding Aboriginal population. More famously, he declared during a dispute with francophones in the province, “I am not going to let those goddamn frogs blackmail me.” Translation: The premier indicated the government was anticipating difficult negotiations. We all knew that if we quoted Thatcher directly, he would simply issue a denial. If it was the word of a reporter against that of the premier, the friendly provincial press barons knew where their interests lay.

Thatcher was ahead of his time in one regard: inventing the enemies' list long before Richard Nixon. Shortly after Thatcher had moved into the premier's office, he called me in for a chat. Out of his desk he pulled a sheet of paper and waved it in the air. “Here,” he said, handing it to me, “are names of all those goddamn socialists I intend to fire.” There were dozens of civil servants, including a number of the most capable deputy ministers of the day.

Covering the Saskatchewan legislature in those days had its share of drama, but also plenty of mischief. A fair number of socialist politicians, whose wives would never allow them to drink, regarded the illicit press gallery bar as a home away from home. Reporters played low-stakes poker every second Friday and were regularly cleaned out by a young Cabinet minister named Allan Blakeney, later to become an outstanding provincial premier. Whenever it became necessary to throw caution to the winds and ante up another nickel for the pot, Al discouraged timid gamblers by ordering, “all ribbon clerks out of the game.”

The parties that marked the end of the legislative sessions were always riotous—and usually all-male—affairs. The Douglas government had developed a well-oiled propaganda machine
that churned out copious press announcements. To demonstrate our independence, we journalists piled a stack of press releases on the marble gallery floor and set them on fire. The blaze was then extinguished through the simple expedient of reporters urinating on it.

Saskatchewan had curious news priorities all its own, as I learned one quiet lunch hour at the office in November 1963. I received a call from an obviously distraught woman. Was it true, she wanted to know, that President John F. Kennedy had been shot? I assured her this was not the case and she was immensely relieved. I pointed out that had anything of such earth-shaking import occurred, I, the local representative of the vast CBC News organization, would know about it. Having satisfied her, I decided to check the wires anyway. In the teletype room, the bells were ringing wildly. There it was in one terse line: “Dallas … the President has been shot.”

I rushed to the control room and told the producer we must interrupt the daily farm broadcast with a bulletin. I admit I was eager to read it. He looked at me like I was mad. “Not a chance,” he declared. “Farmers need to know stock and grain quotes and nothing can stop the daily agricultural market reports.” In the studio, the farm reporter continued his tedious recitation of the prices of common-to-medium cows on the Winnipeg Exchange until finally the network broke in from Toronto with a special on the Kennedy assassination.

The shift to the Outside Broadcasts Department opened the door to occasional television opportunities. Whenever an eastern-based unit came to town, they did not miss the chance to exploit my contacts, and occasionally I was asked to do interviews with the individuals selected to appear on-camera. After a
time, I was teased for having the most recognizable back of the head on the Prairies. No matter, I was working with top writers, directors, and crews and learning the ropes.

The country had a chance to see my better side during federal election night in 1962, when the television news department pulled me in to cover Tommy Douglas. As leader of the NDP, he was seeking election to Parliament in a Regina constituency, and his supporters were so certain of the outcome, they had mounted a huge sign at the Saskatchewan Hotel identifying his headquarters there as the Victory Ballroom. The news department thinkers in Toronto were likewise confident of a Douglas win and assigned an inexperienced kid to report the predictable outcome.

I had never worked so hard to prepare as I did that night. As I came to know the players and the constituency, I began to sniff out evidence of a massive campaign against Tommy by an alliance of business figures and medical professionals. They could not defeat medicare, but they could defeat the man who fathered it. The nation was stunned when the capital city of Saskatchewan rejected its popular former premier, but I was ready with the backstory and delivered it to a national television audience.

In 1965, the network brass singled me out again to appear on the network's national election night broadcast covering John Diefenbaker. Dief had set himself up in his private railway car, parked in the station siding in Prince Albert. By then I knew the Chief pretty well and accepted that he had little use for the national press, much preferring the local media, which in his mind included me. I had interviewed him many times. On the first occasion I recall asking him nervously for his opinion on how the Liberals were running the country. “Young man,” he
scolded me with mock impatience, “you must learn to spell. The Liberals are
ruining
the country, not
running
it.”

The election was on my birthday, November 8, which one of Dief's aides drew to his attention. I was outside on the station platform with the television crew when Dief invited me in for a drink. He was famous for such small courtesies toward his staff and others he liked. As any reporter would, I inquired how he thought the night would go. To my astonishment he replied, “I think we may lose the night.” This was news, but I was sure he believed the conversation was off the record. To assuage my conscience on the matter, I went on television and announced that senior aides to the Opposition leader believed they were about to lose the election to the Liberals. That sent reporters on the train scurrying down to his car, demanding the names of the loose-lipped aides. Dief killed the story, stating that no staff member of his had ever said such a thing, which was literally true. Nonetheless, Dief was correct and his party was defeated that night.

Diefenbaker was a wonderful storyteller, with a laugh that dissolved into a maniacal cackle, but he was also a puzzle to his contemporaries. I discovered one clue to his nature when I interviewed the man who was his first law partner in the village of Wakaw, Saskatchewan. The fellow described Dief as “an old bullshitter,” a successful defence lawyer who owed his triumphs to an ability to act. I came to believe that was both his strength and his weakness as a politician. In Opposition, where he could thunder in the Commons and on the stump against the sins of the Liberals, he was unsurpassed. But as a prime minister, confronted with the challenge of holding a caucus and a country together while implementing policies and solving problems, he found that acting was not enough.