Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
There was never a truly golden age of the press in Ottawa, some lyrical time when reporters frolicked freely and happily in fresh-mown fields of useful and timely information. Prime ministers and their staff always played favourites and held grudges. Reporters, who should be, and who claim to be, the public’s eyes on Parliament Hill, have always been outsiders in the political system. But things are much worse now. Instead of being watchdogs, most of the reporters on Parliament Hill are ciphers, unable to do much more than get reaction to issues that are, for the most part, manufactured by political parties for their own benefit.
Many reporters did try to build bridges to the Liberals during the long decades when Conservative governments were rare and brief. The “natural governing party”—one of the most enduring and successful political machines in the world—and Ottawa media leaders had similar views on Canadian nationalism, economics, federalism and official languages. Through the twentieth century, most reporters, like the people they covered in politics and the bureaucracy, were university-educated first- or second-generation English men from Eastern Canada. They strove to be important actors on Parliament Hill. (The determination to be seen as part of the inner circle may be responsible for the almost comical number of reporters wearing bow ties in the 1960 press gallery “class picture.” Lester B. Pearson’s influence was obviously sartorial as well as ideological.)
Pierre Trudeau had contempt for the press, even though most Hill journalists fawned over him in the early years of his regime. Brian Mulroney tried to prosecute Global TV reporter Doug Small in 1989 for his scoop on a budget leak. The case was thrown out years later. (The judge called Small’s work “exemplary,” but Small’s career on the Hill was dead.) As soon as Jean Chrétien, who was pretty much incoherent in either official language, took office, he had reporters banned from the government and opposition lobbies behind the benches of the House of Commons. There was very little squawk about that, even though Canadian reporters had had access to them for more than 130 years, and lobby journalists—columnists who write serious analysis—are still key reporters in the United Kingdom.1 Chrétien also tried to have CBC reporter Terry Milewski fired for his dogged coverage of “peppergate,” the police attack on protesters during the 1997 Asia-Pacific summit in Vancouver. Yet most of the media bought the “Liddle Guy” shtick.
In the early 1990s, newly elected Reform Party members were treated like hicks by the media. The satirical magazine Frank used the naïveté and talkativeness of several Western rural MPs to set them up for pranks that were sometimes quite cruel. In one, Reform MPs were conned into believing the Chrétien government was giving free Zambonis to tropical African nations (the article was called “Zambonis up the Zambezi”). Reform MPs proved to be easy marks when a Frank reporter told them the book Black Beauty was being banned as porn.
Hill reporters jumped on Reform Party leader Preston Manning’s change of hairstyle and clothing makeover. They, quite rightly, reminded him of a pledge that he had made never to live in Stornoway, the mansion that’s the official residence of the leader of the Opposition, and chided him when he moved into the house in 1997.2
Then came Stockwell Day, whose brawls with the press gallery usually ended in tears and frustration for the Reform Party. Day and his staff and the media were at each other’s throats from the time Day won the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, the party that was crafted from the old Reform movement to unite the political right. Reporters mocked him for holding a press conference on a Jet Ski, gave Day a hard time for the way he handled his Parliament Hill news conferences, and were not kind in the 2000 election, pointing out the many gaffes during Day’s leader’s tour.
Among the party’s executives, organizers and supporters, the bitterness remained, even after Stephen Harper took over. And it was reinforced by a steady message from U.S. right-wing talk radio, newspapers and Fox News that the big TV networks, important metropolitan newspapers and Hollywood were determined not to give conservatives—especially those who, like Day, were religious and social traditionalists—a fair shake.
Day had let his caucus talk. Stephen Harper would not. In 2004, while still leader of the Opposition, Harper demanded all of his MPs let him vet any speeches they made about same-sex marriage after Jason Kenney, one of the party’s stars, told Punjabi-media reporters that he believed gay and lesbian people should get married, as long as it was to people of the opposite gender, and then for the purpose of having children. Some of the old Reformers weren’t happy with the new rules, which they saw as a break from the party tradition. But this was no longer the Reform Party, it was Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.3
Every Conservative leader since R.B. Bennett had faced caucus revolts, and most had succumbed to them. In an undisciplined caucus of Reform MPs who had been elected as populist spokespeople for their predominantly Western, rural constituents, it was easy for reporters to get one policy position from Harper, then find a few backbenchers willing to shoot their mouths off without checking with the leader’s office. It had been that way for more than a decade; the party had taken a lot of hits under the leadership of Preston Manning and Stockwell Day, and Harper was determined to stop it from happening. Harper and his senior staff had read Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson’s Discipline of Power (1996) and were resolved to make sure that only smart, presentable people who were clearly loyal and who understood Harper’s message spoke to the media. Everyone else would just have to be quiet.
STEPHEN HARPER had never been close to the media, even though he did appear on some news network panels during his years in the political wilderness in the late 1990s. Once he was elected party leader, he still kept his distance, although he did show up to a press gallery dinner, where his humorous speech went over well, and at a Christmas party for kids of press members, held on a Saturday in one of the Parliament Building’s big committee rooms. Before the 2006 campaign, Harper was somewhat popular with Hill reporters, though most didn’t think he had a chance of winning.
But he had some personal reasons to loathe journalists. When Harper went to the 2005 Calgary Stampede, a photographer got an absurd shot of him looking very uncomfortable dressed in a goofy cowboy getup of jeans, hat and a bizarre leather-like vest. The picture has haunted him ever since. Another shot, taken in a summer Parliament Hill press conference, showed Harper’s man-boobs through his tee-shirt. (This shot, unlike the Stampede getup, has disappeared from media and public memory, but at the time it generated a lot of hurtful comments about Harper’s weight.)
Since the beginning of his mandate, some members of the media—especially journalists working outside of Ottawa—have been among the people who have spread an almost unkillable false rumour that the Harper marriage is in trouble. From time to time, there have been oblique media allusions to the myth. Andrew Coyne hinted about it in an Ottawa Citizen column, while Norman Spector, a former Brian Mulroney chief of staff, came out with inaccurate details in a column published, and quickly retracted by, The Globe and Mail, which had only carried the piece on its website. The paper replaced the blog post with: “Editor’s Note: We have removed the text of an original posting on this blog as it fell short of The Globe and Mail’s editorial standards with respect to fairness, balance and accuracy.” It’s hard to know how much, if at all, the rumour has personally hurt Harper, but the short author biography on his 2013 hockey book, A Great Game, says the prime minister “is happily married to Laureen.”4
His former strategist Tom Flanagan told the Hill Times newspaper that Harper’s hatred of the press was fixed in stone when the then Opposition leader was hammered in a news conference over an outrageous news release from the Conservative campaign that very strongly suggested Paul Martin tolerated, and maybe even supported, child pornography. On its live broadcast of the scrum, CBC Newsworld showed newspaper reporters huddled together, sharing a voice recording of the Conservative leader’s reaction to the uproar. To Harper, Flanagan said, the reporters looked like hungry sharks or wolves. “There’s no question, just as a historical comment, that that episode, the child-porn fiasco, represented a turning point for Harper,” Flanagan said.5
Harper not only dislikes those he sees as liberal journalists, he also has no use for some conservative commentators like Terence Corcoran of the Financial Post and Lorne Gunter of the National Post (and, later, the Sun chain).6 Harper drew his inspiration from what might seem to be a strange source, writes Gerry Nicholls, who worked for Harper at the National Citizens Coalition during Harper’s hiatus from party politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “For Stephen it was all about control. He didn’t trust the media to get our message out. And he believed it was a mistake to get too friendly with the press. As he once explained to me, the secret to dealing with the Ottawa press corps was to copy Pierre Trudeau’s approach. ‘Trudeau,’ he said, ‘treated reporters with contempt and yet they worshipped him.’”7
Tom Flanagan, when he was still in Harper’s good books, said Harper’s ingrained craving for control fit with the demands of forging a new party that could be taken seriously as a government-in-waiting. “He doesn’t repose trust very easily. He’s always got his antennae up. His first reaction to anything new is almost always negative. It’s a personality trait,” Flanagan told author Lawrence Martin. Flanagan says Harper sometimes leaves important details to subordinates, but messaging is always controlled by Harper. “That’s where he has taken measures of centralization to new levels.”8
When Harper became prime minister, the hammer came down. His government would engage in campaigns of information suppression—censorship at source—and propaganda. He would do everything but ignore the media. While Harper’s apologists tried to say the media was no longer important and Harper didn’t care about journalists and what they thought, the Canadian treasury was paying about 3,800 communications staffers in ministers’ offices and federal departments, including 100 in the Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office.9 Those people went to work gagging anyone under Harper’s control and reshaping the way Canadians see both their country and its government.
Any MP, public servant, diplomat or military officer who wants to say anything to the media has to fill out a Message Event Proposal (MEP) and submit it to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office. The form has headings including Desired Headline, Strategic Objective, and Desired Sound Bite. It asks applicants to describe the backdrop of the event and the type of photograph that the speaker hopes will be taken by the media. It even asks about the speaker’s wardrobe. These MEPs sometimes take weeks to process, being the subject of meetings and memos, bounced around between political staffers and senior bureaucrats and sent back to the would-be speaker for revisions. The control isn’t just over policy talk. TV reporters who want shots of national parks and historic sites like the Norman Bethune House in Gravenhurst, north of Toronto, are held at bay by staffers until approval comes from the Centre. Ministers’ statements and press releases, no matter how seemingly innocuous and banal, get the full MEP treatment. And approval is not guaranteed. When a Parks Canada official wanted to write a press release about the mating habits of black bears, his MEP was turned down. And Canada’s financial literacy commissioner won’t talk to reporters about financial literacy for kids.10
In the winter of 2014, I agreed to write a piece on young people and financial literacy for a trade magazine for credit union managers and executives. Canadian consumers are loaded with unsustainable consumer debt and mortgages. Our big personal debt load scares the hell out of the federal government, to the point that the late finance minister, Jim Flaherty, used to issue warnings, as does the Bank of Canada. Most Canadians don’t spend nearly enough time learning how to handle money. More than half of Canadians don’t budget at all, and younger people are the least likely to do any financial planning. It’s rare for people to have anywhere near the savings they need for retirement. And, during the 2008 financial meltdown, many Canadians made some pretty poor choices. So after the crash, the Harper government wisely decided to create a committee to learn if Canadians had a clue about money. The results of its study were so shocking that the government hired a national financial literacy commissioner, Lucie Tedesco. You may not have heard of her. Few have. But I wanted to talk to her about financial literacy education for kids for my credit union magazine story. It seemed reasonable to assume that talking to the public about that sort of thing is part of her job. So I sent an email to her office.
Instead of a phone call from the financial literacy commissioner, I got an email from her media handler, who wanted to know about the magazine I was writing for. She wanted a list of the questions I would ask Tedesco. “I would like to talk to her about financial literacy for young people,” I replied. Back came the flack’s answer: “As the principal spokesperson for the Agency, I would be available for this interview.” I replied that I preferred to talk to the financial literacy commissioner, who is, after all, the commissioner of financial literacy, and therefore the go-to person on, say, financial literacy education for young people.
So I wrote back: “Sorry, no. Canada has a financial literacy officer. Will she talk about financial literacy for children? If she will, I will be happy to interview her. If not, I will tell the credit union executives of Canada that Canada’s financial literacy commissioner will not speak publicly about teaching financial literacy to children.”
I did not hear from the flack again. But the editor’s boss did. Someone in the office of the commissioner approached the executives in charge of the magazine to have me yanked from the assignment for pushing too hard to have Canada’s financial literacy commissioner talk on the record about the best ways to educate kids on financial literacy. The piece ran without any quotes or material from Canada’s financial literacy commissioner. It was just another day in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa.
THE RULES OF THIS GAME weren’t developed in Canada. The stifling of the media is a worldwide problem. Partly, it’s the result of the idea that governments should be run like businesses. To become more “corporate,” governments and politicians have turned to media consultants who give them the same advice that corporations get: stay on message, use photo ops, circle the wagons when there’s trouble. But governments aren’t private companies (at least not yet). They belong to the people, and they exist to serve the public, not make money or build political careers. And it is worse in the United States under the Democrats than it was under George W. Bush. In Washington, photographers have been shut out of many White House activities. Reporters have to clear their questions in advance and feel the president does everything he can to circumvent them. And this is in the White House in a time of hope and change.11
In fact, the situation in the United States and the United Kingdom is so bad that Canada sometimes actually looks good. As yet (as far as we know), our government hasn’t turned its spy agencies and tax collectors on journalists (unless you count Revenue Canada’s audit of the writers’ protection group PEN), nor has it thrown any into jail, except for a freelance columnist detained during the G20 police riot in Toronto. When Reporters Without Borders released its annual press freedom report at the beginning of 2014, Canada had actually moved up two spots. It was a hollow victory, though. The previous year, Canada dropped ten points—from 10th to 20th. Still, we were miles ahead of the United States, which fell from 32nd to 46th. The top ten was dominated by central Europe, although New Zealand also made it into the top tier. Finland had the world’s freest press, followed by the Netherlands and Norway. (North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan were the worst, with no press freedom at all.) “Since 9/11, the [U.S.] has been torn by the conflict between national security imperatives and respect for the principles of the First Amendment,” Reporters Without Borders explained.12 Probably that was generous. The 9/11 attacks were a great excuse for politicians and security agencies to do what they’ve always wanted to do.
In her 2007 master’s thesis, Calgary television journalist Lynn Raineault explored Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ongoing battles with the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Raineault found most of the Conservatives she interviewed believed Harper was his own worst enemy when it came to getting favourable media coverage. Two factors came up. The high-profile Tories interviewed by Raineault cited Harper’s ingrained belief that journalists in the press gallery are ideologically opposed to all conservative governments. Harper’s introverted, stubborn, impatient and controlling personality was the second factor supposedly behind the prime minister’s decision to alienate and humiliate the media.
Raineault conducted interviews with seven prominent conservatives, including Reform Party founder Preston Manning and lobbyist Geoff Norquay, who had been a director of communications for Harper before Harper became prime minister. Raineault was told by almost all of them that Harper sabotaged his own party by waging war with the media. Manning said Harper is a man who never forgets a perceived slight.
While Harper saw the press gallery that way, almost all the conservatives interviewed by Raineault believed the press gallery skewed toward the left, but journalists still tried to at least appear to give conservatives a fair shake. Even that was a bit paranoid. In his early years in power, Harper faced a press gallery representing the conservative Canwest chain (Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun and Province), the conservative CTV and Global TV networks, and the right-wing Sun chain—which has dozens of small-city and community papers, along with its tabloids. Print was dominated by the centrist Globe and Mail, which almost always endorsed conservatives and had pummelled Jean Chrétien over the sponsorship scandal and his real estate dealings. The liberal Toronto Star did run plenty of “hidden agenda” stories, but it really was an ideological outlier in the newspaper business. And, when Harper was in opposition, he was able to profit from the fact that criticism makes good copy.
Tom Flanagan, who has spent far less time in Ottawa than Harper, described the bulk of the press gallery as primarily motivated by career ambitions and by groupthink. That’s a fairly accurate assessment. Flanagan also told Raineault that Harper’s “strong, silent-type approach” can’t work when there’s a need for someone to explain the government’s policies on complicated issues.13
Alberta journalist Don Martin, in late November 2006, in the conservative Calgary Herald, wrote:
The Prime Minister was raised in a Calgary where his party leaders were routinely ground into sausage meat by Ottawa journalists. His DNA is linked to a special chromosome reserved for hating media and he is convinced that any Ottawa communications strategy—be it to babble constantly or stay silent aloof—will generate uniformly negative coverage … He will not allow himself to be comically defined like previous prime ministers, who lost their luggage, got disoriented in Jerusalem or slipped on an army helmet backwards.14
Tory Senator Marjory LeBreton, who was appointed to the upper chamber by Brian Mulroney, summed the Tories’ attitude up quite succinctly: “I am a Conservative and I know more than most that around this town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles, tut-tutting about our government and yearning for the good old days that we are never given the benefit of the doubt and are rarely given credit for all the good work that we do.”15
Of course, by “media,” Harper’s spokespeople often mean the CBC. Yet Harper and the CBC have a strange relationship. No one in his government complains when Sun News Network and its winged monkeys in the right-wing blogosphere describe the CBC as the “state broadcaster.” Yet, until it lost the revenues of Hockey Night in Canada to Rogers in negotiations near the end of 2013, the network came through the media firestorm reasonably unscathed. Andrew Coyne argues the Tories actually need the CBC. Why, he asked in the spring of 2014, haven’t the Tories privatized it, shut it down or carved it up? He wrote:
That is what a real conservative government would have done. But as this is not a real conservative government, it has instead simply left the CBC as it is, adrift, purposeless, yet still consuming $1-billion of scarce public funds every year. It does so, for all its pretensions of concern for the taxpayer, because the CBC is more useful to it in its present state: not as a problem to be fixed, but as a platform on which to raise funds, a scapegoat for the party’s failures, a diversion for the base’s wrath.16
Harper’s team has never gone after the CBC for far overstepping its mandate by, effectively, running the country’s largest online newspaper, one that seriously undermines the ability of newspapers to make money from paywalls. In fact, the CBC has been able to create the publicly funded national newspaper that Tom Kent recommended in his 1981 Royal Commission on Newspapers, but that almost all people ignored at the time because it was believed to be both expensive and rather scary in the hands of a corporation that might someday fit the real description of “state broadcaster.”
Ezra Levant, a former communications director for Stockwell Day when he was opposition leader, and now a Sun News Network host, was delighted by what he described as Harper’s “marginalization” of the press gallery.17 Levant wanted to use that tactic to get rid of other watchdogs, starting by “denormalizing” the country’s human rights commissions. It was a strategy that would be embraced by the Harper government for most of its information control.
BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER, quite simple reason why Harper picked a fight with the Hill media. Supposedly, Harper is a populist. And populists fight elites. Kate Heartfield, editorial page editor of the Ottawa Citizen, a paper that has endorsed Harper in all of his election campaigns, thinks many Conservatives bash the media as part of an elaborate show that is performed for the Tory base, the westerners and rural Ontarians who voted for Reform.
“People cloaking themselves as populists need elites to attack, and conservative populists can’t attack the rich and powerful, because some of them are rich and powerful. So we journalists become ‘elites,’” Heartfield, hardly anyone’s idea of a lefty, wrote.
And then the Conservatives tie themselves in knots to show us how much they don’t care about us. They pen reporters at their party convention and yell at them when they walk in the wrong places. They pay, with taxpayers’ money, armies of public servants to monitor what we do, to take our questions and pass them around by email like hot potatoes for a few hours, before disgorging approved “lines” that, ideally, have ludicrously little to do with said questions. They spend an awful lot of time and energy to make sure we—and by extension, Canadians—get as little information as possible. And then they spend more time and energy writing aggrieved letters to the editor. They openly mock the press: John Baird’s director of communications recently tweeted “The constant whining of the media about access isn’t obnoxious at all. Oh wait—it is.” A director of communications should hold “access” as sacred as any journalist. His goal, in theory, is exactly the same as the media’s goal: to make sure news stories are accurate and informed.18
Soon after Paul Martin cleaned out his desk, reporters began to notice Harper did things differently from all of the prime ministers who had come before him. Often, when he walked down a corridor in the Parliament Building, his security guards made sure there were no members of the public, including reporters, around. Instead of arriving at the MPs’ door at the front of the House of Commons, Harper began slipping into the building through various entrances, including the Speaker’s private door (admittedly a ridiculous holdover from the days when private doors meant something) and even through the loading dock at the back of the building. Dozens of photographs of the prime minister went up on the walls of the large lounges, called lobbies, used by Tory MPs. (They are hidden behind the curtains on the sides of the House of Commons.) The walls of the Langevin Block, which holds the Prime Minister’s Office and his hundreds of employees, were also redecorated with dozens of photographs of Harper in various poses, both informal and in official pictures with heads of state and other VIPs. Everywhere he went, his official photographers shot video and still pictures.
Harper came into office believing in the political messaging system of Ronald Reagan and the Gipper’s image doctor, Michael Deaver. They believed messages delivered on TV, especially when the leader or candidate looked and spoke directly at viewers, were the most believable. It helps to have a strong visual background. George W. Bush used an aircraft carrier, Reagan chose the Oval Office. Harper liked a lectern placed in front of the main doors of the House of Commons. Talking-to-camera statements allow a politician to cherry-pick facts. Critics and members of the opposition, denied the same direct access and the props of the leader’s power, seem not to be in his league.
On the other hand, news conferences and interviews have uncertain outcomes and cannot be scripted. They reduce the leader to the mortal level of his opponents. If interviews have to be done, it is best if the reporter does not normally see the prime minister, is in awe of the office and is grateful for the opportunity. It also helps that many small-town reporters simply don’t know much about what’s going on in Ottawa.
Sam Donaldson, the venerable ABC reporter, once described the Reagan formula this way: “They are very good at directing the news by making available something on a story that they want out and withholding from sight—remember television—something they aren’t prepared to discuss.” In the early 1990s, Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush White House, said: “I did not look on the press as an asset in doing what I do. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed.”19
In the week leading up to the swearing-in of Canada’s New Government, as Harper and his people insisted it be called, about thirty people shortlisted for cabinet spots were interviewed by senior members of the prime minister’s staff, who summoned them to a downtown hotel. Job candidates were told to keep their mouths shut. If there were any signs of a leak by the prospective ministers or their staffs, they were out. “I think Stephen Harper has placed a great emphasis with this team on discipline,” the new immigration minister, Jason Kenney, said. “This is going to be a government that keeps a very tight lid on privileged information. It’s a pretty radical difference from the culture of the Martin government, whose modus operandi seemed to be to leak like a sieve.” Harper had learned from Paul Martin’s government, which was full of freelance cabinet ministers, divided over loyalty between Chrétien and Martin people, and loaded with powerful, vocal staffers with plenty of friends in the media. In the end, a leak of information about the government’s plan to get rid of income trusts had brought on a much-publicized police investigation in the middle of an election campaign. That loose talk had probably cost Martin the election. “I think the Martin culture of leaks reached its pinnacle [there]. I think it’s just good practice, generally speaking, to be more discreet,” Kenney said.20
Ottawa Citizen media writer Chris Cobb said Harper’s desire to control the message was blatant and obvious, and he would not let the Ottawa press corps get in the way. They might be useful on the campaign trail, but they were dangerous once the election was over. “If Mr. Harper has anything other than an intense dislike of the news media, and distrust of journalists assigned to cover his government, he has done nothing to show it,” Cobb wrote. Harper had time to talk hockey on TSN but thought journalists were out of line for criticizing him for appointing campaign strategist Michael Fortier to the Senate and putting Liberal turncoat David Emerson in his cabinet on his first days in office—the kind of things Harper had attacked Paul Martin’s Liberals for just a few weeks before the election.21
In February 2006, Harper fired William Stairs, his director of communications, over Stairs’s handling of the fallout over the recruitment of Emerson. Stairs wanted Harper to level with reporters about why he had accepted a floor-crosser into his cabinet. Instead, the soon-to-be-unemployed communications director learned a quick and tough lesson about Harper’s secrecy fetish. Denise Rudnicki, a twenty-year veteran of the press gallery who had worked for Preston Manning (and later was hired as director of communications for Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler), was sharply critical of the new prime minister. “It’s clear now why Mr. Harper’s media relations are in disarray. It’s because he is taking his own bad advice.”22 But Stairs’s firing did more than just get rid of someone who seemed too chummy with the press. It sent a message to everyone in the Harper government that anyone who was soft on the press would be driven out. And if anyone didn’t get it, all they had to do was watch Stairs’s replacement, Sandra Buckler, who had utter contempt for journalists.
By the end of the second month of Harper’s regime, whatever honeymoon had existed was over and people were analyzing his throttling of the media. Conservative senator Hugh Segal, a former adviser to Brian Mulroney and Ontario premier Bill Davis, said politicians’ communications plans often quickly collided with reality. The new government needed discipline if it was not going to end up a disorganized mess. Harper’s team had the perception “that the Martin Liberals had no discipline whatever with their relationship to the media, that they scrummed every 12 seconds somewhere, made another commitment, issued another press release. And in the end, the conclusion of everyone—including the media—was that none of it meant anything at all.”23
BEGINNING WITH HARPER’S swearing-in as prime minister on February 6, 2006, his media handlers copied the system used at the White House, where the president and his staff, rather than the reporters, decide who asks questions. Reporters said before the prime minister’s first-day press conference that they would not follow the new rules, claiming the prime minister or his staffers would ignore reporters who ask tough questions. Instead, the press gallery insisted on using the old system, in which reporters were allowed to ask questions on a first-come, first-served basis. In a typical press conference, a member of the press gallery executive scans the room and writes down the names of the people who have raised their hands. Then those names are called in the order that they were placed on the list. On the morning of April 11, 2006, members of the press gallery were told the prime minister would hold a news conference on the government’s showcase accountability legislation. This was the first test of the “list” system.
The conference was held in the small but elegant Commonwealth Room near the rotunda of the Centre Block. As they had done for years at news conferences, reporters lined up at microphones and waited their turn. Instead of using the gallery’s system, Harper pointed to freelance writer Tim Naumetz, who was sitting in the centre of the crowded room and was unaware of the lineups at the edges, and called on him to ask the first question. The room erupted with loud complaints from the reporters in line. “Tim, do you want to ask a question or not?” Harper asked the perplexed reporter. The prime minister took two questions from reporters in the gallery’s lineup, then left the small room. His staff said he had a tight schedule and needed to leave early.24
Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin took Harper to task two days after the botched press conference. Martin, normally fairly supportive of conservative politicians, called Harper Canada’s new minister of truth. “In the theatre of absurdity called Parliament Hill, Harper has gone far beyond simply restoring order to the chaotic business of stick-handling the media. He’s imposed laliophobia—fear of talking—on cowering ministers, MPs, support staff and bureaucrats.” Martin described how he had tried to interview Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and had been told by her handlers that the interview would happen if there were no questions on the Kyoto accord and greenhouse gas emissions. When Martin said no, the flack refused the interview. Martin appealed directly to Ambrose, who agreed to do the interview. Five minutes before it was supposed to start, the same flack killed it. “Kyoto? Nope,” Martin said, “the Prime Minister’s Office abruptly decreed the interview had to be cancelled because it might conflict with the message Harper wanted out this week. Which was, ironically, ACCOUNTABILITY.”25
A few weeks later, Martin pointed out to his readers that, when Harper spoke, he actually said interesting things. Former prime minister Paul Martin could ramble on at news conferences every week and say nothing. When Harper talked near a microphone, facts and policy ideas rolled out, sometimes to the point where reporters were swamped with stories to write. It didn’t help that no other ministers were allowed to say anything interesting or important. “The only other place I’ve seen media forced onto this sort of single-person reliance is the Alberta legislature, where Premier Ralph Klein unilaterally sets the agenda and delivers enough random quips and quotes to fill up the news hole, often scooping his own ministers in the process,” Don Martin wrote. And, he said, it didn’t help that Harper’s communications team were “evasive, unresponsive, paranoid and unable to wrap their heads around the concept of daily newspaper deadlines.” One Tory MP complained that no one could cry about being “out of the loop,” since the “loop” consisted of the mind of one man.26
That doesn’t mean Harper doesn’t closely follow the media, or doesn’t care about what’s written or said about him. For a government that expends so much time and effort trying to define the media as unimportant to Canadian politics, much of the strategy to bury the Mike Duffy housing expense issue, for instance, revolved around how the government’s actions would play in the media, and on how to keep Duffy from blabbing to reporters. Attacking the credibility of the reporters who broke the story hadn’t worked.
“I met the prime minister and Nigel Wright,” Duffy later told the Senate in his swan-song speech. “Just the three of us. I said that despite the smear in the papers, I had not broken the rules. But the prime minister wasn’t interested in explanations or the truth. It’s not about what you did. It’s about the perception of what you did that has been created by the media. The rules are inexplicable to our base.”
Anyone who thinks press gallery stories about scandals no longer get traction across the country should take a long, close look at the Duffy case. Certainly, MPs who went back to their ridings in the summer of 2013 heard about it, as did reporters who got out of the Ottawa bubble. And, even discounting the many problems plaguing pollsters, only Harper’s most diehard apologists could argue that there were no changes in public attitudes. Polls showed support for the prime minister had started to tumble. There was even talk of him quitting without finishing the first term of his majority.
In another column, Ottawa Citizen editorial page editor Kate Heartfield wrote that Harper’s obsession with media coverage of the Duffy scandal would hurt the Tories. The prime minister’s
weird, pigtail-pulling obsession with the media is partly to blame for the fact that the Senate scandal became a PMO scandal. It’s not that he doesn’t care what we write. It’s that he cares so much, he and his staff default to scenarios and talking points. It’s become an instinct. Almost everything Harper’s government does—from the tough on crime agenda to his attempts to make certain senators just go away—is media strategy. It’s fiction all the way down. If there was ever a political party in Canada deserving of being called the Media Party, it’s the Conservative Party of Canada in 2013.27
Ottawa Citizen media writer Chris Cobb criticized the Tory media-bashers for their vacuous, knee-jerk assaults on Hill reporters, describing conservative critics within the media and blogosphere as “journalists who seem oddly embarrassed by what they do for a living, by pseudo-journalists joyfully unencumbered by their own ignorance and, most troubling, by vocal members of the public who have a perversely negative impression of the news media and a total misunderstanding of the role journalism plays, or should play, in a healthy democracy.” He singled out callers to the CBC radio show hosted by commentator Rex Murphy—who had never worked as a journalist on the Hill and hadn’t bothered to do serious research to determine the facts—for congratulating Harper for whipping journalists into line and asking rhetorically why government behind closed doors is such a bad thing.
Cobb explained something that’s obvious to Hill media watchers, but that’s lost in all the stereotyping by talk radio blowhards, open-line hosts, neo-con bloggers and Harper media handlers: the Parliamentary Press Gallery is very deferential to power, much more so than, say, the British political press (which is, itself, fairly cozy with politicians. Its senior members get special secret briefings from top political operative and civil servants). The gallery rarely mentions the private lives of politicians and powerbrokers. (Frank magazine does, but its private-life stories are rarely matched by the mainstream unless there are serious political overtones.) In fact, discretion about affairs, weird habits and addictions that would make the front page of the competitive British papers is part of the requirements of admission to the “insider” culture of the Ottawa bubble.28
When Harper visited British Columbia in 2006, local reporters put their name on the Prime Minister’s Office list. A national reporter asked a local B.C. reporter to ask her question for her because the national reporters’ organization was boycotting the PMO list system. The day after reporters walked out of a press conference about the situation in the miserable Darfur region of Sudan, Harper told an interviewer on London’s A-Channel (an outlet that was not exactly famous for its cutting-edge journalism) that he would try to ignore the Parliament Hill media and give preference to media in cities and small towns. “Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government. They don’t ask questions at my press conferences now. We’ll just get the message out on the road. There’s lots of media in the country who do want to ask me questions and hear what the government is doing. I have trouble believing that a Liberal prime minister would have this problem. But the press gallery at the leadership level has taken an anti-Conservative view,” Harper said.
Yves Malo, who was then the president of the press gallery, objected to Harper’s comments. “It’s a little paranoid,” said Malo, a reporter with the Quebec-based TVA network. Malo had led the walkout over the use of the list. “I’m not anti-Conservative. I’m not pro-Conservative. I’m just a journalist who’s trying to do his job.”29
MANY WRITERS BELIEVED Harper, not the Ottawa media, would win the fight for public support. Columnist Allan Fotheringham, who had left Ottawa years before, told readers of his syndicated column the reason Harper would beat the national media: “Missus Bloggs in Moose Jaw thinks the Ottawa media are overpaid, lazy, drink their own bath water, interviewing each other over beer and [are] into pack journalism,” he wrote. “This is a very serious matter, you must understand. If Hogtown Toronto thinks it is the centre of the universe, in Ottawa—the town that fun forgot—the panjandrums of the Press Gallery seriously believe that they hold democracy in their frail little hands.” Stephen Harper had been sneered at “for years by the Ottawa pundits as an Alberta yahoo who was going to break up Canada with something called the Reform Party—the Flat Prairie equivalent of Quebec’s crazy separatists.” The people who had sent Harper to Ottawa had felt the sting of that condescension and were not about to abandon their man.30
Conservative columnist Claire Hoy, who had also left the gallery long before Harper’s election, said Harper had every right to tell journalists “to take a hike.” It wasn’t a free speech issue, he said: nobody was being stopped from writing what they wanted, and “a free press does not mean everybody has to co-operate with them [journalists] in any way.” The fight was “all about journalistic ego.” While, politically, Hoy thought Harper ill advised to “indulge in this silly war with the media,” polls were showing the spat was not hurting the prime minister’s popularity.31 A poll by Ipsos-Reid published in June 2006 showed 57 per cent of the people surveyed thought Harper’s insistence on controlling who asks him questions is about ensuring friendly questions. About 48 per cent did not think the issue was important at all.
The newspaper chain owned by the Asper family undermined the press gallery’s campaign and finally ended it. The Canwest News Service, which fed the Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and several other dailies, along with Global TV, negotiated with the Prime Minister’s Office and won an exclusive interview with Harper for two of its reporters after Canwest agreed to submit to the PMO list rule.32
In September, the rest of the press gallery caved. It voted to let the prime minister’s staff pick the reporters who could ask questions at news conferences. The deal was supposed to be temporary, lasting just thirty days. In fact, it was a complete surrender. The thirty-day trial period has never ended. When the month was over, Harper’s communications advisers simply refused to negotiate. A few weeks later, Harper was confronted by a Calgary reporter who said changes to access to information rules unfairly punished inquisitive journalists. “I punish them all anyway,” Harper crowed, before breaking into what the journalist described as a “long and sustained laugh.”33
Eventually, the system evolved on off-the-Hill trips into one in which a Harper press aide tells reporters how many questions they get to ask each day. This system practically ensures a sort of Media Party conspiracy. Because of the small, set number of questions, reporters go into a huddle and decide among themselves which questions will be asked. There are no follow-up questions.34 The questions are the type that are easily anticipated by the prime minister’s staff: very “timely” and “national.” Serious, complex questions on, say, business, foreign or regional issues don’t get asked because they’re not interesting to the national TV and print bureaus.
Reporters have to make sure they get something from these news conferences to make their editors and employers happy, since travelling with Harper in Canada costs about three to five thousand dollars for a few days of stumping through small towns or into the Arctic, with even higher charges for major trips overseas.35 “In effect, you are paying for access to the Prime Minister,” Canadian Press reporter Stephanie Levitz told the Hill Times newspaper in 2012. Rather than ignore these trips and simply leave the photo ops unphotographed, news agencies keep signing up for them. It’s partly because they need the footage and the bits of text, partly because the news companies and the journalists like the status.
During the trip to the 2014 Francophonie summit in Senegal, Harper answered only ten questions, two of them from Senegalese reporters. In late May 2007, Harper made a second trip to the Afghan war zone. At first, handlers kept the visit secret from the media travelling with the prime minister. During the trip, reporters were kept away from Harper and his officials. What could have been a significant news event, a discussion about Canada’s role in Afghanistan, turned into another photo op. “[A] father-knows-best discipline was imposed on a fourth estate Harper clearly considers child-like,” Toronto Star columnist Jim Travers wrote after the trip.
Tough questions weren’t answered on the war, the controversial treatment of prisoners, or on Harper’s rationale that ‘terrorism will come home if we don’t confront it here.’… prime minister willing to risk his life to the media should have enough confidence in voters to let them sort through the best available information before making political and policy choices. But that isn’t in his character.36
Domestic journalists aren’t the only ones who are pushed around by Harper’s handlers. South African reporters and photographers bitched when officious staff from the Canadian embassy in Pretoria made them move far from Harper’s plane so that the prime minister’s official photographers and camera operator, as well as Canadian photographers, could have the best view of the prime minister’s arrival for the funeral of Nelson Mandela. A few weeks later, Palestinian TV camera crews were forced to give up the spot they’d staked out near the entrance of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to make way for the PMO-paid videographer who records all of Harper’s travels. The Palestinian Union of Journalists said that one Palestinian journalist was punched in the face and another was hit with a metal object.37
And causes that really could use some positive media coverage can find “help” from the prime minister to be a mixed blessing. Harper spoke at a spring 2014 conference on maternal health issues in Toronto. Reporters spent most of the conference penned up in a media room where they couldn’t see or hear anything. Minders escorted them to the washrooms. When journalists were allowed anywhere near the conference, it was usually just as pool reporters, meaning they had to share whatever they learned with the journalists back in the pen. The outcome was predictably bad, both for Harper and the organizers.38
SOMETIMES, THERE’S REBELLION, though it never quite morphs into revolution. Just before Parliament resumed in the fall of 2013, a CTV News camera operator dared to shout a question during one of Harper’s photo ops. The camera operator wanted to know what Harper thought of Dean Del Mastro (who also had been Harper’s parliamentary secretary) being charged under the Elections Act for violating its spending rules. Harper’s media handlers barred the CTV camera operator from a trip to Asia, but backed down when other journalists who were supposed to cover the trip said they’d stay home in solidarity.
Soon afterwards, on the day before the 2013 speech from the throne, Harper’s office told TV networks that cameras would be welcome inside a Tory caucus meeting to hear Harper give a pep talk to his party’s MPs and senators. Reporters were banned. Newspaper and radio reporters hadn’t been told about the speech.
When the camera crews arrived at the caucus meeting with reporters in tow, Harper’s staff would not let them in. In protest, all of the camera crews, except for Sun News’s—who had gone into the meeting through a side door—decided to boycott the event. David Thibault, a Radio-Canada reporter who was president of the press gallery at time, said: “It’s important because how can you report if you’re not there? A reporter’s job is to witness, to listen, to watch.”
Reporters, National Post columnist John Ivison said, had finally decided to draw a line. “There’s a principle at stake … that reporters are allowed in to these affairs to do their job,” he wrote. “Normally reasonable people decided that this was beyond the pale, and I think they were quite right to do so. It’s maybe a fight that the PMO is ill-advised to take on.”39
Fred DeLorey, the Conservatives’ director of political operations, sent a fundraising letter to party supporters explaining why Harper’s speech would not be seen on the evening news. “You won’t believe what the Press Gallery just did in Ottawa,” DeLorey wrote. “Some media decided to boycott an important speech by our Prime Minister—one where he laid out his vision for our country, before today’s Speech from the Throne.” DeLorey said the Tories needed money to get their message out. “Rather than send cameras to cover the Prime Minister’s speech, they attended the NDP’s meeting, and were welcomed with cheers and applause. We knew they wouldn’t give us fair coverage—but this is a new low for the Ottawa media elite.”40
At their annual meeting in March 2014, more than seven years after Harper took power, members of the press gallery voted to push back against Canada’s New Government. They would dare to ask questions “in all photo-ops and availabilities with the prime minister, cabinet ministers, and all Parliamentarians, to fulfill our functions as journalists in a democratic society.” But there would be no boycott. And, in the debate before the vote, many journalists made it clear that they didn’t expect the little protest to make a difference with the Harper regime. They just wanted to put a shot over the bow of the next prime minister.
“It’s not actually confined to one party,” press gallery president Laura Payton, a CBC reporter, said after the meeting. “There are times with all the parties, I think, where we experience that, so we were just discussing about how we have this right to ask a question. It’s up to a parliamentarian whether they want to answer the question, but you can’t tell us not to ask questions and that’s something that we’ve seen specifically out of the Prime Minister’s Office at photo-ops, for example.”41
During Harper’s time in power, personal attacks, including campaigns to get reporters fired, have become common. In January 2013, staff in the Prime Minister’s Office put out a statement through the office of Ontario Tory MP Dean Del Mastro, challenging the credibility of Postmedia investigative reporter and political columnist Stephen Maher. The robocalls vote suppression story, in which Tory operatives hired a call centre to send non-Tory voters to bogus poll locations, had been broken by Maher and his colleague Glen McGregor, who works for the Ottawa Citizen. The PMO statement, sent to a newspaper in Del Mastro’s Peterborough riding, called Maher—who, later that year, would share with McGregor a Michener Award for public service journalism and a National Newspaper Award, among other prizes, for the robocalls series and other stories documenting campaign violations—a “controversial reporter.” It went on to remind Tories that Postmedia had corrected one of Maher’s stories “because it made false claims against a Conservative riding association.”
After the Peterborough Examiner ran a story about the PMO statement, Del Mastro made a clumsy attempt to say he, not the Prime Minister’s Office, had written it. Gerry Nott, who was then the Ottawa Citizen’s editor, said the personal attack on Maher was “quite appalling and surprising. That the PM’s office would deal with the issues around the Del Mastro story by looking at concerns they had about a previous story suggests to me they are either trying to deflect or have their eye on the wrong ball.” Maher told the Citizen: “I don’t consider myself to be controversial.”42
Like the Obama administration, Harper’s regime has no qualms about using the tax investigation system against its media critics. In July 2012, a Mennonite church magazine was warned by the Canada Revenue Agency to curb its political activism. The letter was described as a “reminder” to Canadian Mennonite Publishing Service that taking part in “partisan political activities” could cost the organization its valuable charitable status. Without the ability to draw on money from the Mennonite Church Canada and issue tax-deductible receipts to donors, the publisher would have been driven out of business. “It has come to our attention that recent issues of the Organization’s monthly periodical, entitled ‘Canadian Mennonite,’ have contained editorials and/or articles that appear to promote opposition to a political party, or to candidates for public office,” the letter said. It reminded the Mennonites that charities are “prohibited (by the Income Tax Act) from engaging in partisan political activities,” including “direct or indirect support of, or opposition to, any political party or candidate for public office.”
The Mennonites took the letter as a threat. Rather than quietly cave, the church paper posted the letter, along with an angry editorial denouncing it, on the newspaper’s website. Canadian Mennonite editor and publisher Dick Benner told a CBC News reporter that the letter was “a chill on speech.” Benner said the letter “tells me that I need to be very careful on what I say about government policy and how I say it. That restricts me as a journalist and as a religious commentator.”
While the Mennonite paper had, in an editorial published before the May 2011 election, asked its readers to keep in mind the church’s policies on social justice, pacifism and environmentalism, it had not endorsed any political party, Benner said. But it had criticized two Tory Mennonite MPs, saying they had distanced themselves from their heritage. And, after the election, Benner had written an article about the killing of Osama bin Laden that condemned the takeover of Canada by what he called “a militaristic Conservative majority government.” The tax department also cited stories profiling young Mennonites as they decided who they would vote for, church concerns about an omnibus crime bill, an article on how the death of NDP leader Jack Layton inspired some young Mennonites to get involved in politics, and a story about Mennonite youths who sent paper airplanes to Ottawa to pressure the government to “spend less money on war.”43
NO MATTER WHAT happened between the Harper government and the media, in Harper’s world journalists were always to blame. Even the Mike Duffy scandal, in which the Tory senator supposedly overcharged the Senate for his second home and accepted what police would later call a bribe from the prime minister’s chief of staff to pay the money back, was the media’s fault. In a truly bizarre column published in The Globe and Mail during the 2013 Christmas season, Preston Manning tried to blame the Parliamentary Press Gallery for the Duffy scandal, saying reporters should have somehow stopped the gregarious CTV journalist from yearning for a Senate seat.
Manning got his hands on a copy of the gallery’s small handbook, which mostly instructs new Hill reporters about things like parking policies and where pictures can be taken. Manning seized on the rule that a journalist can be expelled from the gallery if “such member uses his membership or the facilities of the Gallery to obtain a benefit other than by journalism.” Duffy, Manning said, had been lobbying for a seat in the Red Chamber for many years before Harper put the broadcaster (along with Pamela Wallin, who had also been a member of the press gallery in the late 1980s) into the Senate. So, in Manning’s world, the press gallery should somehow have stopped Duffy before he schmoozed again.
Manning ignored several key facts. The most glaring one was that, while Duffy did eagerly make his availability known to various prime ministers, both Tory and Liberal, craving a Senate seat is hardly unethical or cause for firing from any job. (Manning’s own father had been appointed to the Senate.) The other hole in Manning’s argument was that somehow Duffy had used the press gallery’s resources to win the job. The only “resource” of any value that Duffy may have co-opted was his job as a host on CTV News channel, since it was that employment that put him face-to-face with politicians. It was up to CTV, not the press gallery, to discipline its employees if they crossed the company’s ethical policies.
Manning, who certainly knew more facts about Senate appointments than he let on, was aware—or should have been—that journalists had been appointed to the Senate since Confederation and some had served with distinction. Globe and Mail editor Richard Doyle had been given a seat by Brian Mulroney and became one of the hardest-working legislators in the chamber. As members of the Senate’s justice committee, Doyle and Senator Gérald Beaudoin, the former dean of the University of Ottawa law school, had, during the Chrétien years, scoured legislation that normally would have been rubber-stamped by the Senate and found many foul-ups and bad laws. Jean Chrétien had appointed, among other journalists, Joan Fraser, who had been pushed out of her job as editor of the Montreal Gazette because Conrad Black, who owned the paper, thought she was too liberal. And Manning neglected to say it was journalists, not Senate auditors or the Prime Minister’s Office, who raised the issue of Duffy’s housing and travel expenses in the first place.
Manning was trying to make the press gallery wear the Duffy scandal, as though the gallery could somehow bar one of its members from accepting a Senate seat or prevent one from being offered. In the press gallery, Duffy had a reputation as an honest man, though one who was difficult to work for. The 2013 allegations of improper expenses were surprising to many journalists who knew him. But no one had been particularly surprised when Duffy got the nod. Author Stevie Cameron described him, during the Mulroney years, as one of the gallery’s few stars and, in a piece of prophecy that would turn to irony, wrote in 1989: “If Duffy is appointed to the Senate—the rumour that makes its way around the circuit at least twice a year—not even his fellow journalists, usually an envious lot, will mind.”44 Duffy was a gregarious man, much more friendly and generous with his time and with fans across Canada than most high-profile TV journalists.
Manning might have dropped into the Prime Minister’s Office and asked Harper’s speechwriters about the ethics of moving from media into political service. Some had been press gallery members. One had been the editor of the Ottawa Citizen.
All of this inside baseball and whining does little more than convince people that federal politics is just a game, with patronage as its prize. Many people don’t care that the media, one of the watchdogs of the democratic system, can no longer do an effective job. People don’t follow politics and they don’t vote. They hope that whatever Ottawa does, the federal government leaves them alone, especially at tax time.
Could they be right to ignore the governing of the country? Is it that big of a deal to catch yet another politician in a lie if the present government lies, and the previous governments lied, and if politicians in the provinces lie too? And what if all Western political leaders are shown in news broadcasts, documentaries and Hollywood movies as habitual liars with the ethics of high-functioning psychopaths? “Truth shaving of a serious kind has become so commonplace in politics today that it is expected. In the news business anything that is expected, that happens often, is of declining news value,” writes long-time columnist Lawrence Martin, author of the award-winning best-seller Harperland.
And so the media over time has lost its sense of outrage when politicians willfully distort or lie. The media don’t hold politicians to as high a standard as they used to. You’ll rarely, for example, see a front-page headline saying “Cabinet Minister Caught Up in Baldfaced Lie.” Criticism will usually come in the body of the story or the inside pages. Political strategists realize the story will be a one-day wonder, forgotten the next. Big deal.45
But when politicians don’t lie, and instead speak in self-serving talking points that tell the listener nothing, when they engage in tedious photo ops instead of discussing the governing of the nation with members of the public who actually pay the nation’s bills and they still get re-elected, we’ll see two things. One is a polarization of politics between those few who are included in the governance of the country and those millions who are excluded from it. And, as happened in 2014, we’ll see a public cynicism of political messaging so deeply rooted that an MSNBC TV interviewer can feel free to interrupt an interview with a member of the United States House of Representatives and cut away to coverage of the latest tribulations of pop star Justin Bieber. We’ll live in a fantasyland where people pretend our votes and our opinions count. But it will just be an illusion.