Oliver's Twist (8 page)

The story broadcast that week on
Across Canada
highlighted the striking similarities between the uniforms worn by presentday Wehrmacht soldiers and those of the Nazis. Perhaps unwisely, I interlaced pictures of their training routines with archival World War II footage. Only the swastika was missing. I was accused of provoking an incident, a charge I could not deny, and the corporation's bosses felt it necessary to issue an apology. I was given a verbal dressing-down, but the producer who worked
with me was demoted. He was assigned to the religious program that opened the station each morning and, ever after, when I ran into him in the hallway, he greeted me with hands clasped in prayer.

I spent most of the following year writing and producing programs around the country's centennial celebrations. If there was a small town on the Prairies I did not visit, I would like to know its name. I will never know who recommended me for it, but at year's end I was presented with a Centennial Medal by the federal government. I was so chuffed that I wore it on my pyjamas for a week.

Set against the pure pride and joy of that memorable year was the reality that these were tumultuous times. Both the war in Vietnam and the U.S. civil rights struggle had radicalized the left, and the effects were felt around the world. Closer to home, Quebec's Quiet Revolution was percolating, Canada finally adopted its own flag, and Prairie grain farmers faced an income crisis. The CBC News department was overwhelmed by demands for coverage at home and abroad.

The head of the news department in Toronto was Joe Schlesinger, later to become one of the nation's most-admired foreign correspondents. He came to Winnipeg for a meeting that ended with an offer to make me the first national television reporter in Saskatchewan. I had to agree to go on the cheap: There would be no crew of my own, just local hires. I was also expected to report for national radio. But what an opportunity! Still in my twenties, I was working full-time for the nation's largest and most influential news operation. Mom would be able to see me in Rupert, where TV had finally come to town. It was back to Saskatchewan and my old nemesis, Premier Ross Thatcher.

Perhaps because I was always inclined to play a story for all it was worth, maybe even to overplay it, I seemed to attract trouble to myself and to Mother Corp. At a massive anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Saskatoon, a group of protesters asked me for a match. To my surprise, they used it to set fire to a large American flag. The footage made great viewing on that night's television news, but the Mounties had seen me hand over the match and accused me of staging the event. More criticism from CBC executives followed, and Thatcher sent a letter of regret to the U.S. ambassador.

I came to grief on another occasion when Otto Lang, minister for the Canadian Wheat Board, was to make a major grain sales announcement. I planned to film a group of farmers as they watched the announcement and then reacted to it. A few members of the Farmers' Union were duly invited to gather in a spacious beer parlour at Indian Head, Saskatchewan. They were willing but insisted that, as non-drinkers, they did not want to be associated in the item with the demon rum. I agreed without hesitation. It was a hectic night of editing, and I did not have time to screen the whole piece before it was fed to Toronto and played to a national audience of millions. Unfortunately, the editor needed “cutaways” to cover so-called “jump-cuts” between comments by various farmers. As a result, the item was full of close-up shots of well-filled beer glasses being hoisted from the tables.

The Farmers' Union organized a protest in front of the CBC building, complete with placards bearing my picture. I was attacked for distorting reality, for making teetotalling farmers look like beer-swilling boozers. Poor Knowlton Nash, then the head of CBC News, spent weeks fending off complaints from
outraged farm organizations and Members of Parliament. I had unwittingly broken my word.

I was on the road a lot and became friendly with a circuit judge. He phoned me one night with the details of a horrendous murder-suicide involving six people in the tiny native community of Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan. This honest man wanted Canadians to know the terrible conditions in which natives were living. He told me where and when the bodies would arrive. When the RCMP pulled in to the dark garage of the funeral home in Prince Albert, they were blinded by an explosion of television lights. The lights exposed the bodies stacked in the back of a truck like so much cordwood. This time the new CBC News boss, Joe Schlesinger, had to come to my defence. He did so, citing the value in exposing viewers first-hand to the failure of federal Indian policy and the disregard for Aboriginal lives.

I wish I had been as daring when covering the next royal tour, the 1970 visit to the Arctic by four members of the royal family. The Americans were challenging Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, so the Trudeau government decided to use the high profile of the royals to remind the world that the Royal Navy had mapped the Arctic and claimed it for Britain. It was part of Canada's heritage as a former colony.

I doubt that there has been another occasion when those of us in the media have had such close access to the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles, and Anne. I related well to Charles, about nine years my junior, and found him engaging and witty. In those days before Diana and his misadventures with the British newspapers, Charles was also disarmingly frank. Over informal cocktails, I told Charles we had met when I
did the live broadcast of his investiture as Prince of Wales at Carnaervon Castle, an encounter he pretended to remember. He perked up when I recalled the troubles witnessed by his mother six years before at Quebec City. I suggested to Charles that these did not represent the true sentiments of Quebecers and told him he should make a trip of his own. “No thanks,” he said. “I am afraid the separatists might plant a bomb and blow my ass off.”

Charles's father went on to lecture me about the fact that Canada was not a colony anymore and if we did not want to have the Queen as our head of state we could simply say so, “and put an end to the thing. We don't have to be here if we are not wanted.” Both Charles and his father were admirably candid and I wanted to report the exchange, but I was told such chats were considered off the record.

None of us, however, could refrain from using a later comment by Philip to the effect that the Canadian Arctic was “a garbage dump.” He was referring to the thousands of empty oil barrels that littered the landscape. His bluntness upset his Canadian hosts and somewhat embarrassed the Queen, but there was no apology and everyone recognized he was right. Later, the federal government ordered companies operating in the North to take their fuel barrels out with them.

I was just settling in back in Saskatchewan when the ripples of a management shakeup in Toronto hit my shores. Joe Schlesinger had appointed himself CBC's correspondent in Paris. His replacement, the thoughtful and decent Peter Trueman, asked me to join the national newsroom in a management position. If I could take the heat for two years, he promised me the top reporting job in London would follow. Peter did not last in his
own post for those two years and, of course, his replacement claimed never to have heard of our understanding. But I knew none of that when I packed my bag once again and headed for Toronto and the worst two years of my life.

3

DRAWN
TO
POWER

I had joined the CBC in the final years of its most glorious era. There was very little competition from private broadcasters and the corporation enjoyed a huge share of the radio audience. It was headed by distinguished visionaries like Charles Jennings, the father of future ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, and Alphonse Ouimet, the man credited with creating national television broadcasting in two languages. Its leading broadcasters—reporters like Frank Willis and Norman DePoe, and actors like John Drainie—were admired role models. Many of its producers, such as Lister Sinclair and Harry Boyle, were legends in the News and Public Affairs departments. Boyle and Bill Herbert mentored a younger generation that included Lloyd Robertson and me. But our pride in the CBC as an institution and our respect for its burgeoning upper management began to wobble after the radio era gave way, almost overnight, to television.

In the late 1950s, there was a sudden expansion of the corporation and not enough talent, especially in the management ranks, to fill the need. Many of the old guard from radio couldn't
make the transition to the new medium, and parts of the CBC came under the control of men who did not know their business, administratively or technically. While in Winnipeg, I was called to a meeting at which a senior executive complained that we were shooting too much expensive film stock. He proposed we all be given still cameras. With these we would snap sequential photos, place them on a cartwheel, and spin it, thus creating the effect of film. At first everyone giggled, thinking this adaptation of flip-book art was a joke. When it became clear that the man was serious, we all fell into an embarrassed silence.

Like it or not, however, Toronto was the centre of the country's broadcasting industry, the centre of the known universe to those of us striving to get there. I believed it was where I belonged. On my first day at CBC Television, I made my way to the Corp's national newsroom, located in a rundown wreck of a building on Jarvis Street in a neighbourhood that had seen better times. The day before, following a fatal accident, police had disabled the only elevator in the building. I walked up the five floors to my new office.

Stepping into the reception area of the open working space, I was greeted by a tiny figure who sat not behind a desk, but on it. He was a sadly deformed character known as “Snarley,” because of his raspy voice. When I introduced myself, he burst into laughter and announced to the room that the “fucking hayseed” had arrived. Almost as one, the staff stood and walked out as if taking a group coffee break. I understood this to be a gesture by members of the union. I had made the switch to management, and that made me their natural enemy.

My professional home for the next two years was known as the “Boneyard.” It was, like the newsroom in Evelyn Waugh's
satiric novel
Scoop
, a graveyard of broken dreams. Up until then I had imagined that such a collection of eccentric, self-destructive, and absurd characters could exist only in a work of pulp fiction. Never before or since have I experienced such a poisoned workplace. Years of incompetent bosses and bull-headed unionists had undermined any sense of common purpose. The mandate handed to me was to clean out the Augean stables. I would be joined in the effort by another newcomer, Tim Kotcheff, who had been brought over from the Public Affairs Department, where he had produced numerous award-winning shows. Together we would act as producer-managers of the news department.

The unit employed roughly a hundred individuals, mostly men, as reporters, editors, writers, and assorted hangers-on, all of whom wallowed in rumour, complaint, and power struggles. A few were known for treachery and corruption, and some were on the take from organizations and private companies, accepting favours in exchange for positive coverage. Drugs of all kinds were consumed, and fights were not uncommon. I learned that many staffers routinely padded their time cards, adding thousands to their paycheques. One reporter often claimed more than twenty-four hours a day and got away with it. When I refused to sign off on fraudulent cards, one of the news editors took me aside and warned me that I might soon find myself in a dark alley with a knife in my ribs.

Down at one end of the large floor were the offices of my predecessors, men cast aside but not let go in past reorganizations. They came and went silently, morning and night, waiting resolutely, if bitterly, for their pensions. The walking dead cast me a piteous glance as they shuffled by my desk. One advised me
to choose my cabal carefully lest I be caught on the losing side in the next management shakeup. Another had been officially dismissed but was so distraught that he refused to leave his office. The old friends who had engineered his demise felt too guilty to have him forcibly removed, so for a time he lived in his office, cooking on a hot plate. When I passed him in a hallway late one evening, he told me with a lopsided grin that he was going to change the sheets on his desk.

A few individuals in the newsroom had been my colleagues as reporters and I thought of them as friends. One in particular sought me out socially, and for a time we seemed on close terms. Then I learned that everything I told him was being passed to the news guild that had assigned him to spy on me. Such duplicity and contempt for the corporation that gave these individuals a good living infuriated me. If employees felt they owed the CBC nothing, not even an honest day's labour, I had no compunction about firing them—and I did.

In a courtyard next to our building sat a four-storey brick structure known as the “Kremlin.” It housed the offices of more than a dozen Corp vice-presidents, every one of them despised by the lower ranks. One day I sought out the revered Harry Boyle, then chief of national Radio Public Affairs. He stood with his back to me, staring silently out his window overlooking the Kremlin. Long minutes passed. Abruptly, he pulled up the window sash, stuck out his head, and shouted in the direction of his bosses, “Assholes! Frauds!” He closed the window and turned to me as if it had never happened. Harry was known to take a drink or two in those days, but no doubt he had cause.