Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer

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СКАЧАТЬ Chrétien refused the plea each time it was made. “I had the good judgment not to name him, I guess.” The Liberals did, however, examine the possibility. When asked by the PM, Liberal MP for Charlottetown Shawn Murphy volunteered a comment that squelched the possibility: Duffy “couldn’t be considered an Islander” because he’d not lived in Prince Edward Island since the 1960s. Mike Duffy’s pleas were not taken seriously by anybody except, perhaps, “the Senator” himself.

      Duffy was unrelenting, however, and following the Liberal loss of power, he turned his attention to the new Conservative government. In the run-up to in the national general election of October 2008, when Prime Minister Harper’s minority Conservative government was seeking re-election and the Liberals were led by Stéphane Dion, Duffy broadcast an interview the Liberal leader recorded in the Halifax studio of a CTV affiliate.

      The interview started badly. The party’s leader displayed hesitancy with some English words and appeared not to quite understand the opening question. A number of re-starts were recorded on camera. Normally such failed beginnings get cut, giving viewers a better impression. That this standard practice would be followed was apparently the understanding between the interviewer, the Liberal leader, and his advisers — in short, CTV would put together and broadcast the best of the interview, leaving any evidence of ineptness on the cutting room floor. But when Duffy saw raw footage of the entire interview, he could not wait to broadcast the halting missteps and re-takes. Whether dismayed or amused, Canadians across the country, in the course of making up their mind about whom to vote for, saw many replays of a seemingly incompetent person who aspired to be prime minister. Mr. Harper, whose campaign was faltering, met reporters that night to add scorn.

      The damage Mike Duffy inflicted on Mr. Dion’s campaign was measurable. Stephen Harper won the October 2008 general election and formed another government, still a minority but with an increased number of seats. A panel at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council concluded that journalist Duffy violated broadcasting codes and ethics by airing the “false starts” of the Liberal leader’s interview, ruling he “was not fair, balanced, or even handed.”

      Two months later, on December 22, the reinstated prime minister gave “the Senator” his most cherished Christmas present ever, a real seat in the Senate of Canada.

      Pamela Wallin flew out of Wadena, Saskatchewan, a town of a thousand people bordering the great wetlands of Quill Plain, where she was born on April 10, 1953.

      By 1994, the townspeople had swelled so proud of their famous daughter of Swedish descent in a community mostly derived from Swedes, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Poles, and Germans that they renamed main street Pamela Wallin Drive and painted in big letters, below the name WADENA on the municipal water tower, their happy boast: Home of Pamela Wallin.

      Becoming renowned enough to get your name on a town water tower first requires going out into the bigger world and making something of yourself. Wallin first went to Moose Jaw to complete high school at Central Collegiate Institute and earn money working at the Co-Op, then moved on to Regina where, at age twenty, she graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a degree in psychology and political science. After a brief stint in Regina with a Saskatchewan government program to counsel adults making their own way in society, she next went northeast to Prince Albert and landed work at the nearby Saskatchewan Federal Penitentiary, a maximum security facility built in 1911 on the site of a residential school for Indian children. Wallin had become a political activist and feminist, and her work with the male prisoners was to improve their links with waiting and impoverished wives on the outside.

      Like most Saskatchewanians, Wallin held strong political views. She’d also inherited deep values about “service to country” from her adored father, Bill, who’d flown valiantly as an RCAF pilot in World War II. Her teen years coincided with radical student protest against the existing order of things, and when she signed on with the NDP, Wallin affiliated herself with its most radical element, the “party within the party” formally named the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada but popularly dubbed “The Waffle.”

      Waffle members formed a militant faction trying to shift the already left-wing New Democratic Party further to the political left. The movement mirrored the sixties, combining campus radicalism, feminism, Canadian nationalism, general left-wing nationalism, and a quest for a more democratic Canada. Its 1969 Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada offered a critique of the “American Empire” and sparked much-needed debate about American control over Canada’s economy. There was extensive U.S. ownership of Canadian business and resources, and deep concern over the emergence of a branch-plant economy — felt not only by The Waffle but also by Liberals like economic nationalist Walter Gordon and many “Red Tory” Progressive Conservatives, myself included. The Waffle advocated nationalization of Canadian industries to rescue them from American control. Before The Waffle was expelled from the NDP, its ideas influenced party policy and, in turn, Liberal Party programs. Prime Minister Trudeau, dependent on NDP members of Parliament to support his minority government after 1972, obliged by creating Petro-Canada and the National Energy Policy to assert Canadian control over the energy sector, and the Foreign Investment Review Agency to limit foreign ownership generally and, in particular, American takeovers of Canadian companies. With all of this, Pamela Wallin was more than sympathetic.

      In 1974, leaving behind her social work at the penitentiary, Wallin began a career in journalism with the news division of CBC Radio in Regina. Her lefty credentials appealed to those in charge of hiring, as did her ability to ask big questions of callers to the Radio Noon show. After four years’ experience in radio, she joined the Ottawa bureau of Canada’s largest circulation daily, the Toronto Star. With the benefit of those two years in print journalism, which introduced her to political Ottawa, Wallin switched back to broadcasting, but now in television rather than radio. She was hired by CTV in 1980 to co-host the network’s Canada AM show alongside Norm Perry. The stuff of fame was now hers.

      Wallin also hosted CTV’s Sunday public affairs show Question Period, which was where I first met her, at CTV’s Agincourt studio in northeast Toronto. I had just authored a new book on referendums. Wallin interviewed pollster Martin Goldfarb and me on whether, and when, it’s better to take the public’s pulse through plebiscites than polls. I was impressed by the informed, concise, and pointed direction in which she navigated the topic, giving her viewers value on an important but seldom considered topic. Pamela Wallin’s interviewing skills blended a personable manner with pertinent inquiry.

      In 1985, CTV named her the network’s Ottawa bureau chief, a powerful position but a behind-the-scenes role. Longing for on-air reporting, after a while Wallin rejoined Canada AM.

      By now she was famous. Magazine articles featured the beautiful woman with the brains and nerve to go after stories in Canada and around the world. To a rising number of young women hoping for a career in media and communications, Pamela Wallin served as a role model, going where no path had been and blazing a trail. In the arena of Canadian politics, however, some leading figures felt it was them, more than any trail, Wallin was marking.

      Wallin had a lengthy televised interview with Liberal Party leader John Turner on her Question Period show that aired January 13, 1988. She repeatedly asked him about his alleged drinking problem. No matter how he answered, she returned to the topic of “long liquid lunches” or whether it was true that he “liked his drink” or whatever other way she could frame the allegation that he was an alcoholic unfit to be prime minister. She herself did not think this contentious interview any model for younger journalists to emulate, and later said so in her memoirs.

      Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was another who took umbrage at her reporting style. The first time anyone with power to appoint Pamela Wallin to the Senate proposed doing so came at the height of the intense debate over Canada’s comprehensive trade treaty with the United States in 1988. Although Wallin considered her controversial coverage of issues raised by the СКАЧАТЬ