UNTHINKABLE MOMENT FOR WADENA’S WALLIN
Senate spending scandal
OTTAWA — Anyone aware of Pamela Wallin’s impressive career trajectory from Parliament Hill reporter to parliamentarian would know why being caught up in the Red Chamber spending scandal is a particularly difficult moment — an unthinkable one even — in the life of the 60-year-old senator from Saskatchewan.
While Wallin’s had some setbacks, most notably her high-profile ouster from the co-anchor post at CBC’s main national news program in 1995, she possesses a C.V. studded with achievements from her 30 years as an award-winning journalist and subsequent decade as a diplomat, university chancellor, corporate director and all-around symbol of professional success and distinguished public service. Now, having “recused” herself from the Conservative caucus and been forced to await the outcome of an audit expected to highlight the nature of her claimed expenses, Wallin has reportedly already paid back almost $40,000 to the public purse for flights and other charges that should not have been put on the taxpayers’ tab.
For a “small-town girl” from the Prairies, as she calls herself — especially one who built a shining journalistic reputation as a defender of little guys and a watchdog on government blunders — the recent swarm of questions about her integrity and accountability has surely stung.
Wallin’s former CTV colleague Mike Duffy, the figure at the centre of the spending scandal, has been described by another former colleague of the two senators — network veteran Craig Oliver — as having an ego “the size of the Graf Zeppelin,” as a man dreaming for decades of indulging in the perks of an upper house appointment.
But Wallin’s apparent fall from grace, Oliver said on last week’s edition of Question Period — the very show that put her in the national spotlight in the 1980s — “stuns me.”
There’s no doubt the spending scandal would also stun the Pamela Wallin who, 15 years ago, penned the autobiography Since You Asked — the story of her rise to become one of Canada’s most prominent media personalities. It’s a narrative that emphasized her moral rootedness in Wadena — “for me, the centre of the universe,” despite years of living in Toronto and Ottawa — and the shaping influence of her family.
“They are my touchstones,” she wrote. “I always test my thinking against theirs, my instincts against their reality. And it’s not just about their take on the prime minister’s latest gaffe or some bureaucratic bungle. It’s about what matters.”
Among the book’s highlights was what Wallin called a “life-defining” experience at CBC Regina in 1974, when the young radio broadcaster broke a story about Saskatchewan anesthetists fleecing taxpayers — and risking patients’ lives — by “double- and triple-booking operations to maximize their incomes,” as she recalled.
It was the beginning of a hall-of-fame journalism career that was built, she wrote, on protecting “the public’s right to know” and ensuring “the accountability owed them by those in power.”
And it led Wallin — after sterling stints as a producer with CBC’s As It Happens, as a Toronto Star political reporter and as co-host of CTV’s Canada AM — to her historic 1985 appointment at CTV News as the first woman in Canada to head a parliamentary bureau.
Wallin had already gained a measure of national fame in 1982 with her hard-hitting news reports from Argentina during the Falklands War — “While I wasn’t looking, I had become somewhat of a celebrity,” she later recalled.
But it was during the next phase of Wallin’s career when she earned a permanent star in the firmament of Canadian broadcasting history with a single, courageous — and highly controversial — question.
By January 1988, Liberal leader and former prime minister John Turner had become the subject of persistent whispers among reporters and Parliament Hill staffers that his painful defeat to Brian Mulroney in 1984 and his ongoing struggles to hold on to his party’s leadership had driven him to drink.
There were no signs of intoxication in his public appearances or his performance in the House of Commons, but rumours proliferated in late 1987 and early 1988 about his “long lunches” and booze-fuelled socializing.
No member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, it seemed, had the resolve, the chutzpah or the right opportunity to ask the man angling to reclaim 24 Sussex Drive about this purported weakness for scotch.
Except, that is, for Wallin, who as CTV bureau chief was also lead inquisitor on the network’s flagship political program, Question Period.
“There have been suggestions, I guess is the best way to put it, in the town of Ottawa — and this is a very small world in a little fish bowl — that you have, or potentially have, a drinking problem,” Wallin said, finally broaching the subject no other journalist had dared to raise.
Turner, who had been alerted by Wallin before the broadcast that the question was coming, acknowledged that “I like a good party,” but calmly insisted “I have never allowed any pleasure or distraction to interfere with doing the job, whether I was a
“HER TRAVEL COSTS ARE COMPARABLE TO ANY PARLIAMENTARIAN TRAVELLING FROM THAT PARTICULAR AREA OF THE COUNTRY OVER THAT PERIOD OF TIME.”
STEPHEN HARPER
lawyer or a businessman or now a politician.”
“The Question” — as Wallin’s probe has become known since acquiring uppercase significance — is considered a landmark event in Canadian political and media history, the birth of a new era in which reporting on public officeholders’ private lives has become much more common, if no less contentious.
“If my name lives on in media lore for anything from that period in my life it will be, no doubt, for a single exchange with the Leader of the Opposition on Question Period,” Wallin remarked in Since You Asked.
The episode also illustrated, for her, a belief that the “personal behaviour of politicians is only the proper stuff of public investigation when it interferes with public obligations. Drinking, illness, womanizing, patronage are all fair game if they compromise the actions politicians take on behalf of the citizenry or if they have a negative impact on the person’s ability to carry out his duties or make wise use of public money.”
Wallin’s post-journalism career brought her new and different kinds of public attention and acclaim. Her four-year term as Canada’s consul-general in New York — following an appointment by then Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien in 2002 — is remembered for having strengthened Canada-U.S. relations following the terror attacks in September 2001.
Her time as chancellor of the University of Guelph between 2007 and 2012 coincided with a high-profile appointment by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to an independent panel examining Canada’s future role in Afghanistan.
Other significant titles — including 14 honourary degrees and directorships on the boards of Porter Airlines, the wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff & Associates and the Conference of Defence Associations Institute — complete the picture of a woman widely regarded in Canada for her accomplishments, experience and influence.
But Wallin’s 2008 appointment as a Conservative senator placed her squarely in the heart of the “zero-sum game” partisan political world she’d spent much of her career scrutinizing for scandals, abuses of power and other juicy stories.
So concerned about maintaining her professional objectivity as a reporter on Parliament Hill, Wallin chose not to vote for any party while covering politics in the 1980s. Now cast into the political wilderness, at least temporarily, she is already facing opposition accusations that her busy role as a Tory fundraising superstar may help explain — though not excuse — her apparent expense-claim excesses.
In February, as Senate spending emerged as a serious political controversy, Wallin defended her record and said her higher-than-average travel costs could be explained by her commitment to visiting Saskatchewan — a relatively pricey destination — so frequently.
“Last year, I spent 168 days in my home province, not just with family but participating in dozens and dozens of events,” Wallin wrote in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 13. “I gave speeches, moderated or took part in panel discussions, presented Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medals to veterans and other deserving Saskatchewanians, led a military dedication ceremony at Dafoe and attended many, many other events such as dinners and barbecues. That is my job, and I love doing it.”
Harper defended Wallin in the House of Commons on the same day, stating: “I have looked at the numbers. Her travel costs are comparable to any parliamentarian travelling from that particular area of the country over that period of time.”
But in the weeks that followed, more questions mounted and Wallin removed herself — or did so on Harper’s orders — from Conservative ranks.
In her 1998 memoir, Wallin recounted how the late Progressive Conservative adviser Dalton Camp once told her that Mulroney had contemplated offering Wallin a Senate seat in the 1980s to remove at least one troublesome journalist from the media pack hounding him during the national debate over the Canada-U.S. free trade deal.
Camp squelched the idea, Wallin wrote, “by reminding (Mulroney) what an even bigger pain I could be inside the fold as a Tory-appointed senator.”
The joke won’t seem as funny today, a generation later, to a deeply wounded Wallin and another Tory prime minister — one struggling to prevent the Senate scandal from dooming his government’s re-election plans.