A LAMENT FOR THE BLACKBERRY
How the devices let political journalists keep their thumbs on the pulse of political life in Ottawa.
Not so long ago, the Canadian political world would have been seriously shaken by the announcement that BlackBerry was ceasing to make its addictive devices.
But political life carried on this week with barely a glance at the end-of-an-era announcement about the winding-down of phone manufacturing from BlackBerry.
This column is that glance — a backward one, at just how big a role the little devices played in the political ups and downs of Ottawa a decade or so ago.
I believe I was the first reporter on Parliament Hill to own a BlackBerry. I was having an email conversation in early 2001with David Herle, one of the most senior strategists in the Paul Martin camp of the then fractious Liberal party. He told me he was writing to me from a plane he had just boarded.
How was that possible? I asked him. Herle, an “early adopter,” as the tech folks say, said he had one of these new gadgets called a BlackBerry and said I should go get one — they were extremely handy.
That very day, I went and picked one up from the local Bell store. It looked like a pager with a tiny keyboard. It had the reassuring weight of a small river stone and was curved at the back to fit into the palm of the hand.
Within days, it had changed my working life. I was no longer chained to my desk if I wanted to communicate with people on Parliament Hill. I could glance at incoming messages while doing interviews or having lunch or talking on the radio.
A year later, more and more MPs had them. Politicians were making regular pilgrimages to the BlackBerry plant in Waterloo to pay tribute to the makers of the wondrous device. The media was slower to catch on, but as colleagues started to see it was possible to talk to politicos while in meetings — even caucus meetings — my BlackBerry started to look less like an eccentric accessory.
The watershed moment for BlackBerry in Canadian politics came in early June 2002, when the simmering Liberal battle between Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien finally boiled over. I was at the union hall in Toronto, BlackBerry in hand, on the Friday night when Martin announced he was thinking about leaving Chrétien’s cabinet.
The editor of the Ottawa Citizen, where I was then writing a thrice-weekly column, asked how quickly I could file a story — how long it would take me to get to my computer to write, or a phone to dictate, if necessary. I had a better idea: I’d write the story on my BlackBerry while sitting in the car taking me back to the Liberal gathering at a hotel near Pearson airport, where Chrétien was due to speak.
As far as I know, this story was the first Canadian political report ever written on a BlackBerry. There would be many, many more, even in the next weeks, as the Chrétien-Martin battle was going public. Soon, all of Ottawa seemed to be thumb-typing their way through the drama.
Mike Duffy, then the host of a much-watched nightly politics show on CTV, started to punctuate his broadcasts with updated bulletins from his BlackBerry, reading aloud messages sent by sources inside closed meetings. That practice, entirely in keeping with the Duffy whom Canadians got to know better through the Senate saga, would result in a ban on MPs bringing BlackBerrys into caucus. I’m not sure that ban ever worked — we all still managed to keep in touch with MPs in the tumultuous weeks and months ahead in the Liberal Party.
Still, the Ottawa media lagged behind the politicians in picking up the BlackBerry habit. Even by the election of 2004, it took a lot of persuading to get media organizations to issue the devices to reporters and it was initially on a temporary basis. I recall having to argue with flinty managers at the Star that, no, we couldn’t function with just one BlackBerry in the bureau to be used by all on a sign-out basis.
Now, of course, Canadian political coverage revolves around reporters and their hand-held devices, used for email as well as shooting pictures and videos to be filed quickly online. Very few of those devices are BlackBerrys, though — iPhones are the preferred, ubiquitous gadgets, as is the case with the public at large.
I’m still carrying a BlackBerry, though — a Classic, with a keyboard, of course. I’ll probably keep carrying one, even if it will soon be manufactured by some other company.
BlackBerry’s future may remain uncertain, but these little devices changed how politics on Parliament Hill was covered — and conducted. In fact, if you’re reading this column on a hand-held device, you probably have BlackBerry to thank for it. sdelacourt@bell.net
A decade ago, the BlackBerry changed the way politics is covered — and conducted