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Taking a Risk with Celebrity Senators

The Senate of Canada is an odd place for famous people to end up. “An ornament to the legislature” is sometimes how a renowned public personality from a non-political field is described by those seeking a diplomatic turn of phrase for an exotic bird landed among the Senate’s flock of seasoned politicians. Quite often the reason for the celebrity’s surprise appearance is a complete mystery — is there some childhood connection with the prime minister, perhaps, or could it be some personified tribute to Canada’s secular religion, a symbolic veneration of hockey through senatorial beatification of one of the game’s star players?

Frank Mahovlich, for instance, left Timmins to become famous as “The Big M” in a blue Toronto Maple Leaf’s jersey many years ago, but in 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien persuaded Mahovlich to trade up and don the red maple leaf as a Liberal senator. During his ensuing fourteen-year season in Parliament’s second legislature, Mahovlich’s low-profile performance failed to match his efforts on ice, which had put him into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He fit quietly into the senators’ club, where rules were seldom more onerous than “sip your Scotch slowly and keep out of trouble.” He made few headlines, and certainly no bad ones.

When he skated into the sunset in January 2013, fellow senators bid seventy-five-year old Frank farewell. Needful of some noteworthy references for their tributes, they spoke about his accomplishments at the hockey rink winning six Stanley Cups, rather than any goals he’d scored in the political arena. Nobody even remembered Frank getting an assist on any of the plays in parliamentary match-ups. Only the Liberals’ leader in the Senate, the astute Nova Scotia lawyer James Cowan, realized it would benefit his party to recall one or two of Senator Mahovlich’s upper chamber breakaways.

“While he was never the first to intervene in committee hearings,” remarked Cowan kindly, “his thoughtful, probing questions always cut to the heart of issues and concerns of witnesses who appeared before us.” Cowan was drawing on his recollection of meetings of the Fisheries Committee, on which at one time he’d sat with Mahovlich. Fisheries was a natural fit for Maritimer Cowan, less so for the son of a northern Ontario gold mining town, although the Liberals’ celebrity senator did ask about more than just what the testifying fishermen used for bait. “For me, Frank Mahovlich represents, by his quiet dignity, by his thoughtful remarks, and by his faithful attendance to his duties in committee and in the chamber, a fine example of a first-class senator.” Indeed, what more could be expected?

For his own last play, departing Senator Mahovlich took an unaccustomed brief turn around the upper house ice. He thanked Jean Chrétien for appointing him, his assistants and research staff, his wife, Marie, and “everyone in the Senate and, indeed, in Parliament. I would like to bid adieu to the Senate and leave with these final words: I have had a wonderful time. Thank you.”

No requirement obliges senators to make public statements, or to remain in the spotlight. Most make negligible public impact, regardless of what they may believe about their newfound importance, once they’ve taken a seat inside Parliament’s upper house. It’s just that for celebrity senators, switching from big star attention to lacklustre performance, the contrast seems more noticeable.

Like Prime Minister Chrétien, Mr. Harper has plucked stars from the world of sports. His new senators in 2009 included Canada’s female athlete of the twentieth century, as voted by the Canadian Press and Broadcast News, and a highly respected hockey figure who spent more than two decades behind NHL benches coaching the Québec Nordiques, Detroit Red Wings, St. Louis Blues, and Montreal Canadiens, often deep into the playoffs.

Nancy Greene of British Columbia became famous as Canada’s snowflake darling in the 1968 Olympic Winter Games in Grenoble. Claiming gold and silver medals for her downhill triumphs, she showed the world that a Canadian had the right stuff to break the Europeans’ lock on alpine skiing. Internationally, Nancy won overall World Cup titles in 1967 and 1968, and her total of fourteen World Cup victories and Olympic medals is still a Canadian record. Here at home, during her nine-year skiing career, Nancy won seventeen Canadian championship titles. Then she promoted amateur sport and ski tourism, helped develop Whistler-Blackcomb and Sun Peaks, and in 1994 became Sun Peaks Resort’s skiing director. Her star status also continued to sparkle as Chancellor Emeritus of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of both the British Columbia and Canada Sports Halls of Fame, and of Canada’s Walk of Fame.

Jacques Demers led the Canadiens to a Stanley Cup championship in 1993, was twice awarded the Jack Adams trophy for coach-of-the-year, and in 1999 began his popular broadcasts analyzing Canadiens games as a commentator on RDS Television, a position that drew richly on his insider’s knowledge of the sport. Soon after being inducted into the Senate of Canada, Demers made known that he had achieved his career successes despite being effectively illiterate, highlighting not only the challenges of literacy but how a determined individual can fashion a worthwhile career by inventing ways to overcome hurdles, including unseen ones. Neither Demers nor Nancy Greene had political backgrounds, yet both seemed as adept as Frank Mahovlich in learning the rulebook for this new sport of senatorship. Whenever they did make news, which was infrequently, the story was not controversial.

The risk with a celebrity senator, though, is that instead of fading blandly away, he or she will continue to earn controversial headlines. After all, stars achieve notoriety precisely for not being like everybody else. In 2012, Parliamentary Press Gallery interest in problems over at the Senate was only tweaked because some disputed expense claims had been submitted by senators whom Prime Minister Harper had personally selected for their value as national celebrities.

Born in Charlottetown on May 27, 1946, Michael Dennis Duffy was driven to reach out to others.

Even before becoming a teen, he’d told his chums he wanted to become a radio reporter on Parliament Hill. At age sixteen, he was an active ham radio operator, and in his teens, he worked as a disc jockey on CFCY, playing many records from his own collection on air. After completing high school, he opened a fall season at St. Dunstan’s College, but burning to become a news reporter, Duffy quickly lost patience dallying around college classrooms studying humanities, so quit and simply crossed town to start reporting for the Charlottetown Guardian. In 1964, he traversed the Northumberland Straight to work for a mainland radio station in Amherst, Nova Scotia.

Burning for politics in the excitement of Centennial Year, Duffy used his 1967 vacation time and all his savings to get to the Progressive Conservative national leadership convention at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto with press accreditation, a sampler of his unabated determination to report major developing political stories. His next career move was further in the Ottawa direction, getting him from Amherst as far as Montreal’s CFCF as an assignment editor. By 1971, he finally landed where he’d said since a youth he would be — in Ottawa — working as a political reporter. Duffy had a job with CFRA radio.

Three years later, Duffy joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Joyfully working out of CBC’s Parliament Hill bureau, he covered politics for radio listeners between 1974 and 1977 before engineering a switch to The National newscast, becoming the CBC’s lead television reporter on Parliament Hill. He covered most major stories of the Trudeau, Clark, and Mulroney years, becoming well known and recognized across Canada as a national political journalist. But Mike Duffy also worked as a foreign correspondent, covering the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 for the CBC, one of the last journalists to leave Saigon before North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong insurgents swarmed into the city.

Back home, he settled into a rewarding life as a reporter. His personal life was in flux, however; he divorced his first wife in the early 1980s but remarried a few years later. The change was matched by a professional change of partners, too. Shifting networks in 1988, Duffy crossed over to private television’s CJOH-TV in Ottawa as host of a new Sunday Edition public affairs program, which aired until 1999. Leaving the CBC for a more prominent role at CTV was not unmitigated joy. He rankled at being kept further down the pecking order than the network’s well-respected Ottawa political reporter Craig Oliver, and he’d also upset his former close friends and colleagues at CBC Television, men like Peter Mansbridge and Brian Stewart, who felt Duffy had deserted the ship that first sailed him into prominence.

At CTV, Duffy progressed to become host and interviewer with CTV Newsnet, forerunner of the CTV News Channel. An avid interest in political doings and his cherubic ways when meeting others soon made him a parliamentary insider, easily able to entice prominent cabinet ministers onto his name-bearing shows, first Countdown with Mike Duffy and later, Mike Duffy Live. Duffy was a gregarious egalitarian, as readily on a first-name basis with all the security guards and secretaries on The Hill as with senior ministers of the Crown. His personal routes into and around the parliamentary precincts exceeded those of anybody else I know. On his travels, he picked up a great deal of info from improbable sources, which he integrated and stored away. Who knew what secrets he acquired about those who wield power in Canada?

Often Mike Duffy broadcast from the foyer immediately outside the House of Commons, impressive as a set for his TV show, but also highly convenient as a place for ministers and other prominent politicians to get wired with a microphone and slide onto a stool in front of the camera. Like a P.E.I. lobster fisherman with a procession of fine specimens entering his well-placed trap, Duffy was easily able to catch worthy interviewees and dispatch over the country’s airwaves a steady stream of live insider reports on the politics of the nation. Despite many setbacks, he’d determinedly engineered himself into the position he had aspired to from boyhood. The people he interviewed were the players who moved the country’s government and shook our politics, but the fact they would come and go on the TV screen while Mike Duffy’s was the constantly recurring face gave him national recognition and clout in political Ottawa.

As one who intermittently had a Duffy “interview,” I was seduced by his easy-going manner of questions, his rounded face that seemed uncharacteristic of television personalities, and his unthreatening manner. An Ontarian, I was acclimatized to an earnest approach to all issues, no matter how large or small. Duffy’s “down home” style reflected Prince Edward Island’s more relaxed manner and the Island’s down-to-earth dialogue. Off Parliament Hill and across Canada, the man’s pleasing ways accounted for Duffy’s enduring appeal. Television viewers found him as easy to take as comfort food. He was disarming. His enthusiasm was contagious. The twinkle in his eye never left you sure who was fooling whom.

After arriving on Parliament Hill in the early 1970s, Mike Duffy lived mostly in the National Capital Region. In 2003, he and wife Heather bought a home next to the Kanata Golf and Country Club for $293,000. He continued to bask in his popularity and influence, acquiring plenty of inside stories about Ottawa’s major players and sharing them, a celebrity raconteur, with colleagues in such power venues as Mama Teresa’s and Hy’s restaurants.

Duffy developed a taste, as befits a celebrity, for expensive cars and good clothes. In a tax court case, according to Jonathan Gatehouse of Maclean’s “Duffy had made some inventive attempts to lower his tax burden,” including a claim his wardrobe of costly clothes actually consisted of “uniforms” belonging to the CTV network. It was not an implausible contention, since he needed them when appearing on-camera, but as Gatehouse notes, “Revenue Canada disagreed and presented him with a bill for $21,000.”

Duffy attempted to parlay his celebrity standing into even higher acceptability with Canada’s establishment in a number of ways, such as by gaining investiture into the Order of Canada. His orchestrated campaign suffered irreparable damage, however, at the hands of Frank magazine. The publication was repeatedly, and tiresomely, on Duffy’s case — calling him “the Puffster,” running unflattering photos, noting his dwindling audience ratings, and once designating him “Eyesore of the Year.” Then a headline called Mike Duffy “A Fat-Faced Liar” after the broadcaster spread word he was going to the United States to speak in Durham at North Carolina’s renowned Duke University, but, as Frank disclosed, his true destination was instead a weight-loss clinic in the state. His prospects for the prestigious Order of Canada, which he’d evidently tried not once but three times to achieve, were apparently scuppered by this ongoing attack from Frank. Prime Minister Chrétien privately confided to Duffy that this sort of publicity had thwarted his nomination to the Order. Duffy sued Frank and won, reported Jonathan Gatehouse in Maclean’s, “an apology and a $30,000 out-of-court settlement.”

Despite this acrimonious history with Frank, when Duffy later became embroiled in behind-the-scenes power struggles at CTV, he did not hesitate to leak information about his rivals to the magazine. Now he would gratefully use his former nemesis as a new ally in serious battle to protect his reputation and livelihood. Clearly, Mike Duffy’s career-honed survival instinct enabled him to adapt for self-protection and change his stance dramatically if the stage upon which he played his starring role shifted.

The issues that percolated at this time between Duffy and CTV concerned disputes over expenses and contract provisions. When his personal behaviour was caricatured by fellow journalist John Fraser, or criticized by another journalist, Don Martin, or complained about formally by CTV producer Carl Langelier, Duffy was swift to strike back, either personally or through his lawyers. Colleagues learned to give his sensibilities wide berth. Complaints went uninvestigated. Transgressions remained unpunished. Even the Parliamentary Press Gallery, whose constitution prohibits members from using their position on The Hill to gain any benefit “except through journalism,” ignored Duffy’s decades-long campaign for the benefit of a prime ministerial appointment to the Senate. Rather than enforcing their only rule on ethical conduct, the journalists of the Press Gallery treated Duffy’s breach of their constitution as a joke.

In a country where thousands crave a seat in the Senate, Mike Duffy was unrivalled as Canada’s most ardent supplicant for appointment to the upper house. Everyone surmised that if he had any path into the Red Chamber, it would be across the red soils of Prince Edward Island. But the island province with just four Senate seats knows only infrequent vacancies. For Duffy’s progress, an incumbent P.E.I. senator had to hit retirement age seventy-five or die in office. “Every time Mike Duffy shakes my hand,” quipped Prince Edward Island Senator Heath Macquarie, “he takes my pulse!”

Over his many years on Parliament Hill, some half-dozen different prime ministers received Duffy’s barrage of appeals. Most everyone working around Parliament Hill referred to him, either with a chuckle or dismissively, as “the Senator.”

Brian Mulroney, aware of the standing joke, shocked reporters the day he announced that he’d been trying for years to persuade Mike Duffy to accept a seat in the Senate but the broadcaster had turned the prime minister down flat. Following a pause of stunned disbelief, Mulroney chuckled delivering his punch line, “It’s the speakership of the Senate he wants, or nothing at all. These guys from P.E.I. sure know what to hold out for!”

In the 1990s, it was Jean Chrétien’s turn to face the incessant battery of pitches by the wannabe senator. The former PM told the Charlottetown Guardian on October 30, 2013, that at least “a hundred times” he’d been ambushed. “When he was in the lobby of the House of Commons, he would say, ‘Hi prime minister. I’m ready, I’m ready!’”

Mr. 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 Free Trade Agreement “a valid examination of questions that needed answers,” Mr. Mulroney was irked by the negativity of her reporting, as Wallin would later write and as I heard at the time as a member of his parliamentary caucus.

“Maybe I should just appoint Wallin to the Senate,” he proposed, as a way of curbing what he considered her relentless attack on the trade initiative. Dalton Camp, a long-time Tory insider and past president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada who was working at this time in the Privy Council Office, tried to discern whether Mulroney was joking or hatching an ill-advised plan. Not taking any chances, Camp squelched the idea, reminding the PM “what an even bigger pain Wallin would be inside the fold as a Tory-appointed senator.”

If Pamela Wallin zeroed in on issues in ways political leaders disliked, that was just the quality of her journalism, which, when also factoring in her good looks and nation-wide popularity, made the CBC covet her. In a highly publicized 1992 coup, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hired Wallin away from CTV. The public broadcaster wanted her star status to boost and reposition the network’s entire approach to television news programming.

That fall, Pamela Wallin and Peter Mansbridge went on air as co-hosts of Prime Time News, featuring both news and interviews. The trail blazer had now become the first Canadian woman to co-anchor a nightly national television newscast. By 1994, CBC Television news, juggling for better ratings, rejigged the format so Mansbridge read the news after which Wallin hosted a magazine segment of interviews and special stories. It seemed a demotion. In 1995 Canadians and other news media were stunned when, as the result of further backstage struggles, the CBC replaced Wallin with Hanna Gartner. Non-CBC broadcasters, newspapers, and magazines across the country were full of the story. Wallin herself was now news.

Sidelined at the height of her career by CBC’s humiliating dismissal, she retreated home to recover. In Wadena, she found her legion of loyal supporters boycotting the CBC. She took her bearings, then responded by creating Pamela Wallin Productions and successfully launched a daily interview series, Pamela Wallin Live, which CBC Newsworld, and intermittently CBC’s main network, carried over the next four years. The engaging series featured Wallin interviewing newsmakers, celebrities, and other personalities with clarity and intimacy akin to CNN’s popular Larry King Live. She was famous again. Young women once more were inspired by her example of resiliency, first in getting to the top, and then finding ways of staying there.

Wallin was again a media success, but her life would make an unexpected change at this point. Following the horrors of the 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, when the world was aching to help wounded, devastated America, Canadians were at the forefront. In the early rush to support New Yorkers, a “Canada Loves New York” rally was pulled together in Manhattan. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who’d just come off a U.S. trade mission and was mindful of new opportunities for Canadian businesses in the conveniently close American markets, was present. So was Canada’s athletic foreign minister John Manley, who ran New York City’s marathon. A key rally organizer was their fellow Liberal Jerry Grafstein, mastermind of many campaign victories who’d been strategically placed in the Senate of Canada. The deeply moving, star-studded tribute in still-reeling New York City drew some twenty-six thousand Canadians, many travelling south by train, plane, and motor vehicles, including thirty-three buses from Toronto alone. The emotionally searing event with its throng of performing Canadian celebrities was hosted by popular Canadian television personality Pamela Wallin.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, immediately grasping the importance of embracing this new connection between Canadians and Americans, did not hesitate to appoint Ms. Wallin as Consul General of Canada to New York. Her mission was to knit together as many new relationships as possible in cultural projects, commercial initiatives, and foreign policy. Canada’s prime minister and foreign affairs minister both, having seen her skills on full display at the “Canada Loves New York” rally, embraced her potential to open doors in New York the way nobody else could.

Wallin was in her element, providing lavish entertainment, having her own car and driver, and staging an unending parade of prestigious receptions featuring notable Canadians to attract New York’s biggest players. She forged a wide array of important American contacts, opening doors for other Canadians. Among numerous Canadians witnessing this tour-de-force on behalf of our country was John S. Elder, Q.C., a prominent Toronto lawyer who four times accompanied clients to Wallin’s receptions to develop new business. “She was one very impressive lady,” he recalled in 2014. “She could make things happen.”

Canada’s consul general was leading a heady, exhilarating life in Manhattan, deploying an over-the-top style compared to other Canadian diplomatic pushes that, in comparison, were long on frugality but short on results. In 2005, Wallin bought an oversized studio unit at 118 East 60th Street, a proper “white glove” address with covered circular driveway, doorman, and concierge. The high-end custom renovations to her thirty-fourth-floor Lenox Hill residence rendered it as charming as it was functional.

Her expenses were a contentious subtext, but this was not news. At the CBC, where money flowed and budget management was so loose that at one point program director Trina McQueen had to face the public and explain some $28 million was missing and nobody could trace it, Wallin learned nothing about restraint with public dollars. For Toronto power lunches, to which other movers and shakers arrived by taxicab, she was delivered by a CBC limousine, and later fetched and whisked away by the shiny black vehicle. When she had her own production company, it was standard industry practice to run all expenses through it, since they related one way or another to the TV shows she was creating and selling. Now in Manhattan as consul general with a specific mission from the PM to forge new Canadian-American business links, she just shifted from high gear into overdrive. Wallin excelled in her social and cultural task of bringing American high-rollers into a Canadian orbit, creating a positive glow about Canada by imparting the sense that our country had verve on a par with New York’s.

Officials in the Department of External Affairs “had their hair on fire,” as one insider told me, trying to control Pamela Wallin’s spending, driving departmental comptrollers to complain to the Prime Minister’s Office that she was throwing around money like no other diplomat even knew how. This apparent concern for financial rectitude disguised their real agenda, however. Wallin was getting results that bread-and-butter career diplomats could not even dream about, and jealousy was a factor. But appointment of a non-diplomat to a foreign posting was an especially sore point. The reason for complaining directly to the PMO about Pamela Wallin’s expenses was that it was a choice way to rap Mr. Chrétien’s knuckles under the pretence of financial management.

While that sideshow played out, though, Wallin would continue in what by now had become an indelible pattern in her successful career — incurring costs while getting the job done and, as an after-thought, either tossing receipts to somebody else to process or accumulating them to deal with “someday” as part of her never-finished paperwork. What a nuisance!

Two other patterns had emerged that were by this stage also definable hallmarks of the Wallin style: air travel and a whirlwind work schedule. Wallin could never have had the career she did without civil aviation. Wadena is a fine town, with the best wildfowl festival anywhere, but, two hours east of Saskatoon, it is not a crossroads of the world. From her teen years when she left town for high school, then university, then working at the penitentiary, next getting into broadcasting, Wallin was operating within the province, travelling by bus or driving her own car. After that, getting from Saskatchewan to the next places she worked, in Ottawa and Toronto, or flying down to Buenos Aires to cover the Falklands War for CTV, was only possible by airplane. Across Canada and around the world, Wallin’s continuing career in television reporting put her into aircraft travelling with prime ministers, covering dramatic developments, and staying connected with the many people in her peripatetic life. As colleagues and friends routinely joked, “Pam lives on an airplane.”

She knew airport facilities like the layout of her own home. She knew airline schedules by heart. She commuted between Ottawa and Toronto for many years as a national broadcaster, and added New York flights to the circuit, first as consul general and after 2006 as senior adviser on Canadian affairs to the president of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas. Pamela Wallin continued flying to New York for three days’ work a week from Toronto, and then from Ottawa after becoming a senator in 2008. This pattern was maintained for two more years, as she continued to hold this position while also working as a parliamentarian. As a senator, of course, she was also now flying to other spots in Canada and abroad — as she had always done with CTV and CBC — to pursue her work.

Wallin not only lived on airplanes but found this form of travel ideal for her habitual networking with our country’s movers and shakers. She also used flights as her airborne office. “As I settled in for my third flight of the week,” she wrote in 2009 for her Foreword to a book I was publishing of Patricia M. Boyer’s newspaper columns, “I found that rare moment of quiet and calm, and therefore the opportunity to peruse a collection of columns written by my friend Patrick Boyer’s mother.” Pamela Wallin penned a reflective and uplifting message for the book. The quality of her effort was matched by her generosity in reading the manuscript and adding her prominent name to The March of Days: Optimistic Realism through the Seasons of Life, in tribute to a fellow woman journalist with Saskatchewan roots, my mother.

Her capacity for work overwhelmed many people. Sometimes I thought Wallin should just take a break and sort out her priorities. She seemed to be doing so much and, being constantly on the go, raced against herself as much as the clock. But this pattern was deep-seated. At university, she’d been involved in so many projects that “my life was one unending blur.” In broadcasting, she’d rise in the middle of the night to prepare the early morning telecast. In the urgency of her stop-watch-tight routines, Wallin’s need for efficiency often led her to say to others, “I’ll do it myself.” She knew how because over her career she’d learned just about every task that journalism incorporates, and she understood it would be fastest in the brief time available to complete something crucial — check a source, cue up some audio — herself. But often, colleagues instead heard her to be saying, “I can do it better than you.” She could perform miracles, yet sometimes in an off-putting way.

In July 2006, completing her half-decade mission as consul general in New York, Wallin joined the board of Gluskin Sheff & Associates, a small but prosperous Bay Street investment and wealth management firm. The following month she became a director of Bell Globemedia, multimedia owner of the Globe and Mail newspaper and CTV television network. In 2007, she added the Calgary-based exploration company Oilsands Quest, Inc. to her roster of directorships. In March 2007, she became Chancellor of the University of Guelph. In 2008, adding a couple more corporate directorships, Wallin joined the board of Porter Airlines and Jade Tower, an antenna site and tower company. She became a member of the advisory board of BMO Harris Bank, and the board of an obscure entity called Ideas Council. With income and honorariums from these many positions, Wallin was financially very comfortable.

She worked just as hard in charitable organizations for which she received no payment, co-chairing the National Strategy Council for the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, and other volunteer boards such as the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. She became a volunteer member of the Advisory Council of Breakout Educational Network, a non-profit public policy organization that I’d founded in 1995 with Manitoban Kitson Vincent.

Along the way, Wallin garnered some fourteen honorary doctorates and fifteen national and international awards, including being inducted into the Canadian Broadcasting Hall of Fame, receiving a national Visionary Award, being awarded the Toastmasters’ “Golden Gavel,” and twice being recognized by Queen Elizabeth for her public service and achievements.

If Canada had a celebrity, it was Pamela Wallin. Her work in New York had added an important international affairs component to her already impressive life. In 2007, Prime Minister Harper asked her to serve as a member of his independent advisory panel on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, a high-level group chaired by John Manley. Their work concluded in 2008. In February that year, Pamela Wallin was inducted into the Order of Canada, our country’s highest civilian honour.

By year end, Prime Minister Harper asked Pamela Wallin if she believed in Senate reform. When she said “Yes,” he invited her to become a member of his Conservative caucus as a senator. The people of Wadena took even greater pride in seeing her name on their water tower.

Born November 11 in 1974 in the Québec town of Maniwaki, Patrick Brazeau grew up off-reserve with his father, Marcel, an Aboriginal Canadian, living over his father’s grocery store, Dépanneur Brazeau.

Originally, Maniwaki was on land that formed part of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Reserve, where Patrick’s grandmother had been born, a full-status Algonquin Indian. Since then, the municipality had been carved out of the reserve and developed adjacent to it. When Patrick’s grandmother fell in love with a non-native and married him, she was forced off the reserve. The Indian Act stipulated that native women who married non-natives forfeited their Indian status and had to quit their reserved homeland. The policy was designed to contain Indians, not see them multiply in number. She was, to Canadian law, no longer an Indian.

In 1985, the Mulroney government amended the Indian Act to end this discrimination against Indian women. Among the many thousands touched by this reform was the Brazeau family in Maniwaki. The Indian Act change applied not only to Indian women but their families, too. Eleven years after he’d been born Algonquin, Patrick Brazeau became an Indian in law as well as in fact.

Patrick’s father did not want to move back to the reserve because he had his store in town and was conveniently settled in Maniwaki. The Kitigan Zibi reserve is large. It borders on Maniwaki at its southwest edge, is bounded along its western edge by the Eagle River, the Desert River to its north, and the Gatineau River on its east, making the heavily forested 184 square kilometers, with its many lakes and streams, the biggest Algonquin Nation in Canada, both in area and in population. Today, about half of Kitigan Zibi’s three thousand members live off the reserve, while the others enjoy a well-developed community of grocery stores and hardware markets, a gas station, elementary and secondary schools with a library accessible to all, and gift shops. The reserve’s sense of oneness is further strengthened by a local radio station, a day-care facility, the community hall, a health centre, police department, youth centre, the wildlife centre, and an educational and cultural centre.

As a young person growing up in Maniwaki, Patrick would daydream about his life and future, but in 1985 he had to confront a defining reality he faced as an Indian in Canada. He’d been an Algonquin non-status Indian living off reserve one day, and the next, because of Parliament’s change to the Indian Act, he’d become an Algonquin status Indian living off reserve. The rights he’d acquired overnight imparted a lesson in absurdity to young Patrick. Its impact would become manifest over the coming two decades, in his radical reinterpretation of established Canadian policy governing Aboriginal peoples.

Part of young Brazeau’s view resulted from the fact his theoretical upgrade in legal status meant next to nothing in real terms. The Government of Canada funded the system of reserves, and, generally speaking, chiefs within that structure along with their families and supporters were among the principal beneficiaries. Off-reserve natives like the Brazeaus, despite now gaining Indian status, were effectively excluded from this system and its financial benefits. Few spoke up for off-reserve natives, despite the fact they considerably outnumber their on-reserve counterparts. If democracy incorporated majority rule, and if fair government provided the greatest good for the greatest number, then the Indian Act system, in Patrick Brazeau’s eyes, was neither democratic nor fair.

Patrick could do nothing about the situation at the time, though, and so he simply lived his life. He became fluent in Algonquin, French, and English. Strong and athletic, he played hockey and trained in karate. After graduating from local schools, Patrick went to Ottawa and enrolled at HMCS Carleton, a unit of the Canadian Forces Naval Reserve, which each year trains about 230 sailors. Next, he completed studies in social sciences at Gatineau’s CEGEP, Heritage College. Then his desire to realign human rights, Aboriginal issues, and the outdated and dysfunctional regime imposed by the Indian Act led him to the University of Ottawa to study civil law.

In 2001, Brazeau abandoned legal studies for work with the Native Alliance of Québec, an affiliate of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, which represents native Canadians living off-reserve. He now saw a more direct way to advance Aboriginal interests, working for repeal of the Indian Act and implementing a new structure for First Nations’ governance that would be more respectful of all indigenous communities.

Working at CAP exhilarated Patrick. Other people found him clear-spoken and intelligent. His powerhouse appearance — strong face, radiator smile, athletic build, piercing blue eyes, and long black hair — also helped attract others to him, and even gave Brazeau easy extra income as a model. As an appealing spokesperson for the organization, Patrick was named vice-chief in 2005.

The congress, of which he was now a chief, represents the interests of nine provincial and territorial affiliates, whose members include more than eight hundred thousand off-reserve Indian, Inuit, and Métis people. Such a voice as CAP’s causes tensions within the Aboriginal community, however; the Assembly of First Nations, whose chiefs and band council governments speak for some 630 First Nations communities living on reserves, see themselves as the true lineal inheritors of Aboriginal rights connected to the land, and, thus, as the legitimate voice for Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Because over half of Canada’s status and non-status Indians don’t live on reserves, though, CAP says their interests are not effectively represented by the Assembly of First Nations. Many, it noted, did not choose to become dispossessed, but for generations had been driven into limbo by the Indian Act or forced to make the difficult decision of leaving their reserves to escape the poverty found there and to earn a livelihood or make a career. Moreover, because most of the $9 billion spent each year by the Government of Canada on Aboriginal programs and services goes to the reserves, CAP says this imbalanced allocation short-changes the off-reserve majority of Canadian Aboriginals. The two First Nations organizations are strong rivals.

On November 25, 2005, the Liberal government of Paul Martin, having spent a year and a-half consulting CAP, AFN, other national Aboriginal groups, and provincial and territorial governments, agreed at a meeting in Kelowna to boost funding in a big way. There would be an additional $5.1 billion over five years to improve housing, education, health services, and economic development for Aboriginal peoples.

Three days later, Prime Minister Martin’s government was defeated in the Commons and a general election called for January 23, 2006. The PM made the so-called “Kelowna Accord” a centrepiece of his campaign. It embodied stark differences between Liberal and Conservative philosophy, respectively represented by Mr. Martin and Stephen Harper, leader of the Official Opposition. The Liberals, devoted to meeting Aboriginal interests by providing for specific aching needs, believed spending more money was essential. The Conservatives, devoted to the general imperative of reducing Canada’s national debt, believed $9 billion a year was plenty. Instead of spending more money, already in short supply for a Canadian government with crippling annual deficits, Stephen Harper believed deeper change was needed. The Conservatives wanted to ensure that public funds already committed led to better results in the lives of First Nations peoples, and as part of that, would seek to establish financial accountability in band-council governance, along lines similar to the budget discipline required of municipal governments. The Conservatives would “support the principles and objectives” of the Kelowna Accord, said Mr. Harper, but would not commit to spend another $5.1 billion.

Stephen Harper’s senior policy adviser, American-born and American-educated political scientist Tom Flanagan, had come to believe it necessary to revamp Aboriginal governance and the reserve system. In his 2000 book entitled First Nations? Second Thoughts, the political scientist at the University of Calgary described the reserve system as “anomalous and dysfunctional.” He said, “Governments should help the reserves to run as honestly and efficiently as possible, but should not flood them with even more money.” He added that government should focus attention and money on improving the lives of the eight hundred thousand Aboriginals who live off the reserves. In this, Tom Flanagan and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples held carbon copies of each other’s position.

On January 10, less than two weeks before voting day in the 2006 general election, Stephen Harper called for “a realignment of federal Aboriginal expenditures to include appropriate and adequate distribution of resources in order to accommodate the needs of off-reserve and non-status Indians.” Only days before balloting began, CAP endorsed the Conservatives. A letter signed by National Chief Dwight Dorey and Vice-Chief Patrick Brazeau called Mr. Harper’s position a “promising and respectful alternative to the status quo.” On election night, January 23, Conservatives gathered in a Calgary hotel, and among those present, celebrating with prime minister–elect Stephen Harper the party’s break-through victory at the polls, was Chief Dorey.

This Conservative-Congress alliance, founded on mutual agreement about a fundamental Canadian policy, meant the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’s voice in Ottawa would now be heard more attentively than that of its rival, the Assembly of First Nations. In November 2006, the Harper government increased CAP’s annual budget from $5 million to $6.3 million, ensuring the Congress would have the resources needed for their common cause.

The Conservatives had gained strong backing from one of Canada’s main Aboriginal groups, which meant the Harper government could take fresh approaches to Aboriginal issues “without appearing to be indifferent to native suffering,” noted Ira Basen of CBC News, “or supporting the assimilationist positions advanced by Tom Flanagan.” Even though CAP had been at the Kelowna conference, added Basen, “the Accord itself was a one-page document that no one had actually signed their names to,” a fact that allowed the new government to say it was not bound by the agreement, making it easier for “Patrick Brazeau to help Stephen Harper drive a stake into it.”

In February 2006, National Chief Dwight Dorey stepped down, and Brazeau’s swift ascent continued as he was promoted to the position of acting chief. At CAP’s annual convention that November, delegates keen for a new direction formalized the move, unanimously electing Patrick Brazeau their national chief.

From this country-wide platform, Chief Brazeau accelerated his radical campaign to dismantle the Indian reserve system across Canada, abolish the Indian Act, and reconstitute the traditional Aboriginal nations.

Chief Brazeau, speaking to a parliamentary committee about the Accord in November 2006, the same month his organization received significant increased funding from the Conservative government, said that while the process for the agreement seemed to be inclusive, the reality was that “Kelowna provided false hope for grassroots people — real people, in real need — while enriching organizations and the Aboriginal elite.” The chief echoed the Conservative critique that the accord did not demand enough accountability for the billions of dollars that would flow to First Nations, nor break down how much would stay on reserves or go to natives living off reserves.

“The reserve system as we know it is broken and needs to be replaced,” Brazeau had already told Ron Corbett in a 2007 Ottawa Citizen feature article. “Billions of dollars are poured every year into that system and what do we have to show for it? Reserves that are scandals, that’s what.”

Chief Brazeau’s bold campaign to advance his message of a new day for Canada’s First Peoples incorporated filmed messages, newspaper op-ed features, radio and television interviews, speeches, work at the United Nations, and addresses to such international conferences as a Chilean gathering on problems facing “urban indigenous peoples.” Everywhere in Canada he told audiences that “anybody serious” about solving the problems on Canada’s reserves “needed to get rid of a lot of chiefs.”

The Indian Act should be replaced by “more progressive legislation,” Brazeau argued, not only to reconstitute true Indian Nations, but also “to reflect the tenets of modern-day governance.” Such reforms were needed “to end the status quo which overwhelmingly supports a system of Indian Reserves where poverty and hopelessness remain pervasive.”

In tandem with abolishing the Indian Act, Chief Brazeau advocated the amalgamation of many First Nations communities “to restore the traditional Aboriginal nations,” consolidating the 633 native communities in Canada into perhaps sixty or eighty. Why did it make sense to keep living on the scattered parcels of mostly marginal land onto which non-Aboriginals had relegated them? He envisaged how the ten Algonquin reserves in Québec and Ontario would become one, with something similar for the Cree people, the Mohawks, and other Indian nations across the land.

Upon re-establishing the traditional structure of Aboriginal societies, to help harmonize these communities among themselves and create First Nations that were no longer divided and weakened but indigenous nations of self-reliant peoples, Patrick Brazeau envisaged a far more rational and responsive allocation of the nearly $10 billion in federal funding going to Aboriginal programs and services in Canada every year. This would include substantial redirection of resources to natives living off reserve: a large, ignored, generally impoverished, and trouble-plagued component of Canadian society.

“The lion’s share of the federal government’s more than $9-billion investment in Aboriginal programs and services supports the system of Indian Act reserves,” Chief Brazeau reminded policy makers in an op-ed explanation of his program for the Ottawa Citizen. “Yet Statistics Canada census data show that 79 percent of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples live away from reserve communities.” In the article, the chief complimented Prime Minister Stephen Harper for having “committed” his Conservative government to addressing this imbalance. The chief knew his goal of fundamental reordering of Canada’s governance structure for Aboriginal peoples would require a prime minister’s full support.

The Prime Minister’s Office, tasked with developing the Conservative government’s revamped approach to First Nations, which included band council financial management and budget accountability similar to that of municipal councils across Canada, took due note of Chief Brazeau’s clearly articulated agenda. It was rare to find an Aboriginal leader with clear-eyed analysis and candid expression of views about a fundamental Canadian issue that, in political Ottawa, was a toxic topic. It was also encouraging that Chief Brazeau’s program coincided on key points with recommendations of the PM’s senior adviser, Tom Flanagan.

Right on cue, many chiefs across Canada, whose positions derive from the status quo that brash young Brazeau was vigorously challenging, responded in an orchestrated attack. Their power and income, flowing from the Indian Act and existing patterns of federal government funding, would be undermined if such radical ideas gained traction, let alone ever got implemented. Brazeau’s message was that Canada’s Aboriginal communities needed to be brought under “the tenets of modern-day governance.” Representatives of band councils and the Assembly of First Nations leadership flooded Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice with letters. They also began a wider campaign to derail Patrick Brazeau, knowing the easiest way to stop a message is to discredit

its messenger.

As radical and threatening as CAP’s national chief appeared, Patrick Brazeau had not come up with his plan to overcome the stagnant life for many of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples on his own. Nor, for that matter, had Tom Flanagan. A decade earlier, the largest study ever conducted into the Aboriginal condition in Canada had reached similar conclusions. The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney had not been content only to restore full legal status to Indian women and their families, but had more boldly laid the groundwork for far-reaching changes by launching a full-scale Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Its final report, which reached Parliament in November 1996, recommended dismantling the reserve system and reconstituting Canada’s traditional Aboriginal nations.

These proposals had been distilled from years of hearings in First Nations communities across Canada, and included active participation by respected elders. Yet strong opposition to such change by those entrenched in and benefiting from the existing system, when combined with the Liberal government’s reluctance to move ahead with recommendations of a review it had not initiated, consigned the ideas to oblivion — at least until Chief Patrick Brazeau gave them fresh wings.

As Ron Corbett noted, “Aboriginal people in Canada are an increasingly young, displaced, populace. Yet when the federal government funds Aboriginal programs and services, it continues to pour eight dollars out of every nine into a reserve system that was devised in the nineteenth century. To people like Patrick Brazeau, that’s like maintaining a fleet of wooden ships when the Bismarck is bearing down on you.”

Clearly, Brazeau knew the stakes were high and that the status quo could easily lead to real instability. This view found further support elsewhere; Canada’s security and intelligence services were warning the Government of Canada about rising threats within the country from militant First Nations groups, and internationally recognized insurgency expert Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Bland, retired from the Canadian Forces, was writing his warning on the same subject, a novel entitled Uprising, which I published in 2010.

For Patrick, it was obvious that the kind of change he sought required political action at the centre. Increasingly, he entertained the idea of pursuing that course of action himself. “I may take a stab at federal politics some day and run for elected office in the mainstream,” he explained to Corbett near the end of their interview. “I’ve thought about that.”

While working for fundamental change, CAP’s national chief also focused on specific measures that supported his vision of Aboriginal people acting in society to achieve their goals, not only on a tribal basis, but as individuals. Brazeau sought to inculcate a vital sense of personal responsibility for one’s own future because he felt strongly about self-sufficiency for Aboriginal peoples as individuals, not only as communities, which is particularly important for the majority of isolated natives living off-reserve. He fought to repeal section 67 of the Canadian Human Rights Act because it stipulated that communal rights under the Indian Act superseded the rights of individuals under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Brazeau argued this impeded the individual human rights of Aboriginals and was particularly detrimental to Aboriginal women. In this stance, CAP’s national chief was supported editorially by the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and other major organs of public opinion.

On June 20, 2008, Chief Brazeau happily applauded passage of the Harper government’s Bill C-21, which repealed section 67.Viewing this as another step toward the larger goal of reforming Aboriginal governance, he suggested this extension of human rights protection by the Harper government “will ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Indian Act itself.”

Before the year was out, Prime Minister Stephen Harper invited the highly visible spokesperson for marginalized Aboriginal Canadians to become a senator. It was one of the PM’s most strategic appointments. CAP’s national chief could continue to press, with whatever additional resources and status the Senate of Canada offered, alternative views that challenged positions held by Liberals and the Assembly of First Nations.

Chief Brazeau, who had contemplated federal politics “one day,” radiated his sunniest smile and agreed.

Prime Minister Harper believed the lustrous presence of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau would enhance the Conservative Party and even, as a side-effect, the Senate itself.

In a tightly controlled Parliament, moreover, he reasoned that senators, like MPs in the House of Commons, no longer needed to possess much legislative prowess. If their attendance in committee was sufficient to provide quorum, and if they supplied the expected votes in committee and in the chamber whenever summoned by the Conservative whip, that would suffice as far as Senate duties mattered.

Lacking prior political experience would not serve as a hindrance to being a member of Canada’s highest legislative chamber because any decisions it made about legislation would continue to be orchestrated from the Prime Minister’s Office. No real thinking or independent action as law-makers was required, or even wanted. The three celebrity senators could devote themselves instead and to much better purpose advancing the Conservative Party and Conservative policies in Canada’s wider reaches beyond Parliament Hill.

The prime minister had yet to discover how taking a chance on famous self-starters would be like gambling with the family’s grocery money.