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CHAPTER 1
AT THE BEGINNING
On Wednesday, November 6, 1867, official Ottawa was abuzz with excitement. A nineteen-gun salute from the Ottawa Field Battery greeted Viscount Charles Stanley Monck, the forty-eight-year-old governor general, as he arrived to preside over the first session of the new nation's Parliament. After the formalities of swearing in MPs and the Cabinet ended, Sir John A. Macdonald, the fifty-three-year-old prime minister picked by Monck for the role, moved the appointment of the first speaker of the House. Seconding the motion was Macdonald's seatmate, Sir George-Etienne Cartier. Then, Joseph Dufresne, the Quebec Conservative MP from Montcalm, rose in his seat and, addressing the House in French, protested the election of Honourable James Cockburn of Northumberland West. In the words of the Toronto Globe the next day, Dufresne complained, "the gentleman could not speak the French language. He thought it was to be regretted that, at the inauguration of the new system, greater respect was not shown to Lower Canada in this matter. He looked upon this as a matter of national feeling." Without further discussion, the House then went about its business in English. Along with the report, the Globe, a partisan Liberal outlet in its day, used an adjacent column in the November 7 paper to condemn Macdonald for using the speaker's office as a reward for a loyal but unpromising follower.
So much for a smooth start for the first Parliament.
The Globe report was significant: it affirmed the vital role of the press gallery in national affairs, since there were no official records of debates 32 Power, Prime Ministers, and the Press — known as Hansard — until 1875. Indeed, the Parliamentary Press Gallery is as old as Confederation. While the great fire of 1916 that razed the Parliament Buildings destroyed most of the official records, the first volume of the House of Commons Journals mentions the "reporters' room." In 1872 the Canadian Illustrated News carried artist Edward Jump's sketch of the press gallery in the Commons. In fact, pre-Confederation reporters covering the Parliament of Upper Canada actually worked out of the still-under-construction Parliament Buildings in 1866 — an anniversary the press gallery marked with the publication of a retrospective, Sharp Wits & Busy Pens, in May 2016.
The tradition of covering legislatures dates back to the colonial days. John Bushell published the first issue of his Halifax Gazette in 1752. Quebec's pioneering paper, La Gazette, appeared in 1764. Journalists had reported on political debates in Quebec City since 1792 and established La Tribune de la Presse Quebecoise on November 18, 1871. Etienne Parent, the young intellectual who was the guiding spirit of the nationaliste paper Le Canadien, later served as a senior Cabinet official for the Province of Canada, moving as the seat of government shifted among Kingston, Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec City between 1843 and 1859 — and submitting occasional articles to his paper. Other pre-Confederation journalists led the fight for press freedoms and reform. William Lyon Mackenzie, destined to mount the Upper Canada Rebellion against the Family Compact, wrote in his Colonial Advocate: "Wherever the press is not free, the people are poor, abject, degraded slaves."
Halifax editor Joseph Howe of the Novascotian, George Brown of the Globe, and Parent were among the influential journalists who later played strong, controversial political roles in shaping Canada. Of the ninety-eight-member Province of Canada delegation attending the Charlottetown Conference in 1864, twenty-three were journalists. As educator George Grant observed in 1828, referring to Howe's activities, "At this time in the history of the world, it was almost impossible to be an editor without being a politician also."
And how the members of the press gallery could play politics. Thomas White Jr., called "the Father of the Gallery" by the Canadian Illustrated News in 1875, bought the Hamilton Spectator and the Gazette in Montreal before getting elected and becoming Macdonald's influential minister of the interior. Henri Bourassa left Laurier's Cabinet and founded Le Devoir in Montreal, later turning over direction of the paper to a gallery veteran, Georges Pelletier. In the 1900s, two English giants of journalism — friendly with the party in power — graduated from the press gallery to become editors of powerful newspapers: John Willison of the Globe in Toronto and John Dafoe of the Free Press in Winnipeg. In almost a direct line, Dafoe's figurative descendants over the decades continued the close association and influence with Liberal governments, including Grant Dexter of the Winnipeg Free Press, Bruce Hutchison of the Vancouver Sun, and Blair Fraser of Maclean's. For the Conservatives, there was the irrepressible Grattan O'Leary, who rose from poverty in the Gaspe to the editorship of the Ottawa Journal and was a confidant of three Tory leaders. In an era when there was no Twitter, Snapchat, or email, these men wrote diaries and exchanged letters with leaders and each other, providing a trove of archival material for historians about their thinking and their actions.
From all of that, we know that early press gallery members were a highly partisan lot. Indeed, the seating plan mirrored the one on the floor of the Commons below. London Free Press editor Arthur Ford, who covered his first Parliament in 1907 for the former Winnipeg Telegram, recalled in his memoir, As the World Wags On: "When I first went to the capital, the Liberals were in power and sat, of course, to the right of the Speaker. The representatives of the Liberal press sat in the press gallery also to the right." When the Conservatives won the 1911 election, the Tory reporters swapped with the Liberals and moved over to the speaker's right. So-called independent journalists were relegated to the cheap seats.
Until Laurier's time, governments ladled out information — even including election calls — as patronage only to their friends in the gallery, the "ministerial press," as they were known. Willison, who started in Ottawa in 1886 as a correspondent for the Liberal-leaning Globe, complained about his pro-Tory rivals having access to official documents before they were tabled in Parliament. "Their dispatches would be in the telegraph office before less favoured rivals could examine the reports," he wrote in Reminiscences Political, and Personal, his 1919 autobiography. "It was one way a grateful ministry paid newspapers for their support."
And what support. Ford recalled that one of his freelance gigs was filing to the Fredericton Gleaner, then owned by a rabid Conservative, James Crocket. Prime Minister Borden had just finished outlining his proposals for the controversial naval assistance bill to provide England with cash. Wilfrid Laurier's response was highly anticipated, given the opposition in his party ranks and the anti-Imperial furor in Quebec. Laurier happened to follow Sir Douglas Hazen, a Conservative Cabinet minister who was a close friend of owner Crocket. When Ford asked his Halifax desk how much copy they wanted on Laurier, the response came back: "Ignore Laurier entirely. Send Hazen verbatim."
That was the way it was, mainly because the parties owned the major papers. Macdonald invested his own money in repeated newspaper ventures that supported Conservative policies, including the Mail and then the Empire in Toronto. So did Laurier, who worked to assure the welfare of Liberal-leaning papers. At one point Laurier learned of a plot by Conservative friends of Macdonald to acquire the pro-Liberal La Presse so they could malign Laurier in the 1910 election. Laurier persuaded the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to back out of the acquisition and then leaned on two of his railway friends to buy La Presse out from under the conspirators. Laurier did attempt to change the channel on access by offering off-the-record sessions with reporters from Conservative as well as Liberal papers. Revealingly, a Globe Ottawa correspondent protested, urging Laurier to maintain the previous practice of partisan publicity. He did not — on the advice of the reporter's boss, Laurier's friend Willison.
From the beginning, journalists were active players in the government of the day, forming an intricate interlocking directorship between press and politicians. One season they might work in the press gallery, another time they would be in Cabinet or the back room. Quebec journalists would bounce between federal and provincial politics and the gallery. White, a respected parliamentary reporter, got Macdonald's backing in his takeover of the Hamilton Spectator. Later White and his brother Richard bought the Gazette in Montreal and turned it into the leading Conservative voice in the new country — helping Macdonald to secure his hold on Quebec. From that base, Thomas White won election to Parliament and became known for his prodigious work as Macdonald's confidant and, until his death from pneumonia in 1888, possible successor.
Likewise, lawyer-turned-journalist Ernest Pacaud encouraged Wilfrid Laurier to get into politics in 1874. Laurier, in turn, designated his friend as editor of L'Électeur, the newspaper the prime minister established with his wealthy friends as a counterpoint to Le Canadien, then run by Conservative journalist/ideologue Joseph-Israel Tarte. Tarte later became Laurier's public works minister. In 1896 Tarte and fellow Liberal MP Henri Bourassa were the federal negotiators in the compromise settlement of the Manitoba Schools Question, allowing limited access to French-language education.
In the beginning, reporters would travel to Ottawa for the sessions, returning home after three or four months. In the dusty old lumber town, liquor flowed with the political gossip at the legendary Russell House on the corner of Sparks and Elgin Streets, which predated the Chateau Laurier as a favourite lodging for the "sessionals" who could afford it. Stained-glass versions of provincial coats of arms graced a dome over the opulent rotunda. Liveried servants discreetly worked the dining room to the dulcet strains of the house orchestra.
Paul Bilkey, the Toronto Telegram correspondent at the turn of the twentieth century, noted in his memoir: "It used to be said that the Dominion was governed more from the lobbies and rooms of the Russell House than from the ministerial offices or from the House of Commons."
Journalist Augustus Bridle assured female readers of the Canadian Magazine, "Here you are more likely to discover the man you want than almost anywhere else in Ottawa, except up at Parliament." Indeed, the Russell was the temporary abode of senior politicians and bureaucrats, including Laurier, who penned letters from his bed-sitting room to his beloved mistress, Emilie Lavergne. Lesser mortals settled into cramped rooming houses with no running water.
But even for the governing class, the capital of the new dominion, Queen Victoria's geographical compromise between Upper and Lower Canada, offered few comforts. Goldwin Smith, the snobbish British historian and journalist, dismissed the place as "a subarctic lumber village transformed by royal mandate into a political cockpit." There was mud everywhere in the spring. In winter, Arctic blasts blew into poorly insulated homes and ice coated wooden sidewalks. In her telling period look at post-Confederation Ottawa, journalist Sandra Gwyn wrote: "Stinking piles of garbage and 'night soil' accrued behind houses all winter, to be hauled away in April, and dumped on the river ice."
In the summer, there was little relief from oppressive heat, and the lack of running water made the stench from toilets unbearable. For the political class and their followers in the press contingent, elegant balls at Government House and elaborate house parties staged by the gentry provided some respite. The revelling often continued until dawn. But, as Gwyn put it:
Even at the most elegant parties, the air was dank with the smell of stale perspiration. Teeth, even in rosebud mouths, were frequently snaggled and discoloured. The roads were full of mud and manure; the wooden sidewalks covered with clots of spittle, tobacco juice or worse.
To be sure, there was violence and menace. In the wee hours of April 7, 1868, Prime Minister Macdonald heard a visitor outside his house shouting that Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the journalist and passionate representative of Montreal Irish in Parliament, had been fatally shot. The planks outside the boarding house where McGee stayed were stained with his blood. The owner of the house was Queen's Printer George Desbarats; he erected a plaque in McGee's honour outside his nearby printing shop. Nine months after McGee's assassination, a fire burned Desbarats's shop to the ground. Too discouraged to rebuild, he moved his family to Montreal and launched the Canadian Illustrated News. According to his great-grandson, the late journalist and journalism professor Peter Desbarats, family folklore had it that Fenian rebels, upset by McGee's constant warnings about their violent ways, torched the place in revenge.
Still, there was an untroubled intimacy to life in the capital. Edmund Meredith, the prominent journalist turned public servant, regularly received morning instructions from his minister when he walked past his front door on his way to work. Guglielmo Marconi, in town to lobby for federal funding of his wireless station in Cape Breton, caused a stir one day when he strolled through the lobby of the Russell. All the MPs and senators were housed in common offices in the Centre Block, within hailing distance of the press gallery. The Globe's M.O. Hammond, a Willison appointment, met with Laurier for a private chat shortly after he reported for duty in the press gallery in 1903. Later when news reached Ottawa that England had failed to secure a good deal for Canada in the Alaska boundary talks, Hammond went around to Laurier's office and found the prime minister "on his knees on the floor studying a map. He was very indignant at the decision and said it was 'a damned injustice' and 'utterly indefensible.'"
According to Dalhousie historian P.B. Waite, the newly opened House of Commons was dark, hot, and stuffy, the oxygen depleted by flickering gaslights. The 211 members sat in green leather chairs, seven rows on either side. There was a members' basement restaurant and an unofficial bar that specialized in rum drinks (the specialty in the Senate bar was sherry). Waite wrote, "It was not uncommon for half the MPs to be under the weather when the house adjourned at midnight." Waite adds that MPs habitually ignored proceedings. During a speech by Tory Guillaume Amyot in the great debate about Riel's hanging, the Tory-leaning Montreal Star revealed that six Liberals were asleep, nine were reading papers, four were writing, six were talking — and only nineteen were listening.** It was an early example of "gotcha journalism."
Until the introduction of Hansard in 1875, parliamentary correspondents produced long reports of debates that many newspapers ran verbatim, but anonymously. It was not unusual for the Globe to carry a full-page report of three or four thousand words. Journalist Kennedy Crone wrote, "In those earlier days, a Press Gallery member was, of necessity, a fast shorthand writer, and often little else." An article on the tiny press gallery in the Canadian Illustrated News of 1875 gushed, "we owe the boon to the sharp wits and busy pens of these twenty reporters."
The quick ones also made extra money on the side recording committee hearings. Hammond of the Globe, who boasted that he could take down 138 words per minute, supplemented his salary by a princely eight hundred dollars in 1905 — enough to take his wife to the World's Fair in St. Louis. In The Canadian Liberal journal, Robin Adair observed: "The speeches were taken down in short hand without colour or comment, and dispatched by post to the newspapers, there being no telegraph. Such 'editorializing' as there was existed in the headline of the story and the scathing editorial page comment which frequently paralleled it."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Power, Prime Ministers and the Press"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Robert Lewis.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
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