Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver Page B

on what we would file for the evening’s national news broadcast. Phillips’s friends and contacts were largely drawn from the business community and the Conservative Party. I felt the focus should be on the Liberals who were, after all, the folks in power. One of our disputes concerning coverage became so heated that he invited me to the parking lot to settle the matter. He was the bigger man, but I had been competing in marathonsand believed that if all else failed, I could outrun him. Usually we managed to compromise, mediated by a Scotch or two.
    As the months passed, a factor in my favour was Phillips’s frequent absence; he had almost a second career as a board member and then president of the prestigious Royal Ottawa Golf Club. When at the club, he left instructions with his secretary for any callers from the Toronto office to be told he was in a meeting and would call back. He often did so from the fairway. Increasingly I made the decisions about what stories would be covered and by whom (including a few I snagged for myself), and when it became clear that head office was satisfied with the on-air results, Phillips was content to enjoy the credit as bureau chief.
    In those days, before press gallery members had offices off Parliament Hill, everyone worked together in a crowded, smoky room on the third floor of the Centre Block. It had been the “hot room” for generations of parliamentary reporters whose photos, dating back to the nineteenth century, adorned the walls. Since we worked cheek by jowl, everyone knew what everyone else was saying, rendering the media’s coverage of the Hill even more uniform than today. Reporters who had not bothered to cover certain events often borrowed others’ “dupes,” carbon copies of filed stories. Sometimes they stole them out of the trash if colleagues wouldn’t hand them over.
    We had a blind pig, an illegal bar, and when the filing was done for the day, the cry went out for Scotch and beer, which gallery staffers hurried to us at twenty-five cents a pop. It was a zoo of a place. Here the rise and fall of politicians was decided and agreed upon, or so we believed. There were critical opinions freely exchanged, occasional trysts in the backroom, and now and thenfistfights between competing newspapermen. The Toronto Star was an influential voice during this time, with John Honderich serving as its Ottawa bureau chief, and Richard Gwyn’s column attracting an avid readership among those seeking a glimpse into the latest thinking of Liberal power players.
    Members of the Cabinet, and even the prime minister, sometimes visited the hot room. Plenty of Opposition members wandered up from the Commons chamber just below, joining reporters for drinks and the indiscreet trading of rumours and secrets about friends and enemies. There was a famous incident involving one of Diefenbaker’s ministers, an over-the-hill ladies’ man who had been denying for weeks that he had had an affair with Gerda Munsinger, the German-born prostitute and suspected East German spy. One of the reporters showed another minister, George Hees, a picture of the woman naked and asked if he thought it had been doctored. “The eyes are wrong,” he said, “but everything else is right.” What was said and done in the hot room was off the record, reflecting a cozy relationship between reporters and those they covered. Today such camaraderie is no more than a distant memory, which is just as well in many respects, but it was the norm when I arrived.
    One of my first calls was to a lifelong friend from British Columbia, Iona Campagnolo. We had grown up together in Prince Rupert and at one time I had dated her sister. Iona had worked her way up the political hierarchy from school board to city hall to national politics, winning a federal seat in our hometown riding of Skeena. By the time I landed in Ottawa, she was an admired member of the Trudeau Cabinet