Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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.
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