After more than 50
years in journalism, he’s still doing what he loves
While should Craig Oliver be
apologetic? His colourful, fast-selling memoir, Oliver’s Twist : The Life
and Time of an Unapologetic Newshound (Viking Canada, 2011), has been
greeted warmly. He’s had a great career as a political reporter and enjoyed
close contact with some of the most important politicians of our time. Perhaps
he might apologize to some of them for his unflattering assessments? On the
phone from his home in Ottawa, Oliver laughs at the suggestion: “No, and don’t
forget I have reached a certain age where I’m probably not going to be around
doing this a lot longer. If they want to get back at me, they’re not going to
have much opportunity to do it.” (Born in Vancouver in 1938, Oliver continues
as CTV’s chief political correspondent and co-host of the weekly Question
Period at age 73) .
The memoir also reveals what few knew:
that he was the only child of unmarried, alcoholic parents, that his childhood
in remote Prince Rupert, BC, included long stretches in foster homes, and that
he now bears a significant disability with dignity. A master of clear,
forthright on camera commentary, Oliver doesn’t read a script from a
teleprompter. He can’t. Diagnosed with glaucoma at age 35, the owlish Oliver is
now legally blind, though he can make out shapes and colours. On familiar turf
in Ottawa, he still walks the half hour to work. “When I’m in unfamiliar
territory,” he says, “the visual impairment can be a bog problem; and night’s
getting pretty much impossible. I take my wife’arm.”
Walking helps him maintain a fitness
level that has been important to him. A sometime marathon runner, he’s also a
longtime member of an expeditionary group of Canadian achievers which sometimes
included Pierre Trudeau who for years spent two weeks each summer canoeing
challenging river in Canada’s North.
Oliver’s loss of vision has been
gradual, first costing him central vision in one eye, finally in both. That
loss has been eased by digital software that can read computer copy to him and
keep him connected and helped him write a memoir he says is “about survival. I
think it’s about ability to change your life, to recast who you are every now
and then when you need to.”
“Your Own Work of Art”
A popular figure in Ottawa, on
Parliament Hill, and nationwide, he’s garnered a long list of awards from the
broadcast industry. None of that was prefigured by his early years. Oliver’s
Twist begins:
“My father was a bootlegger and, for a
short time, a jailbird. My mother ran a successful taxi business, also for a
short time. Both were alcoholics.”
His parents spit early. At times
neither could care for him. As a boy, he often searched for his father in the
boomtown bars of 1940s Prince Rupert. He was sent to foster homes where
treatment was unkind. Finally, his mother found her feet and took him in. She
entertained frequently and young Craig often fell asleep to sound of rowdy
parties. A gifted storyteller, he writes of his hometown:
“Rain was the background music of my
childhood. Situated on the edge of lush Pacific rain forest with mountains at
its back, Prince Rupert endured what seemed a continuous downpour, lifting
occasionally to a drizzle. We wore gumboots year-round and joked of being born
with webbed feet. Out famous high school basketball team was named ‘The
Rainmakers.’ As a crowed seaport, Rupert was a smaller and more northerly
version of Marseilles and attracted equally eccentric characters.”
His stories of “growing up under the
roofs of strangers” are poignant. Yet, he insists “tough years” taught him
much:
“They taught me flexibility. You take
whatever comes at you with as much equilibrium as you can and deal with it
rather than let it knock you down, your own life is your own work of art and
you make what you can of it. You have to prepare for whatever comes. You can’t
just drift. I hate drift. The kind of childhood I had fills you with a lack of
self-esteem or it does the opposite. You become very self-confident because you
have to. And I think that’s what it did for me.”
Oliver’s family life was chaotic, but
he was a quick-witted, popular kid, elected class president in his last year of
high school. “I was well-liked,” he says, “not by accident; I worked at that.”
He let his grades drift and never
graduated. Still, his love of books and words and his habit of memorizing
passages from Shakespeare stood him in good stead when he was given a chance to
fill in at the local radio station. It was, remarkably for Prince Rupert, a
full-fledged CBC Radio station. Today, he marvels at his luck in finding his
calling:
“To have a big league radio station in
town of 11,000 people was so bizarre. And it was only there because it was
built by the American army during the war. Without that, I might have ended up
at the pulp mill; that’s where all of the local boys went. I wanted to join the
Navy at one point-I loved the Navy; I was in the cadets, then the Navy reserve
but I just had no idea. It was really an example of the importance of cultural
institutions in small towns, whether it’s a theatre group or a reading group or
tiny orchestra the locals pull together. You can learn that there’s something
you’re good at that you would never have known.”
In time, his local role expanded. Then,
in 1959, an audition tape landed him a job at CBC Regina. There he began filing
reports from the legislature and improved his craft studying “theatre and
speech with a wonderful German woman who was professionally trained.” He also
found himself in a political hotbed as Tommy Douglas’s provincial government
introduced public Medicare and shocked the continent. Oliver adds:
“Saskatchewan was also a laboratory of
where North America was going two sharply differentiated, polarized political
parties. Far-right wing under Ross Thatcher, and Tommy Douglas very much on the
left though not wildly left; I mean, he believed in balanced budgets. This
struggle between right and left today seems to have reached a point in the
United States where they’re unable to make a decision. And here in Canada, we
have a highly polarized political scene that’s quite unpleasant.”
He recalls Douglas as a great leader”
“Tommy was about as impressive as it gets in terms of his dedication to
creating a better world. He was also funny and charming and warm as a person.
He’d been badly seared by the depression, but Tommy was just a great heart. Of
course, he was deeply Christian and he lived that. But Tommy did not believe in
‘pie in the sky when you die;’ he believed in getting as much pie right now on
earth as you could get for people. That’s what drove him.”
Oliver also covered another
Saskatchewan legend, Canada’s 13th Prime Minister, John G.
Diefenbaker:
“Dief had an immense ego. And he was
one of the great speakers, a great storyteller. He told me great stories, made
me laugh. And he was a humanist. People have forgotten that. He brought in the
first Bill of Rights, he brought in a lot of good legislation. Dief’s problem
was he never ran anything larger than a three-person law office. And he was
inherently suspicious of everybody. He couldn’t trust people. And gradually
that kind of turned against him. That was his failing.”
His
love of books and words and his habit of memorizing passages from Shakespeare
stood him in good stead when he was given a chance to fill in at the local
radio station.
