Touring the Vimy Ridge battlefield in France one day, Stephen Harper went down into one of the First World War trenches that have been preserved to give visitors a sense of what it was like there in 1917. Coming out later, the prime minister glanced at two TV photographers with their cameras pointing at him and quipped, “In those days, the enemy had guns.”

Sometimes Harper’s disdain for the Ottawa-based media — which he saw as part of the eastern establishment that had at one time helped solidify a Liberal stranglehold on Canadian politics — seemed half-serious, somewhat in the vein of the partisan posturing on display daily in the House of Commons. But for the most part, it was clear Harper saw the national reporting corps as self-important upstarts who amounted to little more than an obstacle to the Conservatives’ all-encompassing effort to shape and frame public attitudes toward their government.

Call it government by photo op. More than any previous ruling party on the federal scene, the Harper team elevated message delivery and image creation to priority status.

Once Harper was in power, his handlers wasted little time changing the way things were done when it came to the media. One of the highlights of the average week on Parliament Hill in previous years had been the Tuesday morning cabinet meetings held on the second floor of the Centre Block, just down the hall from the prime minister’s office. Reporters gathered in the hallway adjacent to the cabinet room before noon every Tuesday when Parliament was sitting and waited for ministers to wrap up their meeting.

As they drifted out, most were accosted by reporters and stopped to reply to what was often a confused flurry of questions. The same went for the prime minister, who as often as not would take a few questions before slipping back into his office.

But the whole business flew in the face of the controlled messaging strategy developed by Harper. Information on when the cabinet was meeting was no longer made public, and Commons security guards were ordered to keep reporters from hanging around near the cabinet room. This pattern held true, generally speaking, for all interactions between the Conservatives and reporters. The informal, movable scrums that were a part of life at provincial legislatures and, previously, at Parliament Hill became the exception with the Harper Conservatives.

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Outside the weekly party caucus meetings, the media were roped off into special waiting areas to keep them from getting in the way of members of Parliament. After the daily question period in the Commons, few Conservatives came out to speak with journalists. While some hurried past the media, most of the Tory ministers left through a back hallway or the basement to avoid reporters.

The exceptions to the rule were ministers like Jim Flaherty and Tony Clement, who had been at the Ontario legislature, where interaction with the media was a given and not something to be feared.

The PMO also set off a never-ending dispute with the national media by demanding that questioners at any Harper press conference put their names on a list, a tactic that was rightly interpreted as giving Harper’s handlers the ability to pick and choose who got a chance to ask a question.

Prime ministers and cabinet ministers had always sat for press conferences in the National Press Theatre across the street from Parliament Hill. But aside from a couple of meetings there with the media in his early years in power, Harper refused to use that venue. For one thing, he seemed not to like to sit down when he was answering questions. Most of his statements or brief news conferences were done standing up, behind a podium. Standing gave off an aura of authority and had the added advantage that he could walk away anytime he wanted.

Bypassing the national media

In the eras of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, when the prime minister travelled within Canada, reporters from media outlets’ national bureaus were dispatched to cover the trips. Sending national reporters meant that at press conferences, the prime minister would get questions from people who knew the issues thoroughly and wouldn’t be satisfied with misleading or superficial answers. Harper by and large put an end to this by declining to tell the national media where he was going well enough in advance for reporters to get there in time. In addition, Harper did more events in Canada on a weekly basis than either Chrétien or Mulroney. The cost of covering all these prime ministerial events with reporters from Ottawa would have soon become prohibitive in any case.

This meant Harper was, in effect, bypassing the national media and taking questions, if he did at all, from local reporters who sometimes didn’t know the issues well enough or were too awestruck to press him very hard. As years went by, Harper tended to put himself in fewer and fewer situations where he had to deal with open-ended questioning by any reporters. One often-used alternative was to engage in question and answer sessions with business types. By 2014, as far as television was concerned, Harper sometimes gave interviews only on the condition that the questions were restricted to one topic, such as the historic importance of D-Day. This meant that he could get valuable media exposure without having to handle queries on such embarrassing topics as the Senate expenses scandal.

For the most part, the only news conferences Harper held in Ottawa were planned around visits of heads of government from other countries. They were held in the old parliamentary reading room down the hall from the Commons, which was outfitted with risers for television cameras and tables where press gallery staff set up audio boxes into which reporters could plug their audio recorders. In the early years of Harper’s government, some of the chairs up front were reserved for government officials, diplomats and others involved in the visit, with the rest assigned to journalists.

But after a few years, the chairs for journalists disappeared and reporters covering these events were relegated to standing in a roped-off section in the back of the room where the audio boxes were lined up against the wall. When Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott visited Ottawa in June 2014, two dozen more chairs than were needed were put out for officials and diplomats. But rather than leave them for the media to use, government officials had the seats taken from the room. One of the Australian journalists travelling with Abbott gazed at this setup and said plaintively, “At the White House, we get seats.” Harper allowed only four questions — two from Ottawa media and two from the reporters travelling with the visiting dignitary. Rather than prepare individual questions as in past years, Canadian reporters had to huddle in advance to narrow down the list of possible queries until agreement was reached on the best two.

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The importance of photographs

The government’s priority in any case was pictures, the visual images capable of carrying a message to people who might not have time or the inclination to look in any detail at what Harper was actually saying. Sandra Buckler, Harper’s first press spokesperson, wasted little time in 2006 apprising the capital’s media crew that it was the photos that really mattered. And the messaging from the Conservatives was controlled from “the centre” in a way that experienced Ottawa journalists had never seen before.

Harper doesn’t believe in the point of trying to convince Canadians via the media, one veteran Conservative remarked. “If he has a dollar to spend, he’ll spend a penny on the media and the rest on other kinds of communication or messaging.

“He’s doing things that appeal to his base and trying to keep his base motivated, and he’s not trying to persuade other people because that means risking turning those other people against him,” the Conservative source said.

“Using the national media includes using it as a negative thing for fundraising.” He was referring to the Conservative party’s practice of tapping supporters for funds to help Harper and his colleagues defend themselves against the media “elite” who were supposedly aligned against the Conservatives.

“It used to be public servants could have relationships with journalists, have conversations and try to provide context on things and what not, but that’s long gone now,” a former government official remarked.

Aside from leaks by the political arm of the government that were designed to get pro-Conservative coverage, information basically dried up under Harper. Many cabinet ministers — Jim Flaherty and Jason Kenney being exceptions — were reluctant to do interviews or even talk to the media.

When Harper talked to the leader of France or Britain or the U.S. by phone, the PMO sent around a read-out — a mechanically written, lifeless account summing up the bare bones of the discussion in several paragraphs.

It wasn’t that Ottawa reporters generally had an inflated view of their importance, although some did. It was that most of the media who covered Parliament Hill felt they owed it to the public to try to hold the people in power accountable for their decisions and policies.

The PMO’s information gatekeepers

Control of the government’s extensive communications apparatus fell largely in the first years of the Harper government to Sandra Buckler, an experienced public relations hand. Her determination to provide only the media lines and communications “product” decreed by the PMO angered and frustrated Ottawa’s reporters.

Buckler was followed by Kory Teneycke, John Williamson, Dimitri Soudas and Angelo Persichilli, none of whom stayed in the job very long. Then came Andrew MacDougall, who became Harper’s chief media spokesman and director of communications in April 2012.

Getting the prime minister to ease up in his dealings with the media and provide more information from the PMO was a chronic subject of discussion between reporters and PMO press people. Of all the practitioners who passed through the PMO from the so-called “dark side” of public relations, MacDougall appeared to be the most sympathetic to the media’s appeals for a more open government. Cheerful, sometimes tart and generally well liked, MacDougall had come over from Hill+Knowlton Strategies to work in the PMO press office under Teneycke. Though he joked about the rigours of the 24-7 PMO job, MacDougall worked hard at trying to bridge the gap between his office and the media. But in the PMO’s internal politics, he was said to be Nigel Wright’s guy, and MacDougall moved on not too long after Wright left the PMO.

“There isn’t much goodwill left between the press and the Conservative government; eight years of trench warfare has left a battlefield full of bad blood and blown relationships,” MacDougall said in a post on CBC’s website after he left Ottawa.

“Will any of this change? Nyet, comrades,” MacDougall wrote. “The government’s approach to media relations is set in stone and, say what you will about the particulars, you can’t argue with the results at the ballot box.”

His replacement, Jason MacDonald, a former director of communications at Carleton University in Ottawa and an unsuccessful Ontario Progressive Conservative candidate in the 2011 provincial election, came in as Harper’s eighth communications chief in eight years. He was bilingual, a former magazine journalist, and he knew the political scene from having worked as chief spokesperson for Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt. But his early months left people with the impression that he was unlikely to step very far outside the standard role of purveyor of canned media lines.

For decades, whenever the prime minister planned to travel for overseas events, the PMO spokesperson had in advance held a background briefing for the media in the National Press Theatre. But in 2014, after MacDonald took over, these briefings came to an end, replaced by an anodyne, bare-bones email message from the PMO on some of the issues Harper might address on his trip. In a budget lock-up, where media and government officials are corralled for about eight hours one day annually to give reporters a chance to digest the budget package before it is tabled in the Commons, MacDonald was asked a somewhat cynical question by a reporter. “I’m reminded why I only like to deal with you by email,” MacDonald replied.

Excerpted from Spinning History: A Witness to Harper’s Canada and 21st Century Choices, by Les Whittington. Copyright © Hill Times Publishing, 2015.

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