Free Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver

there has been another occasion when those of us in the media have had such close access to the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles, and Anne. I related well to Charles, about nine years my junior, and found him engaging and witty. In those days before Diana and his misadventures with the British newspapers, Charles was also disarmingly frank. Over informal cocktails, I told Charles we had met when Idid the live broadcast of his investiture as Prince of Wales at Carnaervon Castle, an encounter he pretended to remember. He perked up when I recalled the troubles witnessed by his mother six years before at Quebec City. I suggested to Charles that these did not represent the true sentiments of Quebecers and told him he should make a trip of his own. “No thanks,” he said. “I am afraid the separatists might plant a bomb and blow my ass off.”
    Charles’s father went on to lecture me about the fact that Canada was not a colony anymore and if we did not want to have the Queen as our head of state we could simply say so, “and put an end to the thing. We don’t have to be here if we are not wanted.” Both Charles and his father were admirably candid and I wanted to report the exchange, but I was told such chats were considered off the record.
    None of us, however, could refrain from using a later comment by Philip to the effect that the Canadian Arctic was “a garbage dump.” He was referring to the thousands of empty oil barrels that littered the landscape. His bluntness upset his Canadian hosts and somewhat embarrassed the Queen, but there was no apology and everyone recognized he was right. Later, the federal government ordered companies operating in the North to take their fuel barrels out with them.
    I was just settling in back in Saskatchewan when the ripples of a management shakeup in Toronto hit my shores. Joe Schlesinger had appointed himself CBC’s correspondent in Paris. His replacement, the thoughtful and decent Peter Trueman, asked me to join the national newsroom in a management position. If I could take the heat for two years, he promised me the top reporting job in London would follow. Peter did not last in hisown post for those two years and, of course, his replacement claimed never to have heard of our understanding. But I knew none of that when I packed my bag once again and headed for Toronto and the worst two years of my life.

3

    DRAWN TO POWER
    I had joined the CBC in the final years of its most glorious era. There was very little competition from private broadcasters and the corporation enjoyed a huge share of the radio audience. It was headed by distinguished visionaries like Charles Jennings, the father of future ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, and Alphonse Ouimet, the man credited with creating national television broadcasting in two languages. Its leading broadcasters—reporters like Frank Willis and Norman DePoe, and actors like John Drainie—were admired role models. Many of its producers, such as Lister Sinclair and Harry Boyle, were legends in the News and Public Affairs departments. Boyle and Bill Herbert mentored a younger generation that included Lloyd Robertson and me. But our pride in the CBC as an institution and our respect for its burgeoning upper management began to wobble after the radio era gave way, almost overnight, to television.
    In the late 1950s, there was a sudden expansion of the corporation and not enough talent, especially in the management ranks, to fill the need. Many of the old guard from radio couldn’tmake the transition to the new medium, and parts of the CBC came under the control of men who did not know their business, administratively or technically. While in Winnipeg, I was called to a meeting at which a senior executive complained that we were shooting too much expensive film stock. He proposed we all be given still cameras. With these we would snap sequential photos, place them on a cartwheel, and spin it, thus